“Fifty people, including Hollywood stars Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were charged Tuesday in a scheme in which wealthy parents allegedly bribed college coaches and other insiders to get their children into some of the nation’s most elite schools.” AP News
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Both sides argue that the current system of higher education is deeply flawed:

“All of those wealthy parents indicted yesterday stand accused of breaking the law. But they were also pretty obviously responding to incentives. If a society turns getting into one of the top 25 schools in the country into the Willie Wonka ticket, the Holy Grail, the alchemical formula — the one thing that parents believe will ensure their children will have a happy, financially comfortable, and successful life — then people will go to absurd and illegal lengths to get it.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review

“It’s not just that higher education is literally prohibitively expensive… It’s not just that admission to an élite college—more than the education a student receives there—provides the foundation of future wealth by creating or, more often, reinforcing social connections. It’s not just that every college in the country, including public schools, makes decisions about infrastructure, curriculum development, hiring, and its very existence on the basis of fund-raising and money-making logic. It’s not just that the process of getting into college grows more stressful—and, consequently, more expensive—with every passing year. It’s not just that the process itself is fundamentally rigged and everyone knows this. It’s all of it.”
Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

“Meritocracy is an illusion—long before an application shows up at a school, the system is legitimately stacked in favor of the wealthy. Kids who aren’t from privileged backgrounds are at a steep disadvantage… Now here, with the government’s case, comes a wave of high net worth parents who allegedly aren’t even making a pretense of their children earning admission—mom and dad are just going to pay, and they’ll pay this underbelly of surrogates allegedly willing to make it happen, because the surrogates want the money, and they know the system is rigged.”
Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal

“The behavior described in this alleged fraud should be punished. But on a broader and more basic level, the case also sheds light on deep inequities in our college admissions system. Because if someone can get their kid into Harvard by buying a building, let alone by committing any of the alleged acts emerging from this case, the scandal isn't just what's illegal, but what's legal as well… There is a separate system of justice for the wealthy. There's also a separate admission system for rich people that's quite legal. But maybe with this indictment, we'll get just a bit closer to changing that unfair status quo.”
David Perry, CNN
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Many on both sides also agree that elite colleges are not all that they're cracked up to be:

“If universities were primarily interested in educating students, bribery wouldn't be a problem. Academically unqualified applicants would be filtered out of the system by their inability to keep up. The fact that a rich kid can fake his way into a top university and still graduate with a degree tells you all you need to know about the state of higher education.”
Matt Walsh, Daily Wire

“The parents paying millions to get their kids into elite schools weren’t worried that their kids would fail out despite being unqualified. In other words, college can be a lot harder to get into than it is to pass…  The most valuable thing kids learn in college is probably the ‘soft skills’ acquired by adult(ish) members of a tight-knit community in a common pursuit. Better than in high school, and with lower stakes than in the real world, college students can learn how to work out differences, question their own assumptions, take leadership roles, and simply be adult members of a civil society.”
Editorial Board, Washington Examiner

“There's very little evidence that the actual education you get at an elite university is better than the education you might get at a less-prestigious school. In fact, there are some persuasive arguments to the contrary. The real value of a Harvard degree arguably lies less in what happens in the classroom than in the elite connections you make outside of class. But these connections are already available to the children of the elite; they only make a substantial difference to those who come from more humble origins. Why spend vast amounts of money for access to something you already have?”
Noah Millman, The Week

“The perception that only elite schools produce elite leaders needs to die… Of the CEOs of the top 20 companies in last year’s Fortune 500, exactly one — Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos — went to an Ivy League school (Princeton)... Maybe a Harvard diploma will give a graduate an easier shot at landing a first job out of school. Maybe. But that’s really the only advantage, and it doesn’t last long. Once you’ve landed the job, you have to perform. If you don’t, your Harvard degree isn’t going to be worth the parchment it’s printed on. And if you do perform, nobody is going to much care that you went to the University of Central Oklahoma.”
Joe Nocera, Bloomberg

Other opinions below.