Waruguru Ndirangu is a senior at UCLA and says she's heard the same qualms from a friend who was rejected from Stanford.
"At the time she just felt like, OK there's probably better people, more competitive people," Ndirangu says. "But now, knowing that like people could just pay their way in and take her spot, it's really disheartening."
Ndirangu says it's especially infuriating to her, as a student of color.
"People say that we only get in because of affirmative action, or that we don't deserve to be here," she says. "So it's ironic that the people telling us this actually paid their way into here.”
Waruguru Ndirangu, UCLA senior
Getting it all on the table now, Ndirangu says, may be something of a silver lining to the scandal. "Now they can't tell us s*** about how we got in here," she says. "I feel like for us, it kind of takes that chip off of our shoulder from these accusations. To see the script flip like that, it kind of feels good to be honest."
Students of wealth will always have a better shot
On the other side of the country, on the campus of Boston College, students express similar frustration and cynicism.
Selena Bemak is applying to grad school at Boston College. As she sees it, the news that a few dozen bad apples were busted yesterday is less of a comfort than a reminder of how much she and other less privileged students are up against.
"I will always worry in back of mind," Bemak says, that students of greater wealth and privilege will have a better shot than she does. Yesterday's arrests, "could not have cleaned up [the corruption] entirely. There's no way they could have."
Bemak is among the many who also worry about the cheating and fraud that happens on a smaller scale every day, by people embellishing their applications, for example, or overstating how many hours they volunteer, or the awards they got.
Hard as it is to verify every detail of every application, senior Caitlin Connor says it's up to schools to do a better job of policing and deterring that. Then, she says, "students would be more hesitant to lie on their application, when they know that certain schools are doing something like spot checks and things like that."
I mean the world's not fair. A lot of people are going to be doing crooked things to get into college. That's just how the world works. All you can do is do your best, and hope for the best.
