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Why is that legal?
Why not? A private university has no obligation to run its admissions program they way you think it should. The reason there is a crime here is because the universities were the victims of fraud, not because the law mandates fairness in admissions.
If a university promises fairness and that's a lie, then it is fraud against the students / applicants.
2 years in jail for this is absurd. A week would be more than enough.
I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school. If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.
The tradition is nepotism and bribes. It's a relatively recent thing for the state to go after the moderately wealthy for doing what they've done for millennia.
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What about the kids that didn’t get to go? The ones that the rich students replaced. That’s the real tragedy. The students don’t even know that they were out-moneid.
The amount to donate a building probably covers the cost to expand the student capacity of a university by several dozen students. With the donation they could easily afford to accept everyone they otherwise would have accepted and also accept the one rich kid and still come out way on top. So I'd be surprised if they did this -- though not shocked.
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At least donating a building gives value to the other attending students that far outweighs the cost of their child going
What about the kids that didn’t get to go? The ones that the rich students replaced. That’s the real tragedy. The students don’t even know that they were out-moneid.
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Please familiarize yourself with minimum sentencing guidelines for drug possession. These parents, by preventing other students from being able to get an education they earned, are causing far more harm.
Perhaps those sentences are equally or more absurd?
Unfortunately a lot of America is on the vengeance path when it comes to punishments for crimes. We need a lot more criminal justice reform but, please, let's not start by giving the elites a pass - justice is already inequal enough.
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I reject this - if we want admission in the US to be entirely wealth based and Oligarchic we should just buy that concept whole-hog. Many of us (I hope?) believe that scholarships that allow smart people coming from bad backgrounds to succeed are worth their cost[1] so clearly the ability to make use of your education is part of our general societal motivation to give someone one. [1] There are lots of scholarships,…
In the US the public universities are the only schools that can't be bought into at any cost.
I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school. If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount to donate a building probably covers the cost to expand the student capacity of a university by several dozen students. With the donation they could easily afford to accept everyone they otherwise would have accepted and also accept the one rich kid and still come out way on top. So I'd be surprised if they did this -- though not shocked.
Schools also have an incentive to keep acceptance rate as low as possible as it’s an (extremely bullshit) signal of value.
I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.
As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.