Commentary: Faux Moralism Can Help You Get Into College

I decided to use my time to help others as the dull routine of the pandemic pressed on. This led me to volunteering opportunities on a website called Hands On, which my mother used routinely.

I made an account and my profile quickly went from an empty list of no experience to one, non-verified, note explaining that the following weekend I would be repairing damaged books in East Portland. But then I caught a cold and was unable to attend. Luckily, my sister was happy to accompany my mother to volunteer. They went together, occupying our two reserved spaces. A week later I was surprised to see three hours of service listed on my profile, verified. 

My sister had never used my name. When signing in at the event, she had told the organizer her own name and why she was taking over my spot. Still, they had rewarded me for her work. 

I was surprised to discover that many people have exploited similar experiences. Unfortunately, using a familial substitute to gain verified volunteer hours is a common technique used by college application frauds.

On any internet forum you’ll find a decent number of posts, accounts and questions on how to fake a prestigious resume. There are Reddit threads with over 700 posts that detail lying about ethnicity and buying SAT scores, 1,700 posts under the hashtag “college cheating” on Instagram and hundreds more Quora pages and news articles on the topic. One thing that the majority of these internet resources have in common is a pattern of users who lie about volunteering. 

Sixty-six percent of U.S high school graduates were immediately enrolled in college in 2019 and approximately 15.5 million high school students in the U.S volunteer each year. Some high schools require an amount of logged hours at soup kitchens or dog shelters to graduate while others leave it up to the student. It’s becoming increasingly easy to volunteer with websites such as United Way, Habitat for Humanity, JustServe and Feeding America providing opportunities to participate in their programs with the click of a button. 

High schools can send out volunteering possibilities in emails or promote them on posters, boasting fundraisers and service clubs. Still, when some students learn that they should have at least 50 to 200 hundred hours logged on a college application, they opt instead, to cheat. 

College admissions is a chaotic world with scandalous and financial motives, a dark history of racism and sexism as well as high levels of stress permeate that through many students’ last two years in high school. Parents aren’t always a relief to their applicant child, often encouraging them to take more difficult classes or participate in odd extracurriculars. Some parents even pay for private college counselors that can charge tens of thousands for their expertise and guidance.

In recent years there has been a significant spike in college admissions scandals including the highly publicized 2019 investigation involving children of celebrities faking their way into top schools. From students creating fake charities with real donations, often funded by parents, to paying overseas companies to produce fraudulent books, published in the student’s name, there’s a seemingly endless supply of these scams.

In 2016, the New York Post reported on a high school senior who allegedly registered a charity for deaf people pursuing careers in STEM, and then dedicated donations to personal use. The girl was one of the 1,800 students accepted to Stanford that year. 

Volunteering has a messy history. Many organizations still operate from colonialist ideals of pity and faux servitude that only benefits one party. It’s not a coincidence that white people volunteer at a rate 29 percent higher than any other race. 

In 2014, The Art Institute of Chicago ended a volunteering program that mainly enlisted white women in their early thirties to instead opt for a more inclusive environment that would prioritize financial and racial diversity. Many conservative-leaning news outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Daily Mail and numerous lesser-known blogs deemed the incident as reverse-racist and an indicator of our country’s “woke” problem.  

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, mission trips were once regarded as charitable and beneficial to underdeveloped communities. They’ve come under fire recently for their use of certain areas, most commonly parts of Central Africa, to encourage colonialist ideals and boost the moral righteousness of white Christians. 

These trips have been proven to only offer very momentary relief to communities and result in whole towns and villages relying on those who will leave after a few weeks. The disease of poverty in these locations provides a seemingly inexhaustible source of volunteering opportunities that allow wealthy teenagers to boost their college applications and their egos without doing much to fix the situation. 

With so much pressure to volunteer, the meaning often becomes lost in the whirlwind of academic excellence. In other words, morals seemingly don’t matter if it looks good on paper. 

In recent years colleges have beefed up background checks and pointed interview questions to validate or disprove applicants’ claims. 

According to A Center for American Progress, 66 percent of colleges in the United States have stated that they include background checks in their admissions processes, but only 20 percent of a school’s applicants will have anything beyond their academic transcript fact checked. This means that it would be challenging for a student to lie about taking specific courses, earning a diploma or the name of the school they attended. In contrast, things like athletics and other extracurricular activities that have no affiliation with the students’ high school are unlikely to undergo any scrutiny beyond interview questions making it easy to list false information on an applicant’s profile. Some students may take the chance to outright lie, while others create more complex schemes.

A quick scroll through Reddit’s mayhem will reveal a treasure trove of options on how to fool the college admissions system. If effort isn’t your thing, then simply doing brief research on local volunteering organizations to appear experienced in an interview is the right move, or, if you don’t like how risky that sounds, another commenter recommends having a family member sign up to volunteer under your name and log hours for you, according to one Reddit user: “it works!”  

It’s upsetting that we still struggle with such vast inequality and excuse fraudulent behavior when it’s so blatant. This issue underlines the prominent class divide in the U.S and demonstrates how shameless colleges can be in their enforcement of unattainable achievements. The elite college system is in need of a serious reality check, demanding that high schoolers overwork themselves or go to such extreme lengths that concocting lies seems like the only option isn’t productive for humanity. There are many colleges that don’t have the hype of Harvard or Stanford, that doesn’t mean they don’t offer beneficial classes. When so many students apply to a few specific places the standards for an Ivy League student become absurdly exclusive. Community colleges need better funding and more attention placed on advertisement to possible students, they’re often incredibly informational, welcoming places and they deserve to be appreciated. Education is already unjust enough without being impossible.