Oh dear God. Reading into the indictments, it seems that a lot of the kids never had a clue that they were complicit in the schemes:
>... and it was like, the kids though, and it was funny 'cause the kids will call me and say, "Maybe I should do that again. I did pretty well and if I took it again, I'll do better even" Right? And they just have no idea that they didn't even get the score that they thought they got.
Can you even imagine what those people are going through?
One day you are a USC/Harvard/Stanford grad. The next day you are a fraud. And not only that, you are revealed to the entire world to be dumb as a box of rocks, just totally naked and shamed. And you had no clue. Your closest family members spent tens of thousands of dollars fooling you, committing very serious crimes on your behalf, and all the while, lying to you about your intelligence and work ethic.
For those people, it must feel like The Truman Show or an episode of The Twilight Zone. It's totally unreal.
No empathy. The entire system is pay to play for the social connections. If they were actually interested in education the scenario would have been completely different.
I saw similar fabrications growing up as I attended one of the wealthiest high schools in the country. The top 10 of my graduating class got complete scholarships the most expensive schools in the country and the parents were willing to do anything to the school faculty to make sure their child had a higher class rank.
My high school was like that. The top ranked students were rich foreign kids. I remember the validictorian giving his speech and no-one could understand what he was saying (in grammar and speech).
> If they were actually interested in education the scenario would have been completely different.
Seriously, I was staying at the Trump hotel in Chicago (before Trump ran for president -- before I ever gave much thought about Donald Trump). Anyway, there was a looping video on the TV and she was inviting guests to stay at any one of their other Trump hotels around "North America and Canada." It was at that moment I realized that she thought North America was some kind of Northern area of America. I no longer wonder how she got into Wharton.
The kids who only got in with some SAT fudging, like Felicity Huffman's daughter, were probably just below requirements to get into some of these universities. I read somewhere else that USC has so many applicants that if you don't have a 3.8 GPA with a 1400 SAT you are going to be the odd man out. So if you need 400 SAT points to get there, you probably aren't going to do it with just good prep (which usually only nets you a ROI of 200 or so points). So it's not like these people are complete morons and $15k is a pittance for the parents.
Lori Laughlin's daughter was probably a pretty poor student. Apparently she paid upwards of $500k to get in via the student athlete route, even though she's not an athlete. She's apparently a fairly well known Youtube/Instagram blogger who has made posts about not even wanting to be in college.
What I don’t get about the rowing angle is that she would be found out within a few minutes of being on the crew.
Also I imagine that there aren’t many spots available so that if the fake rower decides not to show up the real rowers will look at the roster and ask the coach why they are down a person.
As opposed to the SAT fakers where you can get into college and skate on by for a couple semesters / years without getting kicked out.
I also don’t get how the coaches didn’t think that they would get caught. Don’t they have to publish lists of students athletes? Presumably with the USC one the only way they got in was via a recommendation from the rowing coach.
I think what's really sad is how much the credential stuffing for their kids figured into this. I would guess that many of these kids would have been just fine going to whatever school they could get into and enjoying their life from there. But the overwhelming desire to get a major school brand label, even if otherwise completely useless for these kids, drove their parents to participate in one of the largest organized crime activities in U.S. history.
I highly doubt any of them will experience any negatives from this. The rigging just goes that deep in society. I doubt the costs will outweigh the benefits. This will continue just with different coordinators.
Makes you wonder how those kids managed in these top-tier schools - just fine, most likely, even if completely unaware.
And then you wonder if the people behind these fraudulent entrance schemes might have considered it worthwhile to leverage their position further by holding it over the parents/students in future.
And what if you find this out, but worked your ass off and got straight As during your degree? Were your parents giving you unknown help then, too? Can you ask them? Where does it end?
Like, they tried so hard on your behalf. They spent so much money on you. They really did it out of the goodness of their hearts and in love of their child, in their own twisted way.
And now? I mean, it all blew up in their faces. All their best intentions made everything just so much more horrible for their children. They'll never wash this off.
My lord, not even Aristophanes himself could write a tragedy on this scale.
EDIT: And the parents were laughing with their fixer at the deception that they pulled on their kids! They were laughing at the naivete of their very children that they fooled. I can't even begin to process what was going through those parents' minds. What were they thinking?!
When you are born into privilege (kid of a celebrity), you are afforded the best private tutors and academic resources that money can buy during you academic career, starting from childhood. Assuming you are born with a neurotypical brain, you are at an advantage over your less wealthy peers from day one whether you perceive it or not.
No doubt it's a disappointment for these kids, but they will get over it pretty quickly. People have a powerful ability to protect their ego and tell themselves what they want to hear.
Wouldn't some of the kids had to have been on it? They posed for picture of sports they didn't even play, and must have referenced it on their application
>One day you are a USC/Harvard/Stanford grad. The next day you are a fraud. And not only that, you are revealed to the entire world to be dumb as a box of rocks, just totally naked and shamed. And you had no clue. Your closest family members spent tens of thousands of dollars fooling you, committing very serious crimes on your behalf, and all the while, lying to you about your intelligence and work ethic.
It's not really that far off the general experience of being an American, what with all the stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen research, the history of which apparently no one seems to know about, let alone work into their fundamental understanding of what our country is and how it came to be.
To some degree, the notion that it's "totally unreal" speaks to how thoroughly failed most Americans have been by both history education and our common mythos.
Haha, that is legitimately what's going through my mind now.
My parents were nowhere near wealthy enough to make these sized bribes, but doesn't stop me from wondering...It's similar to reading about 'back of the milk carton' child abduction stories.
Their parents committed felony fraud to get them into college, do you not think the first thing they did was to call their kids up and tell them to say they didn’t know anything about it and let the family lawyers take care of it?
Anybody who does these kind of things does it because of positive feed back loops training over years. So they have a fair bit of clue. It's just the incentive ladder works that way.
Corruption exists because people want to be corrupt.
This might be more overt than the usual form, but how does this differ from donating a new building, department, or scholarship fund and subsequently getting your kid in?
My mother did well in the Masters program at Stanford and I would have likely gotten in if she donated a couple million dollars but she didn’t and I didn’t (despite getting an invitation a year after accepting enrollment at another university).
It’s not like we ever had that type of money, but if we did I wouldn’t have wanted that.
It seems like they’re targeting this more obvious version of bribery but not digging in and targeting the systemic issue of affluent people buying their children’s spot in college.
I really don’t think it’s much harder to prove that an underperforming student who got in because their parents donated a couple million (or tens of millions of) dollars took the place of a more qualified candidate. Maybe I’m wrong...
Donating a building is a payment to the university. The university then gets to decide to admit your child in return. It may not be meritocratic, but it's not corrupt (except perhaps insofar as by pretending the exchange is a donation, the university and donor manage to cheat the taxman). The donor is simply paying the university to provide a service that they have every right to offer for money. It also benefits other students, which is why the universities take the deals in the first place.
In this case, we're talking about bribery of specific employees to act against the interests of their employer. That's simply corruption.
They might be equally non-meritocratic, but they're definitely not equally dishonest or equally socially harmful.
Anecdata: In my extended family, we have some members with a fair bit of 'bread'. These family members met at a somewhat known (yet small-ish) college and really loved the place and all the memories they had there. They donated a lot of money over the years and, yes, had a building named after them. When it came time for their daughter to apply to college, the choice was obvious.
However, the daughter was rejected outright due to a multitude of factors. She wasn't violent, or addicted, or lazy. Nothing like that. She just wasn't ahead of the other applicants.
Well, you can imagine that the parents were none too enthused. All the love they had for that college, those dreams for their daughter, gone. There were phone calls and in person visits. Still, the daughter was not what they were looking for.
In the end, things have gone alright for everyone. The building still has their names on it, though the donations have ceased. The daughter is doing just fine at the school she is now at. The college is dealing with it's own issues just as it ever was.
Though there may be corruption at many universities and colleges, there are still a fair number of places where merit and fair decisions still reign. I'd look to those schools for the graduates to hire. Integrity is still in high demand, just as it will ever be.
(Kudos to patch.com for actually including a link to the charges in their coverage. Middle finger to the Washington Post.)
Charges are divided into three groups, which appear to correspond to different roles in the bribery. At the top are four people "charged by information". William Singer and Mark Riddell are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. (And some other charges.) Based on the media coverage, this is because some payments in the bribery system took the form of donations to a nonprofit operated by Riddell, and this is tax fraud. (One of those other charges is "conspiracy to defraud the United States".) Rudy Meredith is charged with wire fraud, the catchall crime that everyone in the country is guilty of. John Vandemoer is charged with racketeering.
The second group, "charged by indictment", are all charged with racketeering, except for David Sidoo who is charged with mail and wire fraud. I don't know what these people are supposed to have done. I'd like to think that a racketeering charge requires the organization you're involved with to have committed a crime; that would imply that what they're really charged with is helping the sham charity commit tax fraud.
The third group, "charged by complaint", are the parents. One and all they are charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
It doesn't look to me like paying an admissions officer to admit your child is a crime at all. Similarly, bribing a maitre'd to seat you more quickly is bribing a specific employee to act against the interests of his employer, but it's not a crime. Taking the bribe might or might not be a crime. All of the charges here that involve a crime relate to using a sham nonprofit for tax benefits.
If the donor pays for a service why does it "donates" instead to pay?
This smells very much like donating to a political party just to get government contracts which I believe is bribery.
>>Donating a building is a payment to the university.
>>It may not be meritocratic, but it's not corrupt
Its just dampening the effects a little, but its the same though. Donating X, just means the person who bought in the donation gets promoted or gets awarded some bonus or gets rewards by their employer(university). Instead of receiving the bribe directly.
This is a classic trick from corruption handbooks used by ace corrupt people.
When you trade something for something which could be wrong, only stupid people directly do it through exchange of money. Clever people trade through favors and indirect profit/help. They also call this lobbying in places like politics. In many other places they call these things incentives, commissions, brokerage or whatever.
This is really one of those classic problems with defining corruption. Books and stories can always be cooked in a way to make anything look good.
I think you're making a valid argument that misses the larger point.
I agree that the practice of university donations in exchange for college admission is neither legally corrupt nor dishonest.
However, it is still wrong according to our societal values.
That is, we have a value system that we implicitly adhere to and meritocracy is big part of our value system.
At least in the states, we believe that if you work just as hard and contribute just as much as your neighbor, you deserve to enjoy the same quality of life.
When parents purchase access to an elite university for their child, they are conferring an advantage to their child over the child's peers that is unearned and unfair.
Elite college admissions is a zero sum game. There are only a certain number of spots available and purchasing a spot for a kid who slacked off in school necessarily takes the same opportunity away from a more deserving kid.
I suppose the IRS doesn't prosecute some of the tax fraud, because it might be difficult to prove a quid pro quo or the value of an admission.
Sometimes, alumni give to their alma mater for charitable reasons! And some USC grads do better than some Yale grads, I'm sure.
But maybe the IRS should try to brush back the most conspicuous cases of donating to receive admission. I'm seeing stories of admissions officers being pretty open about it at Ivy League schools.
These universities publicly portray their admissions process as meritocratic. They go out of their way to dispel the notion that buying your way in is officially an option. That it IS an option, in spite of their assurances, is corruption in my book, regardless of whether or not it's an open secret.
>> It may not be meritocratic, but it's not corrupt
Maybe not in the 1800s, but doing that today violates any number of published school policies. It likely also violates several laws, especially if the school receives state/federal funding (they all do). Violating published policies, circumventing established admission systems, and denying a spot for a qualified candidate in order to accommodate a wealthy donor, that is the definition of corruption.
It’s different in the scale of the donation. 2 Million dollar donation materially improves things for other students and is tax deductible. $15,000 bribe doesn’t do much for other students except rob them of a spot.
A guy donates an engineering complex, and every engineering student on that campus gets to take advantage of said complex and its resources. Guy donates a new business school building and every student on that campus can take advantage of said building and its resources. In exchange, the university lets in two girls, their daughters or whatever, who might want to major in Art History and French, and coincidentally will likely be inheriting a few hundred million to upwards of a billion dollars in the future. (Future donors.)
It's a fair trade. I'm not wealthy on that level, but if I were calling the shots at a university I'd make that trade every time.
It provides them the opportunity to network with a young, impressionable kid whose parents can afford to throw $15k into a toilet and flush.
If you believe the primary purpose of a university is to educate and certify, that is indeed "not much". But if you believe that the education is secondary, and the actual primary purpose is to cultivate a social network of influential graduates and dropouts, and to act as gatekeeper to future opportunities, then that bribe is better than a perfect SAT score.
That kid will end up with seed money or angel investments from mommy and daddy, and will be able to hire some former classmates right out of the gate, and they might build a unicorn, which will forever be tagged with "founded and built by a team of University X graduates".
In that sense, no one is robbing anybody of a spot. There are genius spots, and rich idiot spots, and the only problem is getting a few from each pile into the same rooms, with a reason to talk about their futures. One way is to coerce the rich kid into studying (or cheating) their coursework by paying off the genius kid. Management training.
This is precisely not the reason there's a distinction. The problem is that the $15,000 bribe went to the pockets of someone who was subverting the process (mainly the coaches), robbing the university.
Universities can admit who they want to admit based on any criteria they want, including large donations. This news story is about rich people going behind the university's back to get people admitted via exam cheating and employee bribery.
Technically, the same thing, but one side goes to jail because they can't donate millions. One is legal because of wink and a nod, the other is illegal (as it should be) but both sides tried to do their best for their children.
Jared Kushner, the brilliant philosopher went to Harvard at the same his father donated $2 Million to the university.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/21/what-w...
I understand the legality and the law is the law, but let's cut the c*ap, both sides are cheating. The poorer side gets caught because they don't have the money needed to bribe the University, they have just enough to bribe its employees.
So, I've seen admissions described by three doors:
Front Door: Student performance (scholastic and academic)
Back Door: Family donations
Side Door: What this article is about. Part of the ruse was faking athletic credentials to get into a more likely of admissions candidates (athletes have an advantage, apparently).
How do you determine the parent's motives? I can't deny that parents use donations as a pay-to-play mechanic at colleges, but how do you guard against it? Do you ban kids from enrolling in or applying to colleges in which their parent's (or close relative) has donated to?
My local college was a blessing to me. It provided me an education, a safe atmosphere, and most of all, confidence. It changed me for the better. I'd like to donate to the college if I were in the position to do so, and because I had such a great experience, I'd encourage my child (don't have one, yet) to go.
how do you guard against it? Do you ban kids from
enrolling in or applying to colleges in which
their parent's (or close relative) has donated to?
Blind admissions, where the admissions committee isn't told a name or enough details to identify an individual.
Obviously, people's opinion on that will depend on their opinion on things like admissions essays and extracurricular activities; anything like "I learned a good work ethic helping my father with his senate campaign" will have to go.
Blind grading after admission would be sensible too, for the same reasons. Although perhaps difficult in subjects where individual students' work was identifiable even without their name.
We can start by not naming things after donors. I don't understand how that's not immediate quid pro quo right there, you get advertising for your personal brand.
It's different because it's missing plausible deniability for the parties involved. If donations were actually altruistic, they would be anonymous, but sometimes, society needs a veneer of fairness to mask the real nature of the "pay to play" system we have.
In the highlighted case, the "bribe" actually wasn't - the mother paid a 3rd party fix her daughter's exams (administered by the local school on behalf of CollegeBoard, IB, or ACT).
But, generally, your point is correct. In this case, there was an explicit pay-off/bribe/fraud committed. In the case of the super-wealthy, there's a large donation and a wink-wink/handshake.
They’re accused of, e.g., paying insiders at the SAT and ACT to change scores and engage in other such dishonesty, against the wishes of those organizations and the universities. This is fraud.
This is very different from buying entrance to a university. Universities are allowed to admit on any criteria that they want (with a few exceptions). They are private organizations.
I think it is a good thing, if done on a small scale (admitting rich people purely based on donations). It's like pairing smart and driven people with people with money and access to connections.
When you "donate" a building, the school gets to use it. It blurs the line between legitimate and fraud because there's obvious benefits that transcend the arrangement of a wealthy sprog.
When you "donate" $1.2m to a "consultancy" you're just committing fraud. Nobody benefits except your kid and the "consultancy." It's much easier to prove that this transaction is fraudulent.
So in this case the government is going after fraudsters because the government isn't getting paid, and neither is the school. I'd be willing to bet that the government would have continued looking the other way if a) the wealthy had paid taxes on their bribe or b) there was some indisputable asset one could point to and say "there's my donation!"
> I really don’t think it’s much harder to prove that an underperforming student who got in because their parents donated a couple million (or tens of millions of) dollars took the place of a more qualified candidate.
It's the opposite actually; if you're giving money to the development office then you're enabling more qualified students to attend the school.
That’s why college only costs 50k per year when it costs 150k to provide that service to you.
"Legacy" admits with consideration of donations are allowed as far as I understand. It supposedly has a bigger effect than affirmative action, and at many schools we are just a few generations away from segregation now, which somewhat dictates the race makeup of the legacy pool to this day.
It differs insofar as when you do it 'above board' more people get a piece of the pie, the pie tends to be larger, and there are more events where the consumption of pie is celebrated. One can argue that the benefit accrues to the university rather than the corrupt individuals, but from the point of view of excluded applicants that difference is moot except insofar as a donation expands the number of admissions or academic resources.
Some of the examples were egregious, bribing Athletic Coaches to create fake profiles for the kids who weren't even athletes or paying people to take the SAT for their kids. Quite different than donating $100M for Admission.
Donating so that you get something in exchange is fraudulent, and is different, but I don't see how it's any better. It's also possibly tax fraud, therefore theft from other members of society.
No, you're right. But the ultra rich have "loopholes" since donating a building or a stadium to a college is not against the law, and a backroom handshake deal can still be made to donate millions without it going on the record as an exchange for all your kids getting accepted into that school.
Same difference in that sitting presidents don't ask for and don't get paid $millions for giving speeches during office - - yet the record shows that almost ALL of them arranged deals during their presidency in exchange for favorable legislation, so that the minute they walked out of the white house they were jetting off to give these million dollar "payback" speeches.
US high school senior here. Made a throwaway for this.
Seeing this makes my blood boil. Not only is it essentially an open secret that the admissions process actively discriminates against Asians and other high-achieving ethnic groups--and gives a massive leg up to legacies, children of donors, etc.--these people thought they were good enough, by virtue of their wealth, to bribe and cheat their way into these top universities (and some of them, honestly, shouldn't even need cheating to get into!)
I've worked my tail off for the past four years (if not more) to weasel my way past the racially biased admissions office, and now I see this--brazen corruption from the elite whose egos ride on their trust-fund children's college acceptances.
After my personal experience and now this, I've come to a conclusion: the college admissions process in the US is fundamentally broken. This case isn't just an aberration--it's a pattern.
I shudder to imagine just what my children will have to go through.
We live in quite a corrupt society, so here is the part where I tempt you to undertake a nihilistic leap into radical politics: http://www.capitalaspower.com/
I shudder to imagine just what my children will have to go through.
Things have been known to improve as well to decline. Don't let your anger make you pessimistic, experience will supply you with plenty of occasions for that later.
Wait what are you talking about, 'legacies and children of donors'? I've been watching Fox News faithfully for decades and they've assured me it was only the handful of black and hispanic students who didn't "deserve" their places in college.
I worked hard for 8 years of my life for a nil result in terms of college too and unlike you I definitely didn't get into a top university - what exactly does that make me?
College and life in general is not meritocratic. If anyone has any right to complain about colleges being racially biased and the fact that life is not meritocratic, it’s the people who affirmative action was invented to help, not the whites and Asians who are slightly disadvantaged by it now.
Well yes, because donating a building benefits all the students using that building today and well into the future. Small payments (i.e. bribes) to individuals benefit no one except those individuals.
Private universities are private as in control, not in funding. John Hopkins is a private university whose research is nearly 90% funded by the government. None of the private universities can exist without government funding.
So when Harvard professor whose salary comes from grants lectures a donor's child, who didn't get the grades to be there in the first place, it raises a question, if the arrangement makes sense.
This seems like a pretty straightforward issue of an employee doing something shady they should be fired for. I'm sure they will and the schools will put into place checks to make sure this is harder in the future.
> Is donating 'sexual favors' ok ?
Prostitution is currently illegal and I'm sure this against the most colleges code of conducts. I really can't imagine a possible future where this becomes a problem. "Come to HigherEdUniv, we accept an SAT score of 1400 or 1200 and a blow job".
> Should the same principles be applied for job promotions in private corporations ?
Sexual favors? No this is currently illegal and falls under sexual harassment / prostitution.
Giving a lot of money to a corporation for a promotion. This seems like pretty straightforward yes, companies exchange money for control all the time. YCombinator is founded on it.
Giving a lot of money to a boss without the agreement of the company for a promotion. This is shady but I've never seen or heard of this happen in the U.S. Normal corporate governance seems to take care of this issue.
> Is it ok to do similar differential treatment, for different students, for their grades throughout the study, and not just initial admission?
From a legal standpoint sure this seems ok. How long would a university exist if they did this, not very long.
> … aren't those kinds of behaviors, that are then breading the 'financial services execs that 'look the other way' and caused financial crisis of '08?
Completely different problem and set of behaviors. These types of scams involve only a handful of people and have very little impact on society. Financial crises happen pretty often and affect everyone in the U.S.
I think this is an issue for the universities to settle with their employees that are diverting funds away from the universities for personal gain.
It becomes a government and criminal matter when those same private institutions benefit from government regulations, such as loan guarantees, that are not available to other private institutions.
I wonder why they are only mentioning the “wealthy parents” in this article over the corrupt administrators that enabled them?
This is pretty wild. Seeing the FBI tackle something like this is so far outside of the legal and cultural norms of society that it's difficult to even really comment on.
Well, frankly I'm glad they are. As many people die slipping in the bathtub each year as 9/11. If acronym-agencies want to actually help society maybe they should tackle these types of real-world problems (e.g. tax-evasion of 1%) rather than building cool Snowden spy-toys.
I was more surprised at the scope - tackling entrance exam cheats* AND direct bribes to the universities. Neither surprises me much, but glad to see somebody attempting to address both.
* Entrance exams in the US are created by one of several private entities (College Board, International Baccalaureate, ACT) and administered by the local secondary schools.
The rich are getting richer and that demographic usually attends Ivy League schools. As the middle class disintegrates you're going to see more public incentive to prosecute the rich who bend or break the law to sustain their wealth.
"outside of the legal and cultural norms of society"
True. Usually the norm is that wealthy people are exempt from prosecution. I am sure whoever pursued this will get a lot of angry calls from powerful people.
Readit News
>... and it was like, the kids though, and it was funny 'cause the kids will call me and say, "Maybe I should do that again. I did pretty well and if I took it again, I'll do better even" Right? And they just have no idea that they didn't even get the score that they thought they got.
Can you even imagine what those people are going through?
One day you are a USC/Harvard/Stanford grad. The next day you are a fraud. And not only that, you are revealed to the entire world to be dumb as a box of rocks, just totally naked and shamed. And you had no clue. Your closest family members spent tens of thousands of dollars fooling you, committing very serious crimes on your behalf, and all the while, lying to you about your intelligence and work ethic.
For those people, it must feel like The Truman Show or an episode of The Twilight Zone. It's totally unreal.
I saw similar fabrications growing up as I attended one of the wealthiest high schools in the country. The top 10 of my graduating class got complete scholarships the most expensive schools in the country and the parents were willing to do anything to the school faculty to make sure their child had a higher class rank.
(source: https://youtu.be/lveMkZc-NRE, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/style/olivia-jade-giannul...)
Seriously, I was staying at the Trump hotel in Chicago (before Trump ran for president -- before I ever gave much thought about Donald Trump). Anyway, there was a looping video on the TV and she was inviting guests to stay at any one of their other Trump hotels around "North America and Canada." It was at that moment I realized that she thought North America was some kind of Northern area of America. I no longer wonder how she got into Wharton.
Lori Laughlin's daughter was probably a pretty poor student. Apparently she paid upwards of $500k to get in via the student athlete route, even though she's not an athlete. She's apparently a fairly well known Youtube/Instagram blogger who has made posts about not even wanting to be in college.
If you're not smart enough to fill out a form - imagine how you'll go during study.
As opposed to the SAT fakers where you can get into college and skate on by for a couple semesters / years without getting kicked out.
I also don’t get how the coaches didn’t think that they would get caught. Don’t they have to publish lists of students athletes? Presumably with the USC one the only way they got in was via a recommendation from the rowing coach.
And then you wonder if the people behind these fraudulent entrance schemes might have considered it worthwhile to leverage their position further by holding it over the parents/students in future.
Would they stoop so low?
[edit: s/Ivy-league/top-tier]
And now? I mean, it all blew up in their faces. All their best intentions made everything just so much more horrible for their children. They'll never wash this off.
My lord, not even Aristophanes himself could write a tragedy on this scale.
EDIT: And the parents were laughing with their fixer at the deception that they pulled on their kids! They were laughing at the naivete of their very children that they fooled. I can't even begin to process what was going through those parents' minds. What were they thinking?!
What makes you think they wrote their own application?
It's not really that far off the general experience of being an American, what with all the stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen research, the history of which apparently no one seems to know about, let alone work into their fundamental understanding of what our country is and how it came to be.
To some degree, the notion that it's "totally unreal" speaks to how thoroughly failed most Americans have been by both history education and our common mythos.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Anybody who does these kind of things does it because of positive feed back loops training over years. So they have a fair bit of clue. It's just the incentive ladder works that way.
Corruption exists because people want to be corrupt.
My mother did well in the Masters program at Stanford and I would have likely gotten in if she donated a couple million dollars but she didn’t and I didn’t (despite getting an invitation a year after accepting enrollment at another university).
It’s not like we ever had that type of money, but if we did I wouldn’t have wanted that.
It seems like they’re targeting this more obvious version of bribery but not digging in and targeting the systemic issue of affluent people buying their children’s spot in college.
I really don’t think it’s much harder to prove that an underperforming student who got in because their parents donated a couple million (or tens of millions of) dollars took the place of a more qualified candidate. Maybe I’m wrong...
In this case, we're talking about bribery of specific employees to act against the interests of their employer. That's simply corruption.
They might be equally non-meritocratic, but they're definitely not equally dishonest or equally socially harmful.
However, the daughter was rejected outright due to a multitude of factors. She wasn't violent, or addicted, or lazy. Nothing like that. She just wasn't ahead of the other applicants.
Well, you can imagine that the parents were none too enthused. All the love they had for that college, those dreams for their daughter, gone. There were phone calls and in person visits. Still, the daughter was not what they were looking for.
In the end, things have gone alright for everyone. The building still has their names on it, though the donations have ceased. The daughter is doing just fine at the school she is now at. The college is dealing with it's own issues just as it ever was.
Though there may be corruption at many universities and colleges, there are still a fair number of places where merit and fair decisions still reign. I'd look to those schools for the graduates to hire. Integrity is still in high demand, just as it will ever be.
This is a little overgenerous.
> In this case, we're talking about bribery of specific employees to act against the interests of their employer. That's simply corruption.
Perhaps. What crime is it?
I went and looked at the charges that were filed, here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admis...
(Kudos to patch.com for actually including a link to the charges in their coverage. Middle finger to the Washington Post.)
Charges are divided into three groups, which appear to correspond to different roles in the bribery. At the top are four people "charged by information". William Singer and Mark Riddell are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. (And some other charges.) Based on the media coverage, this is because some payments in the bribery system took the form of donations to a nonprofit operated by Riddell, and this is tax fraud. (One of those other charges is "conspiracy to defraud the United States".) Rudy Meredith is charged with wire fraud, the catchall crime that everyone in the country is guilty of. John Vandemoer is charged with racketeering.
The second group, "charged by indictment", are all charged with racketeering, except for David Sidoo who is charged with mail and wire fraud. I don't know what these people are supposed to have done. I'd like to think that a racketeering charge requires the organization you're involved with to have committed a crime; that would imply that what they're really charged with is helping the sham charity commit tax fraud.
The third group, "charged by complaint", are the parents. One and all they are charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
It doesn't look to me like paying an admissions officer to admit your child is a crime at all. Similarly, bribing a maitre'd to seat you more quickly is bribing a specific employee to act against the interests of his employer, but it's not a crime. Taking the bribe might or might not be a crime. All of the charges here that involve a crime relate to using a sham nonprofit for tax benefits.
>>It may not be meritocratic, but it's not corrupt
Its just dampening the effects a little, but its the same though. Donating X, just means the person who bought in the donation gets promoted or gets awarded some bonus or gets rewards by their employer(university). Instead of receiving the bribe directly.
This is a classic trick from corruption handbooks used by ace corrupt people.
When you trade something for something which could be wrong, only stupid people directly do it through exchange of money. Clever people trade through favors and indirect profit/help. They also call this lobbying in places like politics. In many other places they call these things incentives, commissions, brokerage or whatever.
This is really one of those classic problems with defining corruption. Books and stories can always be cooked in a way to make anything look good.
I agree that the practice of university donations in exchange for college admission is neither legally corrupt nor dishonest.
However, it is still wrong according to our societal values.
That is, we have a value system that we implicitly adhere to and meritocracy is big part of our value system.
At least in the states, we believe that if you work just as hard and contribute just as much as your neighbor, you deserve to enjoy the same quality of life.
When parents purchase access to an elite university for their child, they are conferring an advantage to their child over the child's peers that is unearned and unfair.
Elite college admissions is a zero sum game. There are only a certain number of spots available and purchasing a spot for a kid who slacked off in school necessarily takes the same opportunity away from a more deserving kid.
Sometimes, alumni give to their alma mater for charitable reasons! And some USC grads do better than some Yale grads, I'm sure.
But maybe the IRS should try to brush back the most conspicuous cases of donating to receive admission. I'm seeing stories of admissions officers being pretty open about it at Ivy League schools.
Maybe not in the 1800s, but doing that today violates any number of published school policies. It likely also violates several laws, especially if the school receives state/federal funding (they all do). Violating published policies, circumventing established admission systems, and denying a spot for a qualified candidate in order to accommodate a wealthy donor, that is the definition of corruption.
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A guy donates an engineering complex, and every engineering student on that campus gets to take advantage of said complex and its resources. Guy donates a new business school building and every student on that campus can take advantage of said building and its resources. In exchange, the university lets in two girls, their daughters or whatever, who might want to major in Art History and French, and coincidentally will likely be inheriting a few hundred million to upwards of a billion dollars in the future. (Future donors.)
It's a fair trade. I'm not wealthy on that level, but if I were calling the shots at a university I'd make that trade every time.
Donating for improvement that affects others is one thing, but donating for a quid pro quo might affect this.
If you believe the primary purpose of a university is to educate and certify, that is indeed "not much". But if you believe that the education is secondary, and the actual primary purpose is to cultivate a social network of influential graduates and dropouts, and to act as gatekeeper to future opportunities, then that bribe is better than a perfect SAT score.
That kid will end up with seed money or angel investments from mommy and daddy, and will be able to hire some former classmates right out of the gate, and they might build a unicorn, which will forever be tagged with "founded and built by a team of University X graduates".
In that sense, no one is robbing anybody of a spot. There are genius spots, and rich idiot spots, and the only problem is getting a few from each pile into the same rooms, with a reason to talk about their futures. One way is to coerce the rich kid into studying (or cheating) their coursework by paying off the genius kid. Management training.
Buying a basketball team and hiring a coach in order to win is legal. Paying one player to lose a game is not legal.
I understand the legality and the law is the law, but let's cut the c*ap, both sides are cheating. The poorer side gets caught because they don't have the money needed to bribe the University, they have just enough to bribe its employees.
Front Door: Student performance (scholastic and academic)
Back Door: Family donations
Side Door: What this article is about. Part of the ruse was faking athletic credentials to get into a more likely of admissions candidates (athletes have an advantage, apparently).
So in this case, they lied.
My local college was a blessing to me. It provided me an education, a safe atmosphere, and most of all, confidence. It changed me for the better. I'd like to donate to the college if I were in the position to do so, and because I had such a great experience, I'd encourage my child (don't have one, yet) to go.
It this wrong of me?
Obviously, people's opinion on that will depend on their opinion on things like admissions essays and extracurricular activities; anything like "I learned a good work ethic helping my father with his senate campaign" will have to go.
Blind grading after admission would be sensible too, for the same reasons. Although perhaps difficult in subjects where individual students' work was identifiable even without their name.
But, generally, your point is correct. In this case, there was an explicit pay-off/bribe/fraud committed. In the case of the super-wealthy, there's a large donation and a wink-wink/handshake.
This is very different from buying entrance to a university. Universities are allowed to admit on any criteria that they want (with a few exceptions). They are private organizations.
When you "donate" $1.2m to a "consultancy" you're just committing fraud. Nobody benefits except your kid and the "consultancy." It's much easier to prove that this transaction is fraudulent.
So in this case the government is going after fraudsters because the government isn't getting paid, and neither is the school. I'd be willing to bet that the government would have continued looking the other way if a) the wealthy had paid taxes on their bribe or b) there was some indisputable asset one could point to and say "there's my donation!"
It's the opposite actually; if you're giving money to the development office then you're enabling more qualified students to attend the school.
That’s why college only costs 50k per year when it costs 150k to provide that service to you.
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"Donating" to the owner to to exactly the same thing is considered good business.
Seeing this makes my blood boil. Not only is it essentially an open secret that the admissions process actively discriminates against Asians and other high-achieving ethnic groups--and gives a massive leg up to legacies, children of donors, etc.--these people thought they were good enough, by virtue of their wealth, to bribe and cheat their way into these top universities (and some of them, honestly, shouldn't even need cheating to get into!)
I've worked my tail off for the past four years (if not more) to weasel my way past the racially biased admissions office, and now I see this--brazen corruption from the elite whose egos ride on their trust-fund children's college acceptances.
After my personal experience and now this, I've come to a conclusion: the college admissions process in the US is fundamentally broken. This case isn't just an aberration--it's a pattern.
I shudder to imagine just what my children will have to go through.
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I shudder to imagine just what my children will have to go through.
Things have been known to improve as well to decline. Don't let your anger make you pessimistic, experience will supply you with plenty of occasions for that later.
Now if you linked to something like https://sub.media/ or https://itsgoingdown.org/ I'd understand...
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US Attorney re the Huffman/Loughlin (among others) college scam: "We're not talking about donating a building...we're talking about fraud."
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1105493852578697217
Says quite a lot, doesn’t it.
A) a private university can set any criteria they want for admissions.
B) a private, federally accredited, university can set different criteria of admission for different people
C) If a parent donates large amount of money directly to the school, and their children get accept with lower criteria -- it is perfectly ok.
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Are there conditions, that would not make this line of thinking not ok ?
Is donating 'sexual favors' ok ?
Should the same principles be applied for job promotions in private corporations ?
Is it ok to do similar differential treatment, for different students, for their grades throughout the study, and not just initial admission?
What does it mean to be an 'accredited university'? Does accreditation implies any form of fairness? Is that legally enforceable ?
Will the deans of those universities be responsible for lax rules, eg.. looking the other way?
… aren't those kinds of behaviors, that are then breading the 'financial services execs that 'look the other way' and caused financial crisis of '08?
So when Harvard professor whose salary comes from grants lectures a donor's child, who didn't get the grades to be there in the first place, it raises a question, if the arrangement makes sense.
> Is donating 'sexual favors' ok ?
Prostitution is currently illegal and I'm sure this against the most colleges code of conducts. I really can't imagine a possible future where this becomes a problem. "Come to HigherEdUniv, we accept an SAT score of 1400 or 1200 and a blow job".
> Should the same principles be applied for job promotions in private corporations ?
Sexual favors? No this is currently illegal and falls under sexual harassment / prostitution.
Giving a lot of money to a corporation for a promotion. This seems like pretty straightforward yes, companies exchange money for control all the time. YCombinator is founded on it.
Giving a lot of money to a boss without the agreement of the company for a promotion. This is shady but I've never seen or heard of this happen in the U.S. Normal corporate governance seems to take care of this issue.
> Is it ok to do similar differential treatment, for different students, for their grades throughout the study, and not just initial admission?
From a legal standpoint sure this seems ok. How long would a university exist if they did this, not very long.
> … aren't those kinds of behaviors, that are then breading the 'financial services execs that 'look the other way' and caused financial crisis of '08? Completely different problem and set of behaviors. These types of scams involve only a handful of people and have very little impact on society. Financial crises happen pretty often and affect everyone in the U.S.
It becomes a government and criminal matter when those same private institutions benefit from government regulations, such as loan guarantees, that are not available to other private institutions.
I wonder why they are only mentioning the “wealthy parents” in this article over the corrupt administrators that enabled them?
* Entrance exams in the US are created by one of several private entities (College Board, International Baccalaureate, ACT) and administered by the local secondary schools.
True. Usually the norm is that wealthy people are exempt from prosecution. I am sure whoever pursued this will get a lot of angry calls from powerful people.
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