I may be in the minority, but I don’t really have an objection if someone donates a significant amount to a university and gets (some) preference for admission. At least the institution is getting something that may contribute to its betterment, and could possibly help ensure that other students get financial aid.
The problem with this case is that an unauthorized intermediary, whether an employee of the university or not, is the party to get all the benefits. The university basically got scammed here, along with the parents of other more deserving applicants.
In the media reports that I’ve seen, Singer, the guy at the heart of this, would tell parents that their children could get admission through multi-multi million dollar donations. But he could do it much cheaper by bribing and test cheating.
I’m skeptical though. That may have simply been his sales pitch.
I knew a professor/administrator at Duke who said that a wealthy individual had called the University and basically asked how much to donate to secure admission for his academically average son. My professor said that the University told him that it couldn’t be done.
A key point, however, is that these people didn’t just want “any school.” They want specific schools–or, at least, a specific tier of school.
I’ve seen real college advisers talk about this (maybe it was linked here? Too lazy to check every link in this thread). They’d tell the parents what the kid could realistically get, including with donations. The parents would often get incensed that they couldn’t just buy their way into the exact schools they wanted.
And then this guy comes along and says he can, if they don’t care about him fudging the law “a bit.”
I don’t know what the going rate is today, but I bought my house across the Bay from Stanford at that exact time, and it is worth over 4x what I paid for it now.
I don’t know the details, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Stanford wanted the building and Gates offered the biggest chunk to get his name on. And a Gates building is high prestige. Not so much for a guy whose money comes from Chines remedies and supplements.
Uh huh. I just looked at Stanford’s website. They say they got $1.13B from 76,000 donors in 2017-2018 making an average of about $15k/donation. Do you really want to defend that a $6M donation is “chicken feed”?
I agree that race and class are huge factors in the American criminal justice system. I don’t, however, believe any first offender would have received a harsher sentence than this. (and certainly not a $30,000 fine)
I mean, really, Procrustus, talk about leading with your chin! Dude, this is America, where the system is literally built on taking advantage of, and punishing people for being, poor minorities.
I think the sentence was partly due to her previous drug offences, but it should never have been a charge that leads to prison in the first place. (That might well be true of her drug offences too, but that’s a different discussion).
It’s one of those occasions where I wonder what the fuck the judge was thinking. Homeless woman, five year old child, babysitter’s address (so not even random! It was a place that was as much of a home as the truck they were living in) and he hands down five years. At least a couple of years without her kids, for the crime of getting her kid into a school.
