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Rich Folks Get Their Not Qualified Kids Into College, But This Time, Illegally
One student's parents wanted their daughter to go to Yale so badly that they paid $1.2 million in bribes to get into a school that cost $55K a year in tuition. https://t.co/6o8HFVNGwO
— Eugene Scott (@Eugene_Scott) March 12, 2019
A story broke this morning about a scheme involving some rich folks, including two actresses (Felicity Hoffman and Lori Loughlin) have used to get their kids who wouldn’t have otherwise been admitted into college.
Actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman are among the dozens of people charged in a nationwide college admissions scheme that included cheating on entrance exams and bribing school administrators and coaches to recruit students as athletes https://t.co/I0YvhtTuBU
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) March 12, 2019
My friend Salena Zito remarked,
What is wrong with parents? Why would you rob your child the ability to earn their achievements? Or rob them of the lessons of sitting on a bench or failing? No wonder we are buried in snowflakes. https://t.co/issDKRigl2
— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) March 12, 2019
And Daniella Greenbaum Davis rightfully pointed out,
If I had parents who shortchanged me the way these parents did, I’d be subpar too. The sad thing is if these kids were encouraged to work hard rather than having things bought / cheated for them, they may have actually earned what they got.
— Daniella Greenbaum Davis (@DGreenbaum) March 12, 2019
With parents like these, I think I’m even better off having gone to Rutgers on my own merits, on my own dime.
Published in Education
I’m not defending this, just wondering “why is this news?” Who’s surprised by this? And – at least where these mostly private schools are concerned – where’s the crime? Poor form? Sure. By why (legally) can’t they allocate slots to the highest bidders?
Counter to some of the assertions, being white does not help, unless you are willing to cheat.
My reckoning is that 40% of the Ivy League is now filled with kids who are not there for reasons of academic qualification. I include athletes, affirmative action, unprepared “first gen” kids, and legacies among those.
Being white, rich, and fully academically qualified means you have 3-4% chance of getting into a Princeton.
Dude, I am just wondering why it is a crime?
I believe the wire/mail fraud statues came into play because the whole scheme was described as a “charity.”
More on this over on the Member Feed.
There’s a degree of “creativity” at work here that I suppose makes it newsworthy. Bribing coaches of low level college sports to list interest in a kid for admissions purposes when the kid doesn’t play the sport (or plays it poorly) approaches a new low in gaming the system.
Not rich enough to create an endowment, giving the rest of us 1 percenters a bad name and trying to do this on the cheap
The nerve
The Buzzfeed article says:
A half-million dollar bribe to get into Princeton or Harvard would be bad enough, but to get into USC?
Is it the same FBI team that “uncovered” the payoffs to families of basketball players to influence what school they went to?
This is a really interesting topic.
Another one is what did Rod Blogioavich actually do that was wrong.
Lets see. Affirmative action distorts the college entrance market away from caucasians and asians. (Basically anyone with an ‘asian’ in their description).
So the parents pay to game the system.
Did you see where Lori Loughlin paid $500k just to get their kid admitted? To USC? Wow.
Paying $500K for admission to USC seems pretty stupid to me.
They may have needed a school where the daughters’ inability to decide which end of the oar to hold would go unnoticed.
I love this line from the AG
So an endowment for admission is OK, but paying the administration off isn’t?
I guess they just didn’t bribe the right people.
University of Spoiled Children
I’m sure there must be an Arthur Digby Sellers-related comic relief angle in here somewhere…
I see the rest of the PAC-12 is ready to pile on. :)
Celebrities being charged with a criminal offense is always news.
iWe,
Exactly. This is the real problem. As soon as it wasn’t good enough to just help minorities but universities were required to fulfill a quota the whole meritocracy was disrupted. Once merit is taken off the table anything is possible. Up is up and down is down but when you remove the law of gravity anything goes.
Regards,
Jim
For $1.2 million, I’d tutor a kid for four years.
A degree from the University of Stad beats Haaaaavard any day . . .
Actors.
And Harvard doesn’t offer advanced bartending courses either!
The US Atty, Andrew Lelling:
One could also say the same for Affirmative Action.
‘For every student admitted through
fraudAffirmative Action, an honest genuinely talented student was rejected.’This is no worse than affirmative action.
You beat me to it, @instugator.
Yeah, but the Song Girls are worth it. 😎
Here’s the indictment for anyone interested in a deeper dive.
Once upon a time I actually toured USC – twice – with my son. He had them on his short list (eventually chose Seattle Pacific University) but I don’t think he really had much interest in them. The tours, however, were kind of amusing and kind of pathetic at the same time. The tour guides were the most shameless name droppers I have ever seen “Oh, Steven Spielberg teaches a class in blah blah blah, and George Lucas teaches a class in yada yada yada”. At that point my son was interested in physics as well as theology (how’s that for a combo?), and neither tour guide was able to tell us which building housed the Physics department. They also didn’t know if they had theological offerings (they have a school of “religion” but it’s pretty much smorgasbord).
I did just about get run over by Mark Sanchez on a skateboard though. Maybe he was destined for the butt fumble.
You joke, but if you do the math of how much the average college professor makes per hour multiplied by the number of hours of instruction that are required to get a bachelor’s degree, it would be both cheaper and faster to hire PhD-level tutors than to attend a four-year college.
I almost accidentally ran over Tommy Tuberville several years ago. True story.
I have a younger relative that ruled out Wisconsin partly because of this. He was really weirded out by their pitch given that they actually have quite a bit of status.