From Heather Mac Donald writing in City Journal “Unmasking the College-Admissions Fraud: The real scam has less to do with the wealthy cheaters who got caught than with the university system itself“:
The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways: an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities.
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None of this could have happened if higher education had not itself become a corrupt institution, featuring low classroom demands, no core knowledge acquisition, low grading standards, fashionable (but society-destroying) left-wing activism, luxury-hotel amenities, endless partying, and huge expense.
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Colleges should return to their true function: passing on, from one generation to the next, the inheritance of Western civilization. Students who do not yearn to immerse themselves in that legacy should find something else to do after high school, and professors who are not interested in preserving it should find another line of work.
But those who cannot, teach.