I think this entire College admission scandal is horrible for an additional reason.

[madaboutharry]

It seems to me that these parents did not accept the scholastic abilities of their kids. I would not want my children in a university or college that they didn't belong in. I would want my children to go to a school where they could compete and be successful all on their own.

One thing I am waiting to hear about is how if someone was admitted for participating in Crew, then what happens when they show up at college and don't know anything about Crew?

And let us not forget the $2.5 million dollar donation Jared Kushner's father gave to Harvard right before Jared was admitted.

We have always known everything is rigged. This really isn't news.

[mobeau69]

1. It's news that they were busted.

[madaboutharry]

2. Exactly

This has been going on forever.

[hibbing]

3. Linda Tirado Tweet

Link to tweet

[rufus dog]

4. I am guessing that they would just claim an injury

In that case the kid may be in on the scam or the coach takes the bribe, kid gets in, then the coach claims kid injured and out for a year. Kid know nothing, and all if forgotten after that.

[Rustyeye77]

5. wow

" I would not what my children in a university or college that they didn't belong in."

even if you had $ 100,000,000.00 to get him/her in?

You must be a pure as heck.

[madaboutharry]

12. No, I would not.

What for? People do fine in life when they are allowed to find the place they belong. These kids could have probably all gotten into college somewhere. It wasn't like they weren't going to go to college.

[JI7]

13. wtf does purity have to do with it ? if someone had that much they could use it

to provide many other things to help there kid improve but I guess that's for those who actually care about kids learning .

[jberryhill]

26. Give the kid the $100M

....and they can read whatever books they want for the rest of their lives.

[Locrian]

36. my thoughts exactly - when is enough enough?

give me a bit of that and I'll do volunteer work and play jazz the rest of my life

[JI7]

38. they want to brag to other rich friends about how smart their idiot kid is

[CurtEastPoint]

6. Do you have a link w/some info on this. I don't know this scandal.

[MichMary]

7. Do a Google search

It's all over the news.

[CurtEastPoint]

9. I just assumed Trump scandal so I didn't find it. Now that I know it wasn't him... found it.

[MH1]

8. Google news: "college"

https://news.google.com/search?q=college&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

[The empressof all]

10. The wealthy have been doing this for years

Does anyone believe Trump had the academic credentials to get into the University of Pennsylvania even as a two year transfer. Before the internet it was easier to plagiarize and pay others to do your papers. You didn’t even have to do the bulk of the work to graduate And unless you are running for President no one in the real world really checks your GPA.

[d_r]

16. Right?

How many people have made a donation to a school to get their kid admitted. Heck, I only went to kudzu league school and it was known that certain student's parents had bought their way in. These people's problem was that they were too new money to know how to do it without being illegal.

[leftieNanner]

28. When Trump went to Penn

it was not nearly as difficult to get in. I was accepted in 1970 (I'm a little younger then Doofus) with a 3.2 GPA from high school. My SAT scores were decent, but not 800s for sure.

That doesn't mean that Daddy Fred didn't grease the skids, though.

[Rorey]

32. Dubya too

There's no way he qualified to go to Yale on his own.

[Windy City Charlie]

11. The question I have

The question I have is how far did this go? All we've heard so far is this involved having other people take the ACT/SAT just to get into the college. What about the various tests and papers and so on while these kids were in college? Did someone else do that work, too?

[MichMary]

19. It also involved faking

athletic credentials, sometimes with photoshopped pix. The "athletes" would then claim to have an injury or something, so they never had to show up.

[Coventina]

14. This is why you should support your local community college.

I'll keep posting it in these threads!!

We are open access!

[Kitchari]

20. + 1,000 n/t

[GeorgeGist]

21. +1

Community college saved me.

[MiniMe]

15. The kids in question definitely have a sense of entitlement

They think they belong there even if they don't

[Adrahil]

17. I think you have the wrong end of the stick a bit....

Although some school are certainly "less rigorous" than others, once you research a certain level, the idea that the "best" schools are somehow harder is mostly bullshit.

When I was in college as an engineering student, I attended a well-respected state university. Now, it was competitive to get into, but not THAT competitive. It was not a as "highly regarded" as, say MIT. Yet year after year, the top student papers from my school were topping the likes of MIT, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon.... all schools MUCH tougher to get into and whose degrees raised eyebrows when seen on a CV.

My wife Got her Masters from Georgetown, and her PhD from George Washington... both highly regarded schools in her field. She taught as an adjunct at both. She is now tenured at a mid-sized state university. Her conclusion? The lower tier students at her current university would probably have never gotten into her other schools. But guess what? They fail out of her university as well. And her better students would do just as well at the bigger names.

The name of the university on the diploma is a form of currency. It says that either you are of the class expected to rule, or that you are so exceptional that you can expect to join that class (or at least be an upper-level "servant&quot . It's much more about socio-economic class than intellectual performance.

And decent Research I University will give a student a rigorous, quality education.

[leftieNanner]

29. You are so right

No matter what school you get into, you still have to do the work. My daughters are bright, but the reason they have done well - in school and after - is because they WORK THEIR ASSES OFF!!

[Bettie]

18. Wealthy people get to do what they want to

that saying "the rich are different", it's true. They don't have to do anything based on their own skills or merits, it is all 100% based on money and who they know.

SO, they got caught, won't stop it from happening, won't damage any of these people at all.

They were charged, so they might pay a fine, but what does money mean to any of these people?

[Beringia]

40. I think it will be a huge embarassment for the parents and children

The two actresses are smart cookies, and I am sure want to project honest personas.

[obamanut2012]

22. They are also emails and phone calls where some parents are mocking their kids

And how dumb they are.

[treestar]

23. Yes. The stress on a kid

How can kid do well when he or she did not really qualify to get in ? Sounds like recipe for frustration and depression !!

[Codeine]

24. *quietly raises hand*

What’s “crew”?

[madaboutharry]

25. Rowing.

Long narrow low boats with a row of athletes rowing in unison. It’s an Olympic sport. You really need to be ripped to compete. There is a body type, so it is kind of perplexing how these students presented themselves.

[Codeine]

31. Ah! That makes sense.

I clearly did not attend college.

[jberryhill]

27. Do you like gladiator movies?

[leftieNanner]

30. HAHAHAHAHA

This made me laugh! My daughter tried crew one semester in high school (she has the tall, lean, strong body type for it) - and she felt kinda like this!

[Codeine]

33. Well, I have spent time in a Turkish prison. nt

[Jose Garcia]

34. The problem is that there are far fewer spots than there are qualified

applicants at many of these prestigious schools.

[Igel]

35. Right hand, left hand, no communication.

Unless the student gets in on a crew scholarship and is forced to participate, all the student has to do is not mention crew.

Peers and faculty don't have access to the application with the details (unless the student's in the same small class with someone on the faculty admission review committee, and I suspect most of the faculty wouldn't remember the name or detail).

Not everything is rigged; that's a misgeneralization. The fact that this is news means it's not background noise. Otherwise today's headline would be "John Smith arrives safely at work" or "The daily bread delivery went off without a problem at area supermarkets".

I don't know about Harvard. I do know that at at least one large flagship state school the "development foundation" is a separate non-profit and there's not a lot of overlap between admissions and development. Different buildings, different people. While it's possible that at the top lists of donors are shared, I knew the asst. director until she retired 3-4 years ago and the VC that she'd have to deal with was in a separate vertical channel from the admissions office.

When I was involved with administrators in the '90s at a different large state university I saw more "rigging" on behalf of social justice than I did on behalf of wealthy kids. When I asked the VC who ultimately was in charge of admissions about blatant intentional mistakes in characterizing applications in order to help poor kids of color he just nodded and grinned while saying, "Why, we'd never do that--it would be illegal." Because at the time it was illegal. When somebody else asked about donations influencing admissions he was simply dismissive and said it was against policy and practice except in the broadest terms. So a large donation helped fund a program, which had influences on grad student admissions; or it might fund an endowed chair, or a scholarship. But not a student. In a separate discussion, when the state had to crackdown on the admission and funding of "undocumented workers" the chancellor himself said that after a thorough review they discovered, to their happy surprise, that there wasn't a single undocumented student on their campus of 35,000 in a state bordering Mexico. When other students evinced surprise at either the low probability of that happening or the injustice that they'd been so cruelly excluded, the chancellor said that they discovered dozens upon dozens who, necessarily through no fault of their own, had given the obviously mistaken impression that they were undocumented, but staff worked diligently and put in dozens of hours in meetings with the students to correct such horrendous errors that could result in their expulsion so that their files properly reflected their documented status.

In some schools, esp. with legacies--that second school did award legacy points--there's a bit of bias rooted in both a kind of school-level patriotism and loyalty as well as reflecting the truism that grateful alumni tend to help fund the school in various ways (whether through attending games, producing offspring that are high SES and likely to be good fits, through donations, through free positive publicity, or merely through buying emblematic wear with a hefty profit margin). Given that the school's population increased greatly as the state diversified, and given longitudinal fertility rates among various demographic subpops, the racial skew of legacies is likely to be short-lived and is a smallish number.

[Locrian]

37. four words "I got bone spurs"

>>Unless the student gets in on a crew scholarship and is forced to participate, all the student has to do is not mention crew.
four words "I got bone spurs"

[MurrayDelph]

39. Many decades ago, one of my best friends

was teaching Middle School English in San Marino, a rather tony suburb of Los Angeles. The first class of the year, he always passed out a syllabus that showed grade requirements.

When parents showed up for conferences at all, it was usually with a complaint along the lines of "Why did you give my child a C? How do you expect him to get into college with grades like that?"

It was because of crap like that neither of us stayed in public education.

[sarcasmo]

41. How much did Fred Trump pay Wharton?