Would you offer a bribe to get your DC into a better uni. ?

[justasking111]

American police have arrested 50 people including Hollywood actresses and chief executives of companies in connection to a scheme to fraudulently get their children into Ivy League universities, according to media reports.

Felicity Huffman, star of Desperate Housewives, is currently in custody, TMZ reported.

Actress Lori Loughlin, who appears in ABC sitcom Full House and 90210, is also among those facing charges, according to ABC News.

The 50 people are accused of paying bribes of up for $6 million (£4.6m) to secure places for their children at elite universities, including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown and University of Southern California (USC).

Twelve people are believed to be facing charges.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/12/desperate-housewives-actress-felicity-huffman-among-50-people/

50 people and they pick out the Hollywood parents. There are a number of business people on the list as well.

So if you could would you bribe a college to get your DC into a certain college.

llangennith You didn't realise bribery and fraud was illegal?

They knew they were breaking the law.

And no one's SAT score goes up by 400 points unless they were sick as a dog the first attempt ... and even then ...

What these people have said to their children is "we don't think you are good enough to get in on your own merits".

No, I work in HE and the system is ridiculous enough as it is, but my friend’s dad bribed her way onto a prestigious research fellowship programme (he’s not a celebrity but a wealthy businessman).

But I think it can be futile without the talent and drive to get there yourself. She got a PhD but then left work entirely for several years and now does fairly unskilled part time work.

It's not at all illegal to pay for private SAT tuition to boost scores - this isn't tuition it's flat out cheating.

All the more awful for Huffmans oldest daughter the youngest actually got in on merit - they contacted the cheating scheme again but didn't pursue because it turned out her own scores were good enough

I always thought the American system was ripe with bribery eg daddy pays for a new library so son gets a place, grandad and great grandad we’re both members for a fraternity so grandson automatically gets a place?

Firstly, I wouldn't want my children to go to a University that could be bribed with a load of cash so, no, I wouldn't do it. I got into Oxford without my parents paying for private school or tutors.

Secondly, I worked at a rather exclusive summer camp in America 30 years ago and there was plenty of gossip about whose father had slipped some well known universities $1M to accept their not so bright DC. TBH I didn't realise it was illegal either (due to the gossip), there's not necesarily a strict cut off for the number of places on a university course so I just assumed you could either pay for it or get it on merit.

If my child isn't bright enough to get in on her own merits, she isn't bright enough to be there. Few things more stupid than racking up a shit load of debt to struggle with a course you can't cope with because your parents cheated the system on the premise of prestige.

Bribery like buying a library and old school ties like George Bush receiving admission on his name is one thing and there's similar issues here in this country. Prince Charles' famous admission to Cambridge for example

What this is is fraudulent admission so if an institution offers a place to George Bush because he is George Bush, they've made that decision based on the facts.

What's happened here is various teenagers have been given offers based on falsified information which they may or may not have known about and will render their college place void if they are still attending, additionally if they've graduated their entire degree could be rescinded because of "fruit of the poisoned tree" thing in the US usually this is were a fact is determined inadmissible in court because the means of obtaining that fact were improperly carried out.

In this case the degree itself becomes that fruit, maybe? I'm just considering

Might tag in @SenecaFalls for her thoughts as she is US and will therefore be more knowledgeable

Very interesting case though

It’s not exactly illegal to bribe a US university if the university knows it’s being bribed. It is illegal to bribe a third party to cheat on the entrance papers.

It’s legal for me to pay extra to jump an NHS queue by getting private treatment in the same hospital. It’s not legal for me to slip the admin staff fifty quid to put my name higher up the list.

No.

They had all the money to get extra tuition for their children/private tutors.

If the child couldn't pass tests on their own merits then it's insulting them to bribe a university if the child didn't know about it.

Awful parenting.

A sizeable donation to a college would have been a much better investment

Indeed. Two people I know very well have recently got their children into Yale and Georgetown by making donations. Totally legally.

DD is currently waiting to hear back from a couple of Ivies on the list. It's depressing knowing that despite having a 1570 SAT, an average of 97% in her SAT subject tests and being a National Merit finalist there are students out there who may take her place because grandad or daddy paid.

Sadly getting into the top colleges isn't just about merit. Apart from donations, there's the old 'who you know not what you know'. I what my dcs to get there on ability for their own good and I really don't believe it's a good lesson to give your children. I think it's quite widespread to various degrees in the US, based on what I've seen in my family who live there.

plenty of gossip about whose father had slipped some well known universities $1M to accept their not so bright DC.

That would be Jared Kuchner and Harvard :)

I don't think any college will take back a degree unless the work the degree was based on was discovered to be fraudulent (and tbh I'd be having a very close look at the exams/papers etc submitted by these students. If you cheat to get into college with your parents' collusion, you may well continue to cheat. The colleges could well ask these students to leave. It would be fairly brave anyway to continue there with everyone talking about it. This is one of the biggest news stories in the US at the moment. We are waiting for college acceptances to come out later this week. Everyone knows about the system - weighted in all sorts of ways that are unfair - but transparent and somewhat understandable (schools want a diverse student body; they don't want all their students to be from one state; having the son or daughter of a president attend adds prestige; getting 2 million for a library benefits everyone etc). But people did think it was impossible to really game the SATs beyond getting tutoring and impossible to actually falsify sports etc.

I find it amazing that these people thought it ok to do this - cheat on top of all the other amazing advantages their children had.

The sports falsifying is the real surprise

It seems to have been one staff member for a backhander

The competition to get the promising athletes is fierce and yet two girls who had never touched an oar in their lives got spots set aside for students with a proven track record in rowing depriving two actual applicants for spots that might've been there.

The US being what it is litigiously, that school can now expected every person who applied for a "Crew Scholarship" that year and was refused to sue them

People who applied to the same courses at the universities as the other children involved in the same year, and were declined can also now sue those colleges.

It's huge.

Actually it's two sets of applicants who row who'll sue because they pulled the same stunt with two daughters but two years apart

Felicity Huffman must think $15,000 dollars is too high a price to pay for her career she got $250,000 an episode for Desperate Housewives. This will follow all these parents and their offspring around now for a long time. I feel for the kids.

Do people really think this doesn’t happen in the UK too? My friend is an architect and was regularly instructed to complete A level work for his (multi millionaire) employer’s eldest son. The employer lined numerous pockets to get the son into a good university and he spent three years getting drunk while my friend got emailed his university work to complete. Now the son has graduated and daddy has spent millions setting him up with his own business. My friend is regularly told to produce designs for this business and subsequent magazine articles falsely portray the son as the architect. They’ve even submitted my friend’s designs to competitions in the son’s name. My friend hates it but he’s well paid and he needs the job to pay his mortgage.

Well he aint no architect with a three year degree. My DS won a national competition with his architectural design, his boss took all the credit, a good learning curve we told him.

I feel for the kids.

I feel for them that they were reared by parents who think it ok to explicitly cheat and have taught them the same but I don't think they were unwitting victims.

Every high school junior/senior knows how the process works. they talk about it all the time during that 1.5 years. They know the range of their SAT score. Tutoring can get it up a bit- if you are lucky. Not by 200 points. They know how the athletics thing works. They will have seen their friends who were athletes travelling around to colleges to meet with coaches and hope to get a commitment. They had to input the entire application and certify that it was truthful and hit submit. They knew that the sports stuff was false -- they had to include false sports activities on their common app.

My youngest one is a senior waiting for college acceptances. She goes to a private school in new england which is intensely pressured - huge cohort go to Harvard and other ivys. Every single step of the way the school has warned us that this is the child's application. The essay has to be hers, she has to own the process, they are 17/18 etc.

This was flagrantly fraudulant and they knew it and their children knew it. Way beyond the old stories about people getting others to write their college essays (I've never met anyone who has done this - most kids won't let you near it - and college admissions people tell you they can tell immediately the ones written by an adult)

I've looked OP, none of the 4 DDs of the actresses are old enough to have graduated yet

The 3 who got their places by fraud will almost certainly be sent down

The one whose parents considered cheating but she didn't need it will probably still be suspended anyway so they can investigate

It's very sad for them indeed.

VelvetPineapple That's not bribing the university, though; that's your friend taking part in deceiving the university. The only part of that story that indicates possible bribery within the university is:

The employer lined numerous pockets to get the son into a good university

As in, university staff, or was this paying people to do work that the son represented as his to get into university?

I don't find it as easy to excuse your friend here as you do. He's enabled someone to graduate fraudulently.

It's very sad for them indeed.

It is a bit but honestly there is NO way they didn't know they were cheating on their college applications - none. The only reason the students aren't being charged is is won't look great.

Absolutely I would

It's normal in the USA - you donate to x university and in return your quite thick kid gets a place. Rather than bribing they call it sponsoring a building! Here if you are an overseas student sponsoring a building isn't even needed, just an appropriate English language qualification to get your visa and to claim you have your countries equivalent of a levels but the standard of students is really poor, dh is convincing they fake their qualifications (but the main qualification of deep pockets is what interests the university!)

It's an opinion of substance that Lori Loughlins must have known because of having to falsify rowing records but... they seem to have an air of entitlement.. what was it in that kid pled? The Affluenza Defence? Did they understand it as wrong, or did they understand it as playing the game?

It's quite possible Huffman/Macy's daughter DIDN'T and just thought she did amazingly well because they used a proctor to rig her answers after completion at a test centre