Nitpick: If by Univ of PA you mean the University of Pennsylvania, it is a private, Ivy League School.
Your broader point, that many public universities are excellent educational institutions, and some rival the best private schools, is completely valid.
And get them into the ice cream program! I know there are other majors like advanced paper towel tube crafts, but you have to do more than show up to get icecream with them.
There’s a couple in my city who has sued the school district every year since their teenage daughter started kindergarten, because the district says she isn’t qualified for the T&G program. Get a clue, folks (and don’t bother with a college fund; just save up for the therapy bills). :smack:
I found out a while back that a mentally retarded HS classmate from a well-off family has a master’s degree, and suspect this is how she got it. She certainly didn’t belong in mainstream classes, let alone the college track, and am also puzzled as to how she managed to get AND KEEP a job as a high school art teacher. I remember that she got a 3 on her ACT (not 23, not 13, THREE) and teachers would give her sympathy C’s and D’s because they had to, I guess. In addition, since she was part of the ultra-mega-duper popularity crowd and I was not, when I was assigned to sit next to her, she would pat me on the head while speaking to me, usually using baby talk, until I asked her if she was a lesbian and told her to knock it off.
p.s. I know her behavior was because of my place in the pecking order, and not her mentation, because she didn’t do it to other people.
The distinction is the victim. In this case the schools themselves are the victims. In the grand donation case, the schools are the beneficiary and there is no victim.
That’s a pretty big difference.
I think the difference is that one is fraud, and one is not.
Like, Harvard can accept who they want. They might claim to be a meritocracy, but they’re obviously not, and if there’s a tacit understanding that having a building with your name on it on the campus gives you a good chance to get in, whatever.
If I want to start up Walrus’s Super Good College and admit people who donate enough money to build a dorm, why shouldn’t I be able to. As long as I’m not discriminating based on protected classes, I should be able to (FWIW, Harvard is also doing that).
Colleges already charge rich people more than poor people. No reason they can’t charge really rich people way more.
Fraudulent documents and bribing employees is a whole different thing.
Even the ones who knew I think should probably not have degrees revoked. Imagine you’re 18 and your rich powerful parents pull strings to get you something you don’t deserve. I think it’s asking quite a lot to have the moral backbone to have stood up to them at the time. Certainly it would be virtuous, but I think revoking a degree that someone actually showed up to school for for four years is punishment greatly in excess of the crime.
Now, maybe the graft didn’t end there and they also bribed teachers for passing grades. In which case, sure, throw 'em out. But the standard should be more than a lie on an admissions form.
zimaane, I wouldn’t call that a nitpick. That would be a complete correction. I had no idea that UPenn was Ivy League. Being a U of IL alum and a long time employee of UCSD, I just assumed it was a public school.
Thanks for the info!
mc
Plus in this case it’s illegal. It’s not a victimless crime, it’s fraud. The schools were defrauded, we were all defrauded when taxes weren’t paid on the bribe money, and eligible students didn’t get the spots that undeserving students did.
Either the price of a new building was too high or the kids were too dumb but this is way worse than using legal means to buy an education even if those legal means are already morally reprehensible. This just adds illegality that has no justification on top of that.
Harvard has such a giant endowment , around $40 billion, they don’t have to charge anyone to attend but they do since people will pay their way . That’s one advantage you get when your school started up in 1636 , a long time for the money to add up. (and since someone will likely jump in here , I know the Harvard endowment is not just 1 big pile of money so it cannot all be used to fund students)
It doesn’t have to be a prestigious school - most schools don’t accept 100% of students - and a room temperature SAT score and a C average isn’t going to get you in to much but bottom barrel schools.
There isn’t Ivys and the rest of the world including community colleges. There are tons of schools with less than 50% admissions rates that are competitive schools to get into - and it sounds like some of these kids weren’t even competitive at that level.
This guy disagrees with me though.
No wonder kids from wealthy families often have such serious issues with drugs, mental health, etc. - having to live up to expectations for things they aren’t interested in.
As for bribing employers, IDK if that specifically was done at the hospital where I used to work, but we did hire a technician whose mother was a PA-C and his stepfather was a prominent member of the medical staff. We did know from the get-go that hiring him was NOT an option, and without going into details that could potentially lead to a HIPAA violation, let’s just say that didn’t end well, which didn’t surprise anybody. This was during a period where we hired some real doozy technicians, none of whom lasted very long.
One of our pharmacists lived down the street from them, and she was pretty sure that the house was being used for drug dealing, due to all the short-term traffic in and out of the house, which of course could have (among other things) cost the parents their licenses. Plus, when the PA-C and her husband divorced, he got custody and to nobody’s surprise, when they turned 14, they moved in with their mom and stepdad because there weren’t any rules over there. :dubious: (Yeah, I know it’s often the other way around, but that’s what happened in this family.)
I read an article a while back about the daughter of an extremely wealthy East Coast family who completely threw a wrench into her family’s traditions by having a mind of her own and eschewing an Ivy League education for the police academy. Yep, she wanted to be a cop, and that’s exactly what she did
More recently, I read an essay from the guy who wrote “Far From The Tree” about how such families handle children with mental and/or physical disabilities. In short, the kids are often “put away”, and the staff often paid a lot of money to keep their mouths shut, which didn’t surprise me.
I guess I’m trying to think like the rich entitled corrupt parents. I’m well aware that getting admitted to many schools is difficult. If I was going to be bribing with that kind of money I want a school with more cachet.
Growing up in the shadows of Rutgers I’m well aware of how difficult it is to get into some state schools. They are increasing out of state enrollment to make more money which makes it harder for residents to get in to their state university.
I wonder how dumb the kids really are. What if they’d been raised to value hard work, education, and studying? Maybe their parents wouldn’t have felt the only way they could get into a decent college was with bribery. We’ll never know now. Even if some of the kids have working brains, this doubt will always be there.
As a middle-aged student struggling to afford even a public state school, this all really pisses me off. Some of my younger classmates are brilliant and could’ve done so much with opportunities in these colleges. In the case of Lori Laughlin’s daughter, she’s just there to party. Ugh.
They’re gonna call me sir they’ll all stop picking on me
Well I’m a high school grad I’m over 5 foot 3
I’ll get a badge and a gun and I’ll join the P.D…
**God is a Bullet **(Concrete Blonde)
I’m not going to judge all of the children especially since some of them were apparently unaware. If my parent did this without my knowing I would never forgive them and I am speaking as somebody who really would have loved to get into Harvard/Princeton/Yale. If I found out that my parents bribed somebody to get me in I would never feel like I deserved to be there. One of the reasons I turned down Stanford (among many) was that I was a legacy and a faculty brat and I didn’t want that hanging over my head. Some of these kids may have been smart and good workers and their parents just wanted to assure that they got into their school of choice. Then again, some as noted above are clearly idiots who are too stupid or lazy to deserve a spot.
It still amazes me that they could set up an “official” SAT testing center where the proctors were able to give the kids the correct answers or correct their tests for them and nobody was overseeing it.
That makes absolutely no sense at all. If the kid actually met the requirements of graduation, of course they get to keep their degree. That’s what degrees are.
The people who committed crimes should be punished, but the kid did nothing wrong. And from their perspective, getting in isn’t the part that matters. It’s how you got out.
I hate to link to a video, but I can’t put this ideal into words. This sororityrecruitment video was roundly criticized (for good reason) but it shows what the “ideal” college experience is about for some people. If that’s what you are looking for, I can see thinking USC would be a fabulous place to get it (not to say that USC isn’t a good school, academically–it is. But if you did not give a shit about the academics and wanted 1) aesthetially gorgeous surroundings 2) lots of rich, beautiful people to hang out with 3) California weather, USC seem ideal.
Again, you’re thinking of this as “people spend more money than I will ever have to get their kids into college–wouldn’t they want the best?” This is more like “Daughter wants to go a school cuz it’s cool but she can’t get in, but if we spend a fraction of a percent of our net worth, someone will take care of it”. I’m sure they didn’t think they’d get arrested.
I grew up in Des Moines. Drake University has long been that way for kids from wealthy families from Chicago who couldn’t get into Harvard, etc. and I’ve heard the same thing about Creighton in Omaha.
Gee, I also wonder where a lot of the drug money in those cities comes from…
There really aren’t any “best” pharmacy schools, but there are definitely some “worst” ones. The best way to tell is if the program has opened within the past 10 years; far too many of these are nothing but diploma mills.
Oh, man. You would think William H. Macy, of all people, would know better than to get involved in some kind of harebrained criminal scheme. Those never end well.