How dare those parents seek preferential treatment for their kids using their own money and bumping more meritorious students. Who do they think they are? the Federal government that uses affirmative action to do the exact same thing with taxpayer money.
It would be one thing if they just used their money to buy preferential treatment. They went further than that...they used their privilege to cheat on the ACT and SAT scores, and they made up fake sports profiles for their kids...actually photoshopping their kids’ faces onto the bodies of REAL athletes, sports their kids had never played or participated in. Paying astronomical tuition or funding a building or program at a university to gain favor is one thing. This went WAY further than that I’d say. Oh and they cheated on their taxes too by donating all this bribe money to a fake charity then writing it all off.
[How dare those parents seek preferential treatment for their kids using their own money and bumping more meritorious students. Who do they think they are? the Federal government that uses affirmative action to do the exact same thing with taxpayer money.]
I think it’s this: we all realize there are buckets set aside for colleges for certain groups: AA, legacy candidates, athletes, true scholars, etc.
These buckets are more or less accepted, but in none of this is cheating supposed to be happening. If someone gets a spot on a track team who wasn’t even an athlete in HS, that means someone else for that bucket was not offered that spot.
One of my kids runs distance track for the NCAA right now, Division 1. He loves his school and he’s in the right place, but what if Stanford may have offered him a running spot, but didn’t because a rich parent cheated and superimposed their kid’s head on an athlete’s body and sent in fake running times?
Who this scam screwed is not the average high schooler, but actual athletes set aside for the bucket of athletes. The fact that that bucket exists at all is another question. It might not be fair that it exists (my son would not have made it to that college via his grades/SAT alone), but at least the athletes had to actually be star athletes in HS to get recruited. That’s a lot of work, even if not academic work.
College coaches aren’t paid that much so perhaps they are easy to bribe unfortunately.