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Actresses, Business Leaders, and Other Wealthy Parents Charged in Massive College Admissions Scandal (npr.org)
Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people on Tuesday in a major college admission scandal that involved wealthy parents, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders, paying bribes to get their children into elite American universities. From a report: Federal officials have charged dozens of well-heeled parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, in what the Justice Department says was a multimillion-dollar scheme to cheat college admissions standards. The parents allegedly paid a consultant who then fabricated academic and athletic credentials and arranged bribes to help get their children into prestigious universities. "We're talking about deception and fraud -- fake test scores, fake credentials, fake photographs, bribed college officials," said Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
Lelling said 33 parents "paid enormous sums" to ensure their children got into schools such as Stanford and Yale, sending money to entities controlled by a man named William Rick Singer in return for falsifying records and obtaining false scores on important tests such as the SAT and ACT. Describing how Singer worked to present his clients' children as elite athletes, Lelling said, "In many instances, Singer helped parents take staged photographs of their children engaged in particular sports. Other times, Singer and his associates used stock photos that they pulled off the Internet -- sometimes Photoshopping the face of the child onto the picture of the athlete" and submitting it to desirable schools.
Lelling said 33 parents "paid enormous sums" to ensure their children got into schools such as Stanford and Yale, sending money to entities controlled by a man named William Rick Singer in return for falsifying records and obtaining false scores on important tests such as the SAT and ACT. Describing how Singer worked to present his clients' children as elite athletes, Lelling said, "In many instances, Singer helped parents take staged photographs of their children engaged in particular sports. Other times, Singer and his associates used stock photos that they pulled off the Internet -- sometimes Photoshopping the face of the child onto the picture of the athlete" and submitting it to desirable schools.
What ever happened to getting your kid into college the good old fashioned way? Donating enough money to get a building named after you and guaranteed admission to any descendants.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It isn't what you know or how hard you work.
It's who you know, how much payola you're willing to give them and how much leverage that buys you.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Note that Trump's budget released yesterday calls for a cut in education funding. This affects the working class. The rich can afford private schools. The masses get dumber, the rich get more powerful. When will it end?
I am, however, disappointed. Angry, even. Irrationally so.
All my life I was taught to be good. To not steal, not cheat, to not lie. I live my life like that. I stay out of the way. I don't steal, I try not to cheat (my little cheats are leaving a tiny bit earlier, to get a jump on the other commuters, I have a heavy right foot so I tend to take off from lights like a scalded cat and go around corners like a cat on carpet, etc.) I have lied, and I feel bloody awful when I do. I have done bad things, and I feel truly awful.
These people don't, I guess? They just take what they want.
I always suspected that the cheaters are the ones that truly get ahead. The ones who make the big bank. (BIG bank, not get-by-and-put-some-away-for-a-rainy-day bank). They can't do it without cheating.
This just confirms it in a way that's visceral, palpable.
Think on that next time you see that what's driving that Ferrari 458 next to you is a bleached, tanned, perfect specimen and you, who has yearned for a prancing pony since childhood will likely never have one.. and if you do, it'll be a 50-year old 308. (Nothing wrong with that, but I hope you see my point. We have to earn it, they just walk in and buy one. The one who earned it will savor every tick of the valvetrain, every rrrp of the exhaust.. they who walked in and bought it will probably spill their latte all over the leather and worse, far worse.)
Once, I was leaving work, 2 jobs ago.. the wife of the CEO drove a RR Wraith, a car I'd love to just even look after, never you mind drive.. she cut to the right of all of us waiting on the left-turn light, dragged that beautiful yacht of a car all over wet concrete mud and slurry, then gunned it and went into traffic on a red light. And she gets away with it. Cunt. Her husband was no better, he drove a RR Phantom and was unable to park it without a 20-point turn.
Fuck the rich. I really do hope karma is a thing. Imagine being reincarnated from rich asshole to possum?
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It's news when somebody does something about it.
It won't be news when Andrew Lelling's career ends.
He will be made an example of. 3, 2, 1...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I was about to pay several million dollars to pass my son off as the world's greatest collegiate hockey prospect (except he can't skate and is in his 40s) when I saw this Slashdot article. Now I've done something even better: I signed him up at the University Of American Samoa for a law degree! Go Land Crabs!
Thanks Slashdot!
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
What's the news thing here? I thought it was well known that connected people got their children in to "elite" educational institutions by donating a new library or something.
I guess the news is that they tried to avoid giving the college the money and instead tried to come up with a valid excuse reasons why their children might be accepted. But it seems like the crime is less bribing people to get into "elite" institutions and instead bribing the WRONG people.
I think the problem is these people simply are not wealthy enough for their kids to be accepted on that basis alone.
Similarly, the salesperson here probably said something like, "I can get your kid into X University for Y grand. But I can't reveal our proprietary methods."
One person paid $6.5 million. They had to known it was a shady deal. $6.5 million would pay for a team of full time tutors to follow the student around all day for 4 years.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
A bunch of specific people getting named, shamed, and arrested definitely makes it news instead of just something that people know happens.
They didn't bribe the "wrong" people, they bribed the "right" people who really did have the connections. Most of the people arrested already did it, successfully, before authorities busted the company selling the service.
It isn't like they accidentally hired a front company for the FBI.
Well, when they ask you to make up a fake disability for your child to have so they need extra time on the test, you do know something about what is being done. When you also have to make up a fake family event so that they can take their entrance exams in some specific facility, instead of their one close to you or at the school you're applying to, then you do know something fraudulent is happening.
And when you pay $500k for the above services, you really know a lot more about the service. Actual test prep doesn't involve lying to the school, and it doesn't cost $500k.
Or, if you pay $2.5M for your student to get listed as being on an athletic scholarship, you probably already know what college sports are, if your child is really on the team, and if they've dedicated enough of their life for that to make sense. If it involves photoshopping a picture of their face onto the body of an athlete, you obviously already know the sport isn't a big enough part of their life to be earning a scholarship.
I'm having trouble finding any accusations here where they might have thought it was something else. Plus, I mean, they got them talking about it on tape before making arrests; if there were innocent rubes who didn't know, they probably didn't even get charged.
Singer helped parents take staged photographs of their children engaged in particular sports...sometimes Photoshopping the face of the child onto the picture of the athlete" and submitting it to desirable schools.
I can't believe parents were actually this stupid. If you're playing sports at the collegiate level, it's because you're actually fucking good at it. The world knows this.
Exactly how long did stupid celebrities think they were going to get away with pimping their fake elite athletes?
I wish this would have all blown up on a playing field somewhere. Would have made for great social media watching some spoiled little shit get called out and shown the door for going along with their parents idiotic ideas.
Mr. Burns: I see. Well, I- ...Oh, that reminds me, it is time for your annual contribution. How much should I give?
Male Admissions Officer: Well frankly, test scores like Larry's would merit a very generous donation. A score of 400 would require new football uniforms. 300 would require a new dormitory. And in Larry's case? We'd need an international airport.
Female Admissions Officer: Yale could use an international airport, Mr. Burns.
Mr. Burns: Are you mad?! I am not made of airports! Get out!
The correct response to this is to end tuition and just let anyone who passes their exams go to college. It would cost $80 billion a year. That's not even a drop in the bucket compared to the value of a well educated populace.
Yeah, OPM is always just a drop in the bucket.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
What's the news thing here? I thought it was well known that connected people got their children in to "elite" educational institutions by donating a new library or something.
It's news when somebody does something about it.
It's news because they weren't doing that; they were literally cheating: forging fake documents, fake test scores, fake athletic achievements.
I think this is pretty much it. What we are seeing here is the 1% trying to scam their way in because they can't drop $10M+ like the 0.01% can. Unfortunately for them, nobody is amused, not the Universities, not the Elites, and certainly not the middle-class (or lower) who were counting on these spots being up for fair competition. As others have pointed out, one dumb rich kid's endowment can fund the education of dozens of talented students, but these bribes help nobody but the people they went to.
Because no Conservative or Republican was ever a famous actor that went into politics, say as Governor. I can barely name three off the top of my head...
Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Ventura...
If the Republicans had any candidates under fifty there might be more.
Without a strong economy backed by college educated kids you're not gonna get the return on investment you need.
Yeah, the economy is really going to suffer if Muffy can't afford her gender studies degree.
I don't think the ROI on this is quite as clear cut as you might think.
Can you find any Republicans in the group arrested today? Nope. All card-carrying Leftists.
Since the summary didn't list any names except the photogenic actresses, I'm not sure how you know if they were Republicans or Democrats. The actual article names names (scroll down to the bottom for the list), and they're mostly athletic coaches and rich businessmen. I don't know their politics, but in my experience, athletic coaches and rich businessmen both tend toward the right.
No, they weren't "all democrats".
The big lie they tell us is that getting in is a sign of merit, and using the connections facilitated by those universities to jump start your career also means you earned what you got. They market themselves as the apex of progressive enlightened intellectualism, but in reality, they act as the regulators of institutionalized classism and elitism. The issue in this case isn't that these people cheated. It is that they cheated the wrong way. There will be some faux outrage, then back to business as usual.
Oh, and this doozy of a quote from TFA:
"There will not be a separate admissions system for the wealthy," he added. "And there will not be a separate criminal justice system either."
Legacy admissions begs to differ. What a joke. How could anyone say that with a straight face?
What ever happened to getting your kid into college the good old fashioned way? Donating enough money to get a building named after you and guaranteed admission to any descendants.
According to TFA, most of these parents paid the consultant $250k to $450k.
...
Read the actual article. The people accepting the bribes got maybe 350 K to 450K. The people arranging the bribes got a lot more.
Exempli gratia:
"In another example, Lelling said former Yale women's soccer coach Rudy Meredith took $400,000 to designate a potential student as a recruit for the team — boosting the student's admission prospects — despite knowing that the student didn't play the sport competitively.Once the student was accepted to Yale, her relatives paid Singer approximately $1.2 million, including a $900,000 to one of KWF's charitable accounts, according to court documents."
2 out of 50 were "Hollywood elites".
you get them at public Uni or, more likely, community college. And there's damn few of them. As an added bonus Muffy is a little less stupid as a result. At the very least she had to take some basic writing and history courses and learned a little critical thinking. Yeah, she's probably still pretty dense (she did get a Gender studies degree after all) but trust me, she was worse going in then coming out.
That leaves hundreds of thousands of Nurses, Doctors, Accountants, Engineers, MBAs and Architects putting money in your 401k by growing the economy.
To be blunt, ROI's only a problem if you're willing to give all that up to stiggit to the libs by denying the occasional middle class brat their useless degree.
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I can't wrap my head around thinking that $6.5m would be worth it to get your kid into a school. Most people would realize that that's more than a lifetime of earnings for 95% of the population or more.
If they set that up in a trust fund, that poor kid would have to live like a peasant, subsisting on only about $110,000/year (tax-free) to make sure that he doesn't run out of money by the time he's 90. That's twice the median household income. It puts them in the upper-middle-class without lifting a finger. And it could be more than that if they invested it and it could grow over time, or got a job. Or married someone with a similar financial situation or who had a job.
What's the point of trying to get them into a college that they're too stupid to do well in if you're spending that sort of money to do it? I'm sure that kid would rather have the money and go to a party school. And a good college isn't going to make a god damn difference in their life, given that sort of wealth already.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Yes it's news! These parents were cheating the system! They paid someone to fake some records and deliver a few individual bribes instead of engaging in the time honoured system of institutional bribery you describe.
How are elite universities supposed to maintain their campuses, endowments and football teams in the face of increasing cocaine costs when these upstarts are bribing admissions officers with thousands of dollars instead of the whole institution with tens of millions of dollars?
Exactly. The problem isn't that they cheated. Cheating is both acceptable and expected to the point it is ingrained into the elite admissions system. The problem is that this particular group cheated the wrong way. They cheaped out on their cheating, and in the world of wealth and privilege, that's the real problem.
And yes, the vast majority of today's wealthy are in fact leftist.
HAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!! Oh man, that was a good one.
Nope, no sig
That's a good summary and then the icing on top is that the bribes were done as charitable contributions. Not only did they attempt bribery they were defrauding the United States and state governments of tax revenues.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Robert Zangrillo is a republican https://voterrecords.com/voter... (I only googled the one as that's all I need to prove you wrong, try again).
I tried to bribe a collage once but got thrown out of the Hobby Lobby by security.
they were simply Ayn Rand followers
Oh yeah, Hollywood is full of Objectivists. Totally.
Putz.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In the 1950s and 1960s we had several students in my school that had either enormous wealth or power or both. A teacher would be out of his blooming mind to not make certain these kids had really high grades as power and a telephone call could surely end a teacher's employment. I have no way to know if any contact or incentives between teachers and wealthy parents. I believe the system is such that things can happen without anyone ever speaking a word. I do know that our high school football team had one pro player as he tried to recruit me with mention of apartments and cars etc.. He was 21 years old.
How could anyone say that with a straight face?
They're professionals.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Getting the same GPA as Al Gore.
Straight 'gentleman's Bs' for both, no math or science to speak of for eather.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I graduated over 20 years ago from a state school. My parents weren't wealthy enough to buy my way into an Ivy League school. I turned out OK, but the fact is that my path could have been a whole lot easier if I had been able to even think about applying to places like this. Once you make it in, that club will never let you fail...the hard part is making it in.
People wonder why these places are $60K+ a year, and accept less than 5% of applicants. It's because getting into one of these schools is a one-way ticket to Easy Street. You get to hobnob with the rich and powerful, they might fund your business ideas, and if you're not an entrepreneur there's a whole class of high-paying jobs open to you too. I live near NYC and investment banks recruit exclusively from the Ivy League for their most prestigious associate positions. My kids are smart but they're not full-scholarship-to-Harvard smart, or athletic enough for a sports scholarship, and I can't pay millions to an admissions broker...so they'll have to suck it up and find a job like the rest of us do instead of having it handed to them.
I always thought wealthy parents just paid millions directly to the school to help build a building in order to secure admissions spots. Is it now so competitive that they have to go to a middleman with connections, and donations aren't enough? It's too bad...these rich parents' kids are taking spots that could otherwise go to someone who would actually use the education for something other than a stepping stone to McKinsey and Company and executive boards.
The drunk fool George W Bush attended both Yale and Harvard, proving your point.
Pfff. Those were my safety schools. I guess his dad didn't have enough juice to get him into Wharton.
MIT is elite and does just fine for itself thank you. Yeah, Harvard/Yale are full of putzes, but they do some good work here and there.
Like I said elsewhere, tax the rich and fund the schools. Then I couldn't care less if they form phony elite schools. I care about my kid's education, not what some rich prick gets. And I don't care about "fair" as long as me and mine are taken care of (and being a lefty "me and mine" means the working class)
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because the GOP has been cutting every chance they get since the 90s. They didn't do the cuts all at once, you know. It would be too obvious if tuition went from $1700/yr (what it was when I went) to $16,000/yr (what I just paid for my kid, well what I _borrowed_ to pay for her since I never did recover from the 2008 crash).
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