Winners and losers are often sorted not by merit but by privilege (or subterfuge). And even the winners lose. Actually, all of us do, because through this overwrought culling, we’re teaching a generation of children values that stink. There are moral wages to the admissions mania, and we need to wrestle with those.

At its worst, it “corrodes the development of core aspects of young people’s ethical character, often fueling their self-interest, compromising their integrity, and depleting their capacity to either know themselves deeply or to authentically articulate their identity,” reads a draft of a new report by the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Making Caring Common Project, which for the last few years has been a leading advocate for a less calculated and cutthroat process. “Many young people become cynical both about a system that seems unfair and divorced from their interests, and about the adults who created it.”

I was given an exclusive advance copy of the report, which will be published on Monday. Although it was written before the bribery and fraud arrests, it almost seems to have anticipated them. And it articulates the concerns that many of us have long had about the road that kids frequently travel toward the country’s most venerated and selective schools: the plotting of every major and minor step in terms of how it will look on an application; the lavish expenditures, by affluent families, on a veritable pit crew of tutors and trainers and admissions strategists; the gross overselling of accomplishments; the parental micromanaging; the working of any conceivable angle and pulling of any reachable string s.

It makes a particular plea to parents, “who are focusing on the wrong things, with big consequences for their kids,” said Richard Weissbourd, a renowned development psychologist who is the report’s principal author. They’re not encouraging curiosity, empathy, gratitude. “Parents are trying to give their kids ‘everything’ but they’re not giving them what counts,” he told me.

The report includes the important acknowledgment that only a fraction of American children are educated at the elite institutions in question or have any hope to be, and that “the biggest problem in college admissions is that huge numbers of young people, especially low-income and first-generation students, struggle to access or simply can’t afford college, or land in colleges that aren’t committed to their success.” In fact, about two-thirds of Americans over 24 never started or completed a four-year college.

But more than a few of those young people are aware of a gilded track with different rules. “It’s just not fair,” Nicholas Burgess, a 17-year-old 11th grader at an inner-city school in Jacksonville, Fla., said in a telephone interview on Thursday. He had heard about the just-revealed admissions scam, and it hardened his belief that the deck was stacked against kids like him. “We work hard, but I feel like it’s not made for us,” he told me. He’s not aiming for an Ivy. He’s hoping for Florida State.

And while the children immersed in the elite-admissions obstacle course aren’t the norm, many of them will — by dint of their backgrounds, ambitions and, yes, talents — be tomorrow’s leaders. Their character counts. And the admissions madness leaves a dubious imprint on it.