Bribes for College Admission

People have been surprised and outraged by the recent national “college admissions scandal” and they shouldn’t be. I understand the anger, but nobody should be surprised that the wealthiest one-percent are using their bank accounts to buy success instead of earn it.

On March 12, 2019 federal prosecutors indicted fifty people for being part of a college admissions scandal where families payed a combined $25 million to secure placement within their choice of university — without having to be a qualified applicant.

Parents and students across the nation, who have at this point just finished up the college application process themselves, are upset because they feel like they were possibly cheated out of an acceptance to their dream school just because someone else had more money to slip under the table than they did.

But the truth is, parents have been pouring cash into universities to make up for their child’s below low average GPA’s and mediocre ACT scores for decades. The public and education administrators normally just look the other way though because these bribes are disguised as donations.

The real reason this whole situation came to light is because universities were getting cut out of the deal by athletic directors. Normally, an individual will donate a building or some kind of educationally productive resource to a school they want their child to attend. That way, when the child’s name comes up in their pile of applications, it stands out since their name is being put on the school. But college athletic coaches were started taking all of the private capital that would have gone into improving the institutions for themselves.

Nothing here came to light because the good citizens of this nation want to stand united against fraud, it’s because the playing field isn’t level since they can’t pay off a tennis coach for their kid like other parents can.

There’s a larger problem that’s being ignored here and I think people do it consciously because they’ve decided there’s nothing they can do about it. The way that the american school system is currently set up is rigged in a way that the kids with money succeed and the ones struggling financially don’t.

It’s hard to recognize as a SME student because we’re always getting called the “privileged kids” by other high schools but in a state like California, some people are spending $20,000 dollars to send their kid to high school and then bribing an athletic coach another $40,000 to pretend their kid is on the rowing team so they can pay another $80,000 minimum in tuition after four years of “higher learning.”

The only thing these kids are learning is where the best parties are on campus because they aren’t working on their degrees. They’re trying to be social media influencers or sell make-up. A prime example of this is youtuber Olivia Jade. She’s been uncovered to be one of the students involved in the admissions scandal but before learning that her parents payed off a coach to get her into USC she said she hardly cared about school.

“I do want the experience of game days, partying, I don’t really care about school, as you guys know,” Jade said in a video posted to her Youtube channel.

These kids don’t care and frankly we won’t either in two or three news cycles. The wealthy will keep donating libraries and their kid with a 2.5 gpa and 920 SAT will magically find their way into their dream schools.