If an elite school is a branding exercise, that brand is perhaps more valuable to rich parents than to rich kids. An underperforming, school-averse teenager is often content to attend a low-pressure state school with good parties; it’s his parents who are desperate to prevent this. More than faking their kids’ athletic or test-taking prowess, these parents have faked their own parenting. They did not wind up raising enviable, academically extraordinary children, but they’ve fudged the results so they can drop “U.S.C.” in conversations instead of “A.S.U.” Some went to comical lengths to hide these interventions from their children, while others, including Olivia’s parents, supposedly involved the kids, letting them know the exact distance between what they were getting and what they deserved. When these parents celebrated their success, you might imagine they were reacting not with pride but with relief: They had managed to prevent their kids from messing up the paths they had planned for them.

They had also helped convince the rest of us that their kids really were successful. We still like to picture our higher-education system as the linchpin of a meritocracy, like a public utility that sorts the accomplished from the rest. We instinctively conflate elite schooling with worth. The idea of unqualified kids getting into Stanford or Georgetown may rankle us, but this scandal should also call into question the outsize reputations of such schools. They exist partly through a bargain in which wealthy elites commingle with the highest-achieving students of the lower and middle classes. The wealthy launder their privilege by allowing select others to earn their way into its orbit. And the intelligence and success of hardworking peers makes a wealthy wastrel seem qualified by association: Maybe he graduated with straight C’s, a drinking problem and an unearned job at the family business, but he went to Yale — isn’t that where smart people go?

Right before the video clip that was isolated for optimum Twitter shaming, Olivia Jade says something else revealing: She is worried that other kids at school are going to take advantage of her. “That’s already my big fear of meeting people at my college — that they are just going to use me,” she says. She seems to see the value of a good education, in exactly the way so many parents see it: as a transaction.