Well at least it’s not accepting students who have to be passed through their courses because the are inept at scholastics but excel in earning income for their schools through sports (college football, I’m looking at you). :smack:
She should have thought of that before she did an interview for CBN.
Further nitpick: Being public or private doesn’t really have anything to do with the Ivy League. Portions of Cornell are public.
The kids aren’t charged with anything. And it will be up to the universities in question to decide what to do about their continuing status as students–the prosecutors have no say in that.
They should do a movie about this case. I have a title “The Verdict was Mail Fraud”. Who can we get to star in it?
The prosecutors could still charge most of the kids. They took part in the scam too. They could agree not to do so to pressure the parents. What the colleges will or won’t do is a different subject but I imagine that falsifying records could be grounds for expulsion.
According to reports, many of the kids didn’t know. And if the prosecutors were going to use charges against the kids as leverage, I would think they would have included them in the initial indictment, or they would have explicitly said (or hinted) in their press release that it was a possibility… That’s how this kind of leverage is generally applied, so far as I have noticed.
And SC is known for their Dentistry and Cinema programs. Everything else is pretty much meh.
From what I can see this has nothing to do with the very limited number of scholarship slots. The coaches are under a lot less scrutiny for trying to recruit freshmen who might not make the team.
Banning someone from social media sounds like a 1st amendment violation to me.
Although you can’t go completely by what’s in the media, I read that the FBI believes that most of the kids didn’t know there was bribery going on.
The FBI generally doesn’t work that way. They don’t charge and prosecute with the hopes of pressuring someone into a guilty verdict. They don’t like prosecuting unless they feel it’s a sure thing. They have this case wrapped up with a big red bow on top. They have all the documents, they have the main conspirator wearing a wire, they have the ringleader already pleading guilty and cooperating, they have several other cooperating witnesses. They don’t need to threaten to charge the children. It would at least somewhat surprise me if there were any trials at all. There is a chance that the ultra rich on this list will try to throw enough high-priced lawyers at it to win at trial.
Some of the kids were posed for photos showing them engaged in a sport, so they should have realized something was up. Some were told to take the SAT/ACT at particular, corrupt testing facilities so that should have appeared suspicious to them.
From reading all the posts, I got the impression that USC is not a highly selective school, but their admissions requirements say otherwise: The acceptance rate is 16%. The average SAT score is 1400, meaning, according tothis site, that anything lower than that puts you at “below average” by USC’s standards. Loughlin’s 1020, which is nationally about the 40th percentile, would have put her well below average at USC. The average GPA for entering frosh is 3.73.
For comparison,UT’s acceptance rate is 36.5%, the average SAT score is 1275, and the average GPA for admissions is 3.68.
I’m not doubting that USC is a party school or that it offers plenty of opportunities for fun, but it looks like it’s more selective than I’d thought.
It isn’t scholarship slots. A lot of these schools don’t even offer athletic scholarships. But there are a limited number of admission slots every year, and these people stole theirs.
A social media ban could easily work as a voluntary alternative to say 5 years in prison. 
Hey, a former employer bought me one of those! Actually, my masters was in Computer Science, but yeah, it was pretty much a diploma mill. Pass 9 classes with a B- or better, no thesis, no comprehensive exam, here’s your “advanced” degree. I got the impression USC’s main concern was “is the check from your company good?” At least I had to get admitted competitively - I took my own GRE and had to track down my undergrad professors for letter of recommendation.
Interesting. The people whose resumes I got paid for themselves, I assume (since they were looking for a job) but I don’t know how many were company paid. That makes me feel better. One of the classes was taught by someone I know, who is quite well respected, so I think they are getting a good education, but very assembly line.
I read that many of those were photoshopped, so the kids weren’t necessarily involved in making the fraudulent photos.
Ok. I stand corrected. A couple of the CEO types have already “stepped down” and a few university employees fired so far. Loughlin’s husband had to surrender his passport and put up his house as collateral towards a million dollar bond to get out of the pokey. I am enjoying this way too much.
I didn’t make a study of each case and each student but the ones I did see that involved sports were absolutely from schools that have scholarships.
What may be a factor is that UT is more than twice the size of USC. And since it’s public they are political considerations.
Undoubtedly. It stands to reason that most rigorously competitive schools would be relatively small in size. I included UT only for the sake of comparison and because it was cited by others in the thread.
75% of in-state students at UT have to be auto-admits that earned their place by being in the top 6% of their class. The “holistic review” pool is much more competitive, though I don’t think they release those numbers.
College counseling is like half my job and I’ve overseen a lot of applications to UT and USC. For a non-auto admissions, especially in CS, Engineering, or business, UT is as or more difficult to get into.
This comparison of schools is interesting but what those people did was just as wrong as if they bribed people to get their kids into clown or barber college.