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Was Aunt Becky’s Scam Worth the FBI’s Attention?
Okay, I’m not quite being fair. It’s not just Aunt Becky’s scam. But this from today’s FBI news conference on the cheating scandal exposed today struck me a bit… excessive:
FBI special agent says 300 FBI, IRS agents participated in arrests in alleged college cheating scam, named "Operation Varsity Blues"; 38 individuals have been taken into custody so far. https://t.co/eg24f7pl1z pic.twitter.com/iL4lZ6t5CC
— ABC News (@ABC) March 12, 2019
This is obviously a disgusting thing for rich families to do, but I’m not sure why it rises to this level of attention within the ranks of the FBI. For as long as college admissions has been around, there have been rich parents who game the system in order to get their kids in. This happens to have been more glaring than most parents’ schemes, but there are too many schemes to count, and most of them I am blissfully unaware of as a lower middle-class kid who went to a state school.
This Twitter follower of mine has a good point:
Absolutely not! This impacts every family with college bound students attempting to teach our children work ethic and honesty. If I was a lawyer I would seek out the true athletes that would have benefited from the education but lost out cuz of these frauds!
— Dorothy Bell (@DorothyBell) March 13, 2019
But I just don’t see this scandal and these arrests doing anything to prevent gimmicks like the one these parents used in the future. Let’s not pretend the system was ever fair, or ever will be.
Published in Education
Three hundred Federal agents from the FBI, IRS, etc. used to nab 38 people buying their kids’ way into college?
IMHO, there’s still too much drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, and sex slave activity going on to be wasting precious resources on what could very well end up being a PR stunt . . .
I understand your analogy but 25 million in (alleged) bribes involving a significant number of people goes well beyond a broken window. The nature and extent of this scam is rather unfortunately underplayed in the “Aunt Becky” O/P.
Can’t a university admit or deny admission to anybody they want for any reason they want?
How’d David Hogg get accepted to Harvard after being rejected by most every other school he applied to?
There was probably a lot of FBI forensic accounting going on with this case. You could have one poor guy wade through all the stuff himself, or divvy it up between a bunch of them. If fifty green eyeshades were on this for a week, how many participated? And next week they’ll all be off digging through hinky XYZ Corp’s accounts receivables looking for money laundering.
Government types are overly impressed with size. “Lean and mean” would be a better look.
With all the required indignation, etc., about these alleged law breakers and the need to bring them to “Justice”, I cannot help but note that moments before I saw this post, I read about Lisa Page’s testimony to a House Committee to the effect that the “Justice” Department had ordered the FBI not to charge the Right Honourable Felonia vonPantsuit with gross negligence — to quote from the article at the Daily Wire: “”… the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information.” Am I being, to use one of John F. Kerry’s favorite words, overly simplisme to wonder aloud where this country would be right now if those 300 agents had been put to work developing evidence to support the prosecution of this wretched woman; actually it would only have taken a few, with a few newspapers and websites as everything in public knowledge led to only one inescapable conclusion: that she was guilty of as many as 30,000 felony counts, one for each message about “yoga” and “Chelsea’s wedding” she applied the Bleach Bit treatment to, with the full knowledge that they were under subpoena.
Bethany, your use of the words “a bit….excessive” was a masterpiece of understatement and diplomacy; in my non-nuanced world, I see both Clintons, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, McCabe, Sztrok, Page, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and all the rest of those hoodlums walking around, free as a bird, and then I see the FBI sending 300 agents out to round up alleged “law breakers”, whose conduct pales in comparison to those who perpetrated the worst scandal in American history, and I ask: Why?
Sincerely, Jim
There’s a major lawsuit against Harvard by Asian-Americans that’s trying to at least partially resolve this issue. As far as the present matter, it’s not about what the universities did (none of them are defendants). It’s about fraud by others in the application process.
Race is a protected class under civil rights law.
“Dumb as a bag of rocks” isn’t.
True. I was responding to “anybody they want for any reason they want.”
I doubt the people receiving the bribes reported them on their tax filings. I doubt the middle-man paying the bribes filed 1099’s. It is likely that cheating on admissions to a public university is also a fraud.
I see how it is fraud on the worker side. I am less sure on the customer side. If you paid a charity to help your child to get into college how is that an issue? As long as you are not doing the actual fraud?
Depends on what you knew or should have known. I imagine the Feds think that the participants knew the charity was not a charity. In some instances people were encouraged to supply pictures of the kids engaged in activities that they really weren’t any good at. Hey Muffy, pick up that tennis racket and take a swing.
If using pictures of stuff you don’t do or are not good at is fraud then they will need to arrest most of Fakebook / Facebook.
If there is actual criminal fraud gong on- as in the proctors cheating the SAT in violation if their contracts, sure. If some state school employee takes a bribe, that is a criminal matter (bribing a public official), but leave the parents alone; they are stoopid getting involved, but not criminal.
But private colleges have a right of free association, and contra Franco’s outrage about unfairness visited on the poor working class (my bona fides and family experience with this is impeccable- PM me if you want to discuss) by “elites”, there is no center-right constitutional scenario under which federal law enforcement resources should be criminalizing stupid self-interested decisions by private colleges to admit rich idiots, or convict any parents who waste money trying to help their kids this way.
Paying bribes is illegal, just as receiving them is. There’s also the likely matter of tax fraud since the “donations” were made to a phony charity. I don’t really disagree with your last point, as long as we’re agreed that it isn’t really what’s going on here.
Two things I get out of this. 1) My parents surely lacked imagination or just didn’t try/care hard enough. 2) I’d bet that it would not take 300 federal agents to find 50 students/parents at my local HS gaming the special needs protocol of ACT/SAT testing.
I am enjoying myself way too much to answer the question
My family lives and breaths soccer (not me – I’m the outsider to that world)
The coaches taking bribes is a very big deal. As is the fraud involved in doctoring SAT/ACT scores. As is someone other than the student taking the test(s)
And that the bribes were tax deductible.
OK, after reading more of this, I see where the violations of criminal law come in, rather than just the civil law issues I was first thinking of (like violation of a contract). Defrauding a college by faking the SAT/ACT grades is a big one, and doing it across state lines or through the mail puts wire fraud in there, which brings the Feds in. “Donating” half a million to the scam artist and writing it off on your taxes as a charitable deduction is income tax fraud. Bribery of officials at a state university would bring the law into it, too.
To answer some of the responses here that it shouldn’t be a big deal, it’s not true that everybody does this, or even that every rich family does this. This isn’t padding your application or stretching the truth on your extracurricular activities, it’s flat-out fraud. Having a ringer take the SAT for your mediocre son is entirely different from describing your halfhearted helping out at the church dinner as “organizing a charitable project.” Bribing an admissions official to accept your daughter as part of the rowing team and using photos of someone else in a boat is very different in purpose and effect than posting staged photos on Facebook. The intent here is to defraud and cheat the university. If your Facebook pictures are staged, and you want friends to think you’re more active or happier than you really are, there’s no crime, it’s just pitiful.
A few things that stood out to me. Lori Laughlin paid $500,000 for her two children to be admitted into the University of Southern California.
That’s a state university.[Correction: Thanks to Annefy for pointing out that it’s private.] I’m not deriding it as an unworthy choice, but the tuition is $28,000 per year. Figure room and board at about $10,000 more, if you live on campus, and there are fees. But even at the high end, you’re not spending more than $200,000 over all four years, while Laughlin spent $250,000 for each kid to get in the door!Forgetting the fraud for a moment, that’s not a smart use of your economic resources. That mystified me last night when I read it. But today, I’ve read commentary here and elsewhere to the effect that the value to people like this isn’t in what they learn, but the prestige of having a degree from that particular college. That makes more sense. It misses the point of college, but it makes a kind of sense.
I disagree with the heavy cynics that there’s no value to what you learn in a college education and that it’s all a bunch of political indoctrination and that we’re only valuing credentials. Too often, we look at the grievance studies majors, where we rightfully roll our eyes, but those are a tiny number of actual degrees awarded. There are many worthwhile majors, even outside the scientific and engineering fields where I teach. English, history, and philosophy are, in fact, worthwhile, even if they don’t always function as job training. But there’s more to a liberal arts education than merely job training. Making us well-rounded, informed citizens, able to think carefully and participate fully in democratic self-government is a great function. The indoctrination exists, but you don’t find it everywhere.
USC is a private university with an annual tuition cost well in excess of $28k
Are you referring to UCLA? Its public school rival?
edited to add: the specific bribe that referring to was to USC, I believe.
UCLA coaches have also been accused
One more for now. I don’t want to shame the children of the parents in these scams. They didn’t do anything legally or ethically wrong, from anything I’ve seen so far, and it’s going to be an awful embarrassment to them when they learn they got in to school through fraud. Think of how they’re going to be treated by their classmates.
Without naming them, then, I’d like to point out that I noticed an interesting coincidence among two or three of the children—that they are noted as social media “influencers.” One daughter is coauthoring a book out next year with that very theme (a novel, apparently). The daughter of another defendant used her Instagram or Twitter account to shill for Amazon, showing off her dorm room decorations and mentioning how she ordered them through Amazon’s services for college students (I forget what it’s called).
This whole social media influencer idea is a weird one for me. I’ll have to admit that my elder daughter has done a little of that at her school (Notre Dame), specifically advertising the campus dining hall. That made me laugh just a little.
Oh, is it? I had assumed from its name that it was part of the University of California system. Sorry about getting that mixed up. Thanks, I’ll fix my post.
No, SoCal is a thoroughly private school, except that the feds control it and give it funds for any number of reasons that they have no constitutional authority.
The accreditation system needs to be wiped out. It’s just a scam to jack up the price.
They need separate market values for the directly productive money making stuff and the straight liberal arts.
I see no reason all of it shouldn’t be private.
Yeah, Annefy just pointed that error out to me, too. Thanks. I’ve corrected the post. I got it mixed up with the University of California system.
A Harvard alum friend of mine said his circle was mostly buzzing about spending $500k to get into USC. “To get into USC?! That’s like tipping the maître d‘ to get a table at Olive Garden.” I am embarrassed that Georgetown is part of this. I also feel for the kids whose parents got caught. How humiliating.
The perceived pressure is real. In Montgomery County MD, about 35 Chinese-American students were registered as living at the same address so as to enroll in a top-rated high school before being forced back to their own districts.
The ideal many parents are looking for is the one-in-whole-lot chance that their pleasantly average kid will be the college roommate of the next Bill Gates and those odds are better at Harvard than any school with “State” in the name.
The growth of the cost-to-value quotient for college seems to be headed for some kind of breakpoint but I don’t know what comes after.
That said, 20,000 undergrads and 27,000 grad-professional students, etc. is a pretty big private school.
Adding to #53
It really bothers me when people say “not everyone should go to college”. What if it actually developed your human capital and they charged a fair price for it? That’s not what is going on now. Not even close.
They abuse the job signaling function to make money off of human beings, not deliver them value.
It’s just a stupid game of credentialing, not a product that creates value in aggregate.
USC is a private school. Rivalries with Cal Berkeley and UCLA are partly fueled by the public-private thing.
My cousin didn’t want to go to college. He just wanted to tinker with cars. He’s good at it, and so are the guys he hires to work in his garages.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t assume that all of the kids were innocents, especially considering some were falsely promoted as having “special needs,” had their applications doctored, and were asked to have pictures taken of them performing certain sports that weren’t exactly in their wheelhouses. I hope I’m wrong on that, though. FWIW, Georgetown is “part” of this to the extent of one tennis coach who was suspended for “recruiting improprieties” in December 2017.