The recent FBI investigation Varsity Blues sheds light on a pay-for-admission scandal that wrapped up admissions departments, athletic coaches, and wealthy parents. In a country where one can buy everything from luxury ice cubes to political access, are we really shocked that educational credentials are for sale as well?

In recent decades, educational attainment has sky rocketed across the country as narratives like college-for-all and macroeconomic changes drive more people to college applications than ever before. Competition among college applicants, especially at selective universities has increased. This competition is driven in part by the private college prep industry which provides access to exclusive private college counselors, SAT prep courses, and a variety of other services that aim to help students’ college applications stand out from the ever-increasing slush pile.

Of course, these services do not come cheap, as rich parents can spend tens of thousands of dollars preparing their children for college. This results in significant differences in the level of preparation that students have for college based on their socioeconomic background (1). The private college prep industry strengthens elite students’ college applications, boosts their test scores, and provides them with information to get any leg up they can with admissions departments. This curated special advantage in college admissions has nothing to do with academic or athletic merit.

Rich families have always used their resource advantages to preserve their status across generations. The private college prep industry provides them with a relatively new form of social closure (2). That is, rich families use higher levels of college preparation to maintain privileged access to scarce educational resources like enrollment at highly selective universities. This is coupled with a myriad of other advantages that rich students have over the rest. These include attending elite public schools (or private schools), higher levels of parent involvement (not the illegal Felicity Huffman kind), high levels of social and cultural capital that connect them to alumni from prestigious universities, or simply having a parent or grandparent that is a legacy at their school of choice.

We live in one of the richest and most unequal countries in the developed world and a small group of people have way more money than they know what do with. In a hyper-capitalist society like ours, people can and do buy their way into elite colleges every year. Varsity Blues highlights a rare scandal where the rich deviated ever so slightly from the norm.

Why do rich families spend so much money on ensuring their children get into the best colleges in the country? They are rich right? They could just set up a trust fund and make sure their children are always taken care of. For a lot of people college is about gaining skills and educational credentials to enter the labor market. This is how they can get a decent job and become economically secure (or at least live comfortably paycheck-to-paycheck while paying off crippling student loan debt). But rich people are already rich, they don’t need wages. Rich people work so hard to get their children into college for the status, not the money. They want their children to be accepted into high society not because of their seven-figure trust fund, but because they went to Harvard.

Rich families in America use the private college prep industry coupled with other advantages to buy elite educational credentials. These credentials legitimize the unearned privileges of their children. The biggest champions of the “meritocracy” are the rich, because they know it’s all a façade working in their favor.

Don’t be so quick to let elite higher education institutions off the hook. They do, of course love to be trendy and craft a public image that touts their social mobility and diversity statistics. But their true love is the student who is paying the “full sticker” price with a propensity to donate to university endowments in the future. According to a 2017 NBER paper the median parent income for Harvard and Yale students was $174,000 and 199,700 respectively. That same paper shows that students from the 1% were 77 times more likely to enroll in Ivy League schools than students from the bottom 20% of the population (3).

This isn’t a meritocracy. Admission to elite colleges in the U.S. looks about as fair as Putin’s reelection. Don’t let people tell you that Varsity Blues is an anomaly. Sure, these parents went slightly farther than most rich parents do. But higher education is and always has been a massive customer service model for the rich to churn their privilege into elite educational credentials.