The Lori Loughlin chapter of the college admission scandal has come to its anticlimactic conclusion.

Last week, a federal judge sentenced the former actress to 60 days in prison for conspiracy to commit fraud. Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, who received a five-month sentence, paid $500,000 to ensure spots for their daughters at the University of Southern California.

The most galling aspect of this story is not the bribe itself, or the fact that Olivia and Isabella Giannulli were designated as recruits to USC’s crew team when neither had ever rowed crew. It’s the fact that the family was too lazy to take advantage of a system that was set up in their favor to begin with.

The twin advantages of being wealthy and famous already placed them well out in front in the race of life, but Loughlin chose to have her daughters carried around the track instead.

The family could well afford prep tests and tutors to prepare the girls for entrance exams or to improve their grades, but Olivia “didn’t really care about school,” and instead focused her energies on being an Instagram “influencer.” Rather than paying for the intellectual development of their children, Loughlin and Giannulli paid to have them gracelessly slip through the admissions process. What’s more, the 20-year-old Olivia profited off the USC acceptance because of her paid partnership with Amazon Prime Student, in which she was able to “influence” customers to buy matching dorm room decor.

Higher education is the vehicle in which wealthy families reproduce privilege through generations. Acceptance into an elite university confers innumerable benefits, including the opportunity to network with peers for future assistance, and guaranteed entree into the professional world upon graduation.

The children of the rich are overwhelmingly likely to stay rich, but this fact becomes less palatable when families are not even willing to put in the work for the privileges of education. Loughlin and Mossimo, along with the 50 other parents in six states who were charged by the Justice Department, demonstrated how to use privilege badly.

America used to have the highest class mobility of any Western country; now it has the lowest, and the reproduction of elites facilitated by higher education is a large reason why. The nationwide scandal revealed the obvious conflict between the aspirations of a meritocratic society and its reality.

First Published: August 26, 2020, 10:15 a.m.