Last month, for about a week all my parents talked about were the College Admissions Scandals, where a few celebrities and many other wealthy people bribed sports coaches to get fake athletic credentials and cheated on SAT and ACT tests. At the height of the scandal, I had a conversation with my uncle about this topic and he brought up a good point—what these people have done is definitely illegal, but where is the line drawn? Are family legacy admissions and large donations really so different from this kind of bribery? This scandal was crazy and the parents shouldn’t have done what they did, but the bigger problem is that the education system allows wealthy people to exploit these institutional advantages.

Wealth and privilege can provide an unfair advantage over working class or poor kids. Eric Levitz, an editor and journalist for New York Magazine, writes that, while his admission to Johns Hopkins may have been a result of his high grades and test scores,

“My SAT scores were the product of hours of tutoring, and my writing skills were honed in pricey summer classes, which most American families cannot afford. And before all that, my parents’ economic security enabled them to buy a home in a suburb with a coveted school system that featured better-qualified teachers and smaller class sizes than most working-class kids are provided. I did not earn these advantages. My parents purchased them for me.”

When students apply for college, the advantages that many of them obtain from summer classes, tutoring or skilled and experienced teachers, aren’t factored in. University admissions officers judge students by their GPA and SAT scores, both of which can be raised by expensive tutoring or attending a more resourceful school, but the application essays are also the product of how skilled their English teachers were or what kind of extracurricular classes students have taken. Kids from poor or working-class families usually don’t have the opportunity to take the kind of private lessons that are specifically targeted to enhance your ability to write about yourself.

The best students don’t always rise to the top. When resources are distributed so unequally, the “haves” keeps getting more and more resources while the “have nots” keep getting less. This makes it more difficult to elevate your social class. Levitz also writes,

“Equality of opportunity is an impossible ideal. Meritocracy is a cruel joke. The real scandal isn’t all the unethical shenanigans rich parents will engage in to keep their failsons and fail daughters from tumbling down the socioeconomic ladder — it’s that we use adolescents’ test scores to ration economic security in the first place.”

Meritocracy is unlikely to happen. This is because many people who have an influence on the school system are wealthy, privileged people who want their kids to be able to have the same status as them. There is a bigger problem that is more important than the unlikeliness of meritocracy. It’s that college admissions use ACT and SAT scores to determine who they will admit, which can impact their economic security in the future. College admissions are too reliant on test scores and test scores can be raised by classes and tutoring. Levitz says “America’s class hierarchy is rigid.” The upper class having the ability to “buy” test scores, combined with our education system’s reliance on test scores, contributes greatly to this rigidity. This will persist until resources are distributed equally.

These admissions scandals have evaporated from new sites and most of the accused have gone to jail or paid fines, but the real scandals are still happening. All over the country there are people who are talking about meritocracy while they send their children to a public school in a wealthy neighborhood with a student-teacher ratio twice as good as the public school in the poorer neighborhood, or their kids get into to an Ivy League school because their grandparents attended that school, or they pay for pricey classes and tutoring to raise their kids’ test scores. Last month, my uncle asked me where the line was drawn. I’m not sure where the line is drawn it is crossed when resources aren’t distributed evenly, when wealth allows people to exploit advantages, and when working class and poor people are denied an equal chance.