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Home » The college entry bribery scam

The college entry bribery scam

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t gotten around to writing about this story yet, and I probably won’t get to it today. Most likely tomorrow.

But I thought you might want to talk about it here.

Or about anything else that interests you.

Comments

The college entry bribery scam — 34 Comments

  2. Those daughters of the actress must really be stupid,. SC has had rising SAT scores but I was never aware that it was that hard to get into, especially if you could pay full tuition.

  3. There exists nothing in American society more replete with corruption and mendacity than our system of higher education, including admissions policies, preferential treatment for certain groups, the ludicrous fiction of subliterate “student-athletes”, the bloated bureaucracies, the grotesquely ever-increasing obsession with “diversity”, the sense of entitlement among coddled students, the contempt for intellectual diversity among the faculty, the grade inflation, the worthlessness of so many course offerings, the largesse of the federal government (even to schools with multi-billion dollar endowments), the ignorance of donors who give thoughtlessly, the hostility to freedom of expression on most campuses, not to mention the 1.5 trillion dollars in student loan debt. The whole rotten edifice deserves to be destroyed.

  4. USC rejects 84% of the applications submitted. On the other end, about 3/4 of their matriculants finish on time.

    The University of San Diego is a fairly meh school, but the rest of them on the list do screen and do recruit students who are passably adapted to their program.

  7. I have a strong feeling these parents are mostly Democrats. Not that Republicans can’t be dishonest, but this just radiates entitlement.

    It’s also another kick in the teeth for women’s athletics. Most of the coaches involved handled women’s sports. This, after recent headlines on “transgender” guys beating girls in the girls’ leagues. Never mind taking your daughters to swim teams or basketball camps. It won’t matter.

  8. You can imagine how their fellow students are likely treating the kids involved in this scam right about now.

  9. I read Barry’s link, but I also heard Dersh last night on Fox. He made the excellent point that any school that gives a head coach complete autonomy to admit students without oversight is asking for a bribery scandal. He also suggested that all admissions decisions should be committee decisions. That way, a potential briber has to hit-up a half dozen people. Not impossible, just more difficult.

  10. I am glad that I matriculated at a three-letter technological school in Cambridge, MA back in 1960 where all that counted was your high school academic record and your SAT scores.

    The freshman class was 900 at that time, and in a welcome at Kresge Auditorium we were given the message to look to our neighbors to right and to the left — one of us three were not going to make it through to senior year.

    Believe me, there was no partying for those 4 years.

    And I would not have had the opportunity if the Soviets had not launched Sputnik in 1957.

  11. I read the names and address of those who paid off the fixers to get their children into various top ranked colleges. Most of them were from California with a few from the NE and I think one from Florida. I am curious about the marketing of a service like this and I would suppose it was word of mouth and perhaps the tip off was a person who was a little short on funds. Next thought is knowing that a person is taking a test for your child and knowing a coach is recruiting you child who does not have the talent it was obvious this was a totally illegal operation. I had to look up the famous actresses because the names were not familiar until I made the connection with the shows they had been in and we do like to watch the rich and famous when they stumble.

  12. This is a link within Neo’s with details on the Huffman and Laughlin cases.

    Gotta hand it to Felicity Huffman for the most cost effective approach. Only $15K was spent, to straight up cheat on the SAT. In some sense, this is the most disturbing one. Does this happen a lot? A great many parents would shell out $15K. Also extremely disturbing is the mention of an official “learning disability” excuse for special exam taking treatment. Really? Does your score come with an asterisk beside the number and a footnote explanation?

    I heard that Huffman and her husband had never attended (finished?) college so that it was important to them that their children went. Too bad they didn’t find it as important that their children earn their degrees.

    Loughlin and Giannulli blew $500K getting their two kids in. Ouch.

  13. You have to suspect that a lot of the kids–perhaps all of the the kids involved–were in on it too.

    I mean, if your application included discussions of your great athleticism and photo shopped pictures of you engaging in sports you never participated in, I’d think you knew something was fishy.

    Then, of course, if you were touted as being a great athlete, you’d think that when you got to the school people would talk to you about/ask you about your prowess, and if you weren’t an athlete–never had competed in rowing, for instance, and had never even sat in a boat or held an oar, well, you might think that something was up.

    What if you your weren’t a great scholar, and not particularly interested in learning, had taken the PSAT and your scores were really, really low and, then, you took the SAT, and your score miraculously jumped 400 points, wouldn’t that be a big clue that something was going on?

  14. I don’t find this shocking, I assume it is commonplace. Those involved just happened to be caught with their corruption showing.

  15. Snow on Pine:

    Actually, you don’t have to assume the kids were in on it. I’m pretty sure the ones who had another person take the SATs for them were in on it, but it’s not at all clear that the others were, and in fact (although I can’t find the link right now) one article I read said that the announcement of the indictments included a statement that most or at least some of the kids seem to not have been in on it.

  16. “You have to suspect that a lot of the kids–perhaps all of the the kids involved–were in on it too.” Snow on PIne

    Our daughter graduated from a private college in California 17 years ago. Even then, all correspondence from the school was delivered in her name–even grades, despite the fact that my husband and I were paying the bills. That was not just this college, but required by FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), so virtually every college/university.

  17. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt – dumbing down Americans through education
    [if you want to go straight to her speaking, she starts at :59]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IbA2lhXZac

    Full text of “The Impact of Science on Society – B. Russell”
    https://archive.org/details/TheImpactOfScienceOnSociety-B.Russell

    Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. It may be worth while to spend a few moments in speculating as to possible future developments of those that are oligarchies.

    It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries.

    Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.

    And with head start, pre-k, dietary programs, etc…

    Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

    [snip out some horrible stuff about Nazi’s and ideas]

    and now women are at the front, having to leave their kids someplace, and so on and so on, this stuff gets… you pick a word for it..

    Children will, as in Plato’s Republic, be taken from their mothers and reared by professional nurses. Gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton. (The Aztecs kept a domesticated alien tribe for purposes of cannibalism. Their regime was totalitarian.)

    and last..

    More important than these metaphysical speculations is the question whether a scientific dictatorship, such as we have been considering, can be stable, or is more likely to be stable than a democracy.

    Apart from the danger of war, I see no reason why such a regime should be unstable. After all, most civilized and semi-civilized countries known to history have had a large class of slaves or serfs completely subordinate to their owners.

    There is nothing in human nature that makes the persistence of such a system impossible.

    And the whole development of scientific technique has made it easier than it used to be to maintain a despotic rule of a minority.

    When the government controls the distribution of food, its power is absolute so long as it can count on the police and the armed forces. And their loyalty can be secured by giving them some of the privileges of the governing class.

    I do not see how any internal movement of revolt can ever bring freedom to the oppressed in a modern scientific dictatorship.

    Bertrand Russell was such a pip…
    and few think there were thinkers who could surpass prior inventive horrors

  18. I am glad that I matriculated at a three-letter technological school in Cambridge, MA back in 1960 where all that counted was your high school academic record and your SAT scores.

    Yeah. I got a scholarship to USC and my Chicago high school didn’t know what it was so they sent my transcript to Cal. I got a letter from Cal accepting me and asking me to submit an application. I was also accepted to Cal Tech but had no money. No loans in those days.

  19. I’m most impressed by the idiocy of these parents that believed attendance and graduation from a “top” level school would make any difference in the professional lives of their mediocre (in at least academic and athletic terms) children. Add to the idiocy that they would pay full tuition and fees for the privilege of attending.

  20. well, it has certainly made me question the academic legitimacy of other’s kids from Hollywood who went to big name schools. Did they get in the same way?

  21. I ms SHOCKED, i say; SHOCKED to learn that rich people use bribery to get there kids into the elite schools.

  23. Artfldgr on March 13, 2019 at 7:00 pm at 7:00 pm said:
    Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt – dumbing down Americans through education
    [if you want to go straight to her speaking, she starts at :59]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IbA2lhXZac

    Full text of “The Impact of Science on Society – B. Russell”
    https://archive.org/details/TheImpactOfScienceOnSociety-B.Russell
    * * *
    Thanks for the reminder that intellectuals* are not necessarily our friends.

    *Check out Neo’s post on Trump and what intellectuals think about him.

  24. Kate on March 13, 2019 at 5:26 pm at 5:26 pm said:
    I have a strong feeling these parents are mostly Democrats. Not that Republicans can’t be dishonest, but this just radiates entitlement.

    It’s also another kick in the teeth for women’s athletics. Most of the coaches involved handled women’s sports. This, after recent headlines on “transgender” guys beating girls in the girls’ leagues. Never mind taking your daughters to swim teams or basketball camps. It won’t matter.
    * * *
    https://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2019/03/IMG_1370.jpg?w=750&ssl=1

    Week in Pictures already nailed it.

  25. Mike K,
    He He. You really gotta wonder. There is a lot of eye rolling going on where I am today. Visiting with my son and his fiance. Both USC STEM grads. Both my son and my daughter got National Merit Finalist scholarships – part of USC’s effort to get those SATs up. In my son’s freshman dorm was the son of a very famous Academy Award winning actor. My son would tell us about the clouds of mj smoke rolling out of his dorm 24/7, and how he slept though a gen ed class they were both in. When I think of the extra hoops my kids had to jump through because – you know – home schooled… So yes, you really have to wonder – rich celebrity parents – and they still couldn’t make the bottom cut…

  26. Also, this is not about getting an education for these kids. It’s about being with ‘their kind’. They will take a no brainer major and join a sorority or fraternity – the real point of it all.

  27. I saw that one, AesopFan. It’s funny, and it’s not funny, because those aren’t actually women, and everyone knows it. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes; everyone is afraid to mention the problem.

  28. Aesop I always thought the popular conception that North Korea and Jim Jones cults were the height of the Iron Fist to be rather naive and shortsighted. The height of the iron fist is that the ruled subjects and slaves believe they are free and having a good life. They could never envision or support a Civil War 2, because they prefer and are happy in their lives. It is extremely tiring and unstable to control the population with iron fists, fear, and guns. Sooner or later, once you look away for a second, revolution springs up. Or a foreign enemy hits you when you are dealing with local insurrections.

    That is why the Western belief and faith in the scientific orthodoxy is useful for the Deep State and totalitarian regimes. The fools actually believe they know what science is just because their priests tell them what the theories of the day are. They are happy with this, with NASA, and so on.

  29. Everyone is outraged about this, because everyone can relate–they’ve worked a couple of jobs and studied their ass off to get into a good school and to help pay for it, or they’re presently or have paid a fortune in college tuition for one or more kid, or their kid–though a hard-working, very good student–was rejected by one of these schools.

    To add insult to injury, we’ve got one of Laughlin’s daughters talking about how she really just wants to go to college to party and have fun on football days and, then, her making a killing doing a commercial for Amazon about all the crap she ordered from them for her dorm room.

  31. They say that every crisis is actually an opportunity in disguise.

    How about Hallmark taking this opportunity to make their series more relevant, spice them–as they say in Hollywood “dirty them up” a bit.

    So, for instance, they could have “When Calls the Bailbondsman,” or “Hallmark Chicks in the Slammer.”

  33. I’m seeing a lot of commentary online that says this scandal is not unlike that timeless practice of rich donors “buying” admission for less-than-stellar offspring (I.e. legacy admissions). As eyerolling and common as those practices are, they’re not illegal, and at least the school gets a building or professorship or whatever out of the “exchange” that can benefit other students. In the Varsity Blues scandal, it was out and out fraud, on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.

  34. CV – go back to the link for Dershowitz’s interview; he says pretty much the same thing, but that there aren’t enought super-rich donors to really influence the “pool” of students’ grades.

    Here, with the second-rank-rich, it would seem that there are.

    He also calls into question the value of said grades in the first place, which is a separate topic, but the connection is that, in an old-school school, the frauds would have been flunked out soon anyway, but now that is not going to happen.

    (Super-rich kids were not to be flunked out, of course, but they were known to the administration and everyone played the game; this bunch were hoping to be anonymous frauds and just skate through like all the other substandard students.)

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