Actually, George W Bush went to both Yale (undergrad) and Harvard (graduate business school). A friend is fond of pointing out that GWB was rejected from the law school at the University of Texas. HBS was his safety school.
Fellow UCD graduate weighing in here. I’m currently teaching in China at a school where the students are required to pass Australia’s online literacy exam. It’s childishly easy to discover what the prompts are for the exam are if you’re not in the first group taking the test Monday morning. So, here’s an actual conversation between one of my students and me in class:
[ul][li]Monty: Why aren’t you writing anything? You need the practice. Write what I assigned so I can go over it with you.[/li][li]Student: I don’t have to do that. My parents hired someone to write it for me. I’ll get it in E-mail tonight and memorize it before Tuesday afternoon.[/li][li]Monty: That’s not going to help you. The idea is to see if you’re ready to do university-level work. You’re not. You know you’re not. And I certainly know you’re not.[/li][li]Student: I’ll deal with that later. Right now, my issue is passing the ONLA.[/ul][/li]
More fun! A few years ago, one of the teachers with whom I work now had a student whose parents hired someone to write a great essay for a university application. The university told the student thanks, but no thanks; you plagiarized the essay. The kid’s parents freaked out: “We paid good money for that guy to write this essay for our son!” Irony/Karma is lost on them, I guess.
It’s minimum effort all the way down !
I’m not really sure why anyone is surprised. This has been going on for generations. Centuries.
Well, that’s why you do the law-enforcement. If no one ever gets caught, then many assume no wrongdoing is happening. That increases the chances of more people getting bright ideas on how to subvert the system.
So you do a months-long investigation and charge the perps. And you cut down on the chances that anyone will be surprised, next time.
Since the thread had been focused on undergraduate programs, I assumed that’s what we were looking at regarding GWB. Or was the assumption that bribes would have been necessary for his admission to the Harvard MBA program but not for his admission to Yale? The top feeder schools to the Harvard MBA program have long been other Ivy League schools. Getting into Yale as a legacy admission and coming from a politically prominent family is almost certainly what got GWB into the Harvard MBA program. It certainly wasn’t his C average. Bribery isn’t the only means by which well-heeled idiots have gotten into Ivy League programs, graduate or undergraduate.