Higher education racketeers
Well now look at it from their point of view: how are people going to become The Elite if they never cheat? It’s the American way: get to the top via bribery and fraud.
Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people on Tuesday in a major college admission scandal that involved wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, paying bribes to get their children into elite American universities.
The Justice Department isn’t in the business of prosecuting scandals; it prosecutes crimes.
Do we soft-pedal the language when it’s the genteel kind of crime committed by people with money? Hmmm? I think it should be called a major college admission fraud or scheme or racket, as opposed to a scandal. Journalists can always use “scandalous” in addition if they want to draw attention to that part, but they should call it what it is.
Thirty-three parents were charged in the case and prosecutors said there could be additional indictments to come. Also implicated were top college coaches, who were accused of accepting millions of dollars to help admit students to Wake Forest, Yale, Stanford, the University of Southern California and other schools, regardless of their academic or sports ability, officials said.
Yes but money. Don’t you understand? Money. Money is god; money can do everything; money is all that matters.
The case unveiled Tuesday was stunning in its breadth and audacity. It was the Justice Department’s largest ever college admissions prosecution, a sprawling investigation that involved 200 agents nationwide and resulted in charges against 50 people in six states.
Trumps and Kushners among them?
The charges also underscored how college admissions have become so cutthroat and competitive that some have sought to break the rules. The authorities say the parents of some of the nation’s wealthiest and most privileged students sought to buy spots for their children at top universities, not only cheating the system, but potentially cheating other hard-working students out of a chance at a college education.
I don’t see how it’s “potentially.” Surely the word should be “inevitably.” Cheaters inevitably cheat someone, because that’s what cheating means.
“The parents are the prime movers of this fraud,” Andrew E. Lelling, the United States attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said Tuesday during a news conference. Mr. Lelling said that those parents used their wealth to create a separate and unfair admissions process for their children.
But, Mr. Lelling said, “there will not be a separate criminal justice system” for them.
“The real victims in this case are the hardworking students,” who were displaced in the admissions process by “far less qualified students and their families who simply bought their way in,” Mr. Lelling said.
There you go: no waffle about “potentially”; it’s just reality. The fakes displaced non-fakes.
Now about those Trumps and Kushners…
How about a Bush or two, as well? Even if my father had been inclined to buy my way into a university, he would not have had the money. I had to succeed on my own (and then some, since I was not only poor white trash, I was poor white trash woman). Maybe I would have liked a chance to succeed, too?
These merely elite folks got busted because they weren’t rich enough to use the methods of the super elite. Buying a new library or endowing a new professorship riiiiiight around the time your child is applying to be admitted still works just fine.
One thing that stands out to me is how the college admission process in regard to athletes was abused. Imagine if sports didn’t hold any more influence than any other extracurricular activity; no special thresholds for entrance exams, no allowances for school grades. The people executing this fraud might still have posed the students as athletes, but it is far less likely.
@Screechy Monkey #2 – In another discussion over this story I did see someone bring up the point that someone who does something like giving a university a new library, or endowing a new professorship, benefits dozens or even hundreds or thousands of students at the university for decades, and increases the capacity of the university to take on more students than they could before.
So, in some ways, an argument can be made that donations at that level are acceptable in ways that bribing an administrator in the admissions department are not.
I’m not 100% convinced by that argument. I still feel icky thinking about it. But I can’t bring myself to dismiss it entirely.
Sackbut – yes, to me too. It’s already fraudulent, in my view (and that of many other people – the US is eccentric in treating athletic skill as a ticket to Harvard), and pretty much as unfair as bribery. Why not admit people to Harvard because they’re beautiful or tall or red-haired?
A related Atlantic article that plays into the newly revealed scandal:
College Sports Are Affirmative Action for Rich White Students
A NY Times editorial begins:
But then the editorial says no, what really made this a crime:
So the case is really defending the business of running a college, not meritocracy. It’s still legal to buy admission by donating to a college (in a pas de deux), but illegal to bribe an employee (because it cheats the college). Somehow this reminds me of an old joke, “Counterfeiting money is a crime because the government doesn’t like the competition.”
From here: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/12/parents-and-college-prep-agent.html
This is also worthy of note: http://mcmansionhell.com/post/183417051691/in-honor-of-the-college-admissions-scandal
Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell – a site which ridicules the architectural and decorating choices of poor-taste cookie-cutter mansions – got hold of photographs of the houses of some of the perps. This is how the other half live.
What really struck me when I started reading the details: why are coaches the ones accepting bribes? They’re usually some of the highest paid people at a university.
Dave @ 7 – ah yes, good point. “Bribe the university as a whole, dammit, not just one freelance intermediary!”
Re #10, coaches accepting bribes: I suspect that the gymnastics or tennis coach is not usually as well paid as the football or basketball coach. But regardless, I think the premise that wealthy people are not susceptible to bribes is flawed. But why coaches? Because they have the power to grant a student admission, essentially.
Re #7, the NYT editorial: I’ve been trying to formulate what bothers me about the editorial, and having difficulty doing so. The main issue in this scandal is fraud, both with the fabricated (via various means) test scores and the fake student athletic profiles. I have misgivings about preferences and allowances for athletes as well as preferences for children of donors. Wealthy people have far more methods at their disposal for getting their kids into a high profile college; they can actually use their resources to improve the child’s education and experiences.
I am not totally opposed to admissions preferences for children of donors or alumni, although I agree it is excessive currently. I am much more opposed to admissions preferences for athletes, because I think sports should be far less important on a college campus than it is. These racketeers (criminal type, not tennis type) created fake athletes (rather than fake musicians or chess players), not because they’d get more scholarship money, but because athletic preferences are so strong that test score requirements are lowered and the good word from a coach is essentially a guarantee of admission. That shouldn’t be the case.
Here’s another article that highlights the sports angle a bit more.
The real college admissions scandal is what’s legal
Arguably, a donation to the school could lead to additional slots (since the school would have the resources to hire more professors, construct more classrooms, etc). This isn’t trivial, and if the cost of getting four more slots open to merit is an additional slot that’s set aside for Poor Little Rich Boy, eh, I can see the reasoning there. (Actually, that could be a good way for a rich lefty to have a positive impact on their alma mater; instead of building a library, set up a trust fund to pay for a new tenured position on the staff.)
In these cases, though, no new slots were created, so the slots taken were definitely ‘stolen’. If I were a student (or parent of one) who had applied and been rejected to one of these schools, I’d be on the phone with a lawyer right now, saying I wanted a copy of the admissions list–if my kid fell into the zone of students who got bumped because of this scandal, I’d be suing the aforementioned wealthy parents to make sure my kid never had to work a day in their life.
Also, it’s worth noting that this charge involves mail fraud, specifically. As one wit I overheard quipped, “Do not ever &$#* around with the mail. The Postal Service will push for no leniency.”