A USC volleyball coach was arrested here in Waikiki today by the FBI in connection with the scandal. I think the team was here to play the U of Hawaii.
EDIT: The local news is saying something about he was here with the water-polo team, not volleyball. But he seems to be a coach for both.
I don’t know her now. This was a HS classmate.
The “lesbian” thing was an impulsive kind of thing; how would you feel if someone kept touching you and you didn’t like it, and they weren’t doing it to other people?
She did not look, or on the surface act, mentally disabled, but a brief conversation gave it away.
Moderating:
What the hell? I know you are probably trying to make some other point but knock it off. Do not use the word tard to describe someone with a mental disability.
A couple interesting items I’ve seen in various news pieces:
Macy is on tape talking about planning to go through with the plan for his younger daughter. Either they decided to not follow through or there is no evidence any money was exchanged for the younger daughter. There is no evidence linking him to the payout for the older daughter.
This all started from information uncovered during a different unrelated investigation. Fake test scores were submitted to three Boston schools but none of those schools were named in the indictment. Apparently they have no evidence that the scheme was successful there. However since the investigation started in Boston that is where the prosecution is occurring.
apparently there was a ringleader and enough people under him for the USAG’s office to be able to use the RICO act but the analyst said that was just being used so people would cut deals IE the parents and such
This just confirms something I’ve believed for a long time: colleges should not have any sports activities. Period.
I mean, if the students want to get some exercise, they definitely should have access to fields or courts or whatever - but they gotta bring their own ball.
AFAIK, this scandal is about freshman undergraduate admissions, not graduate schools.
UT’s a fine school, but IMO, it’s not worth bribing anyone to get into, certainly not to the tune of six figures.
That’s my point- state schools are generally a good value, but if you’re going to bribe someone and throw down that much money and take that risk, why would you do so at somewhere like UCLA or UT? Even within Texas, most people are going to be far more awed by a degree from MIT than UT (or any other state school).
That’s why I was saying that being named in this suit is a big humongous endorsement for UT- it’s basically saying that they’re good enough for people to bribe people huge amounts of money for admissions.
Which is kind of funny, because in-state, you can swing a dead cat and hit a half-dozen Longhorns (or Aggies, or Red Raiders, or whatever) at any professional workplace.
From what I understand, the kids were not going to join the college team. The sports fraud was more about making the kids look more well rounded by saying they were on a HS team. But they weren’t on a HS team and they weren’t going to play in college. The bribery to the coaches was so that they would tell the admission board that the coach wanted the student as a recruit so the student would be ranked higher. It’s similar to how the parents might have said the kids did charity work and then bribed the president of the charity to forge work records. It was just a way to make the kid look better to the admission board.
Because 1) bribing your way in to MIT or UCLA would take 8 figures, at least, not 6 and 2) for these parents and kids, it wasn’t about trying to max out your educational opportunities or prestige, it was about having the opportunity to have a “fun” or “typical” college experience–lots of parties and road trips and sex and drugs and rock and roll, all in a carefully curated environment where the riff-raff are kept out. The point isn’t what happens after school, it’s the school experience itself.
And UT/TAMU admissions are an entirely different game now. I can’t even begin to describe some of the kids I’ve seen declined or CAPed in recent years. As I said upthread, it’s become unremarkable to have a kid get into MIT or Wash U or Vanderbilt and not get into UT. (It happens the other way, too, of course).
But coaches get a limited number of “recruits,” and each one takes up an admission slot. Bribing the coaches deprive students who earned a spot of their rightful place in the admittance process.
This is just starting to unravel. Internal investigations are going to snare any number of university employees who got paid off along the way.
I wonder if a judge could impose a 5 year ban from social media as part of the punishment for these kids/parents? That would kill and chance of Laughlin, for example, monetizing the experience.
People are saying this is a scandal of liberal elites but Loughlin is conservative and Christian, as mentioned above she would go on TV shows like the 700 club.
Jesus would definitely support bribing your kids way into college. It’s right there in Paul’s letter to the Iumentans.
I agree with this, even though I don’t drink and wasn’t interested in parties. We used to joke that college would be a fun four years if not for the classes that interfered with everything else.
I bet that the prosecutors will pressure the parents to plead guilty in exchange for letting the kids off.
Right! Some other parent dropped half a million into crew so their kid could get an advantage!
I mean, actually getting up and rowing every morning is certainly way more honorable than pretending that you did, but it’s true that “put a ton of money into a hyper-elite sport” has always been a bit of a run-around selective admissions in any case.
Always has been. Always has been cheating, too. 
I’m not against the old tried and true method of donating a building or three. But that is for the mega-rich. The regular rich have to resort to hyper-elite sports and bribery. Poor dears!
Then the problem is that there was a team in the first place, and a coach. And hell, that there are teams in high school, too. IMHO, beyond PE class, education and sports should be kept completely separate.
I thought it was about getting the kid admitted under the lower standards for student athletes?
“Well-rounded” is meaningless here. It has nothing to do with the kid’s past. Basically, what happens is that coaches are tasked with developing a great team. So they want the best kids, and a big part if their authority is the ability to pick their students. So basically, the admissions people give the coaches a (relatively low) minimum standard, and then the coaches do their thing. They give the admissions people a list of recruits, each of which meets that minimum standard, and the admissions people rubber-stamp the application.
In this case, the parents paid College Board people to get their kids up to the minimum standard. Then they paid the coaches to put their kids on the list–and gave them a bunch of fake photos to put in the admissions file so that the admissions people wouldn’t notice anything when they rubber stamped the application. Then the kids enrolled in school and didn’t play on the team, but no one noticed because there’s no sports scholarships at these schools. And admissions people don’t have a lot of contact after kids enroll. If they happened to notice someone wasn’t actually on a team . . .well, kids scrub out or get injured.
So it wasn’t paying for a chance to look better. It was paying for a sure thing.