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.

It's normal in the USA - you donate to x university and in return your quite thick kid gets a place

But that isn't what happened here. Everyone here understands the donation/place correlation (would want to be a hefty sum though). It is quite transparent. People may think it is morally wrong but it isn't illegal. If a donation is made to a college, that money may be used to build a library or provide financial aid for other students (for example, Bloomberg who was mayor of new york recently made a huge donation to Yale I think to support needs-blind admissions) - everyone on the campus benefits.

What happened here was cheating on tests, fraud, bribing of coaches without the college knowing, falsifying whole cvs. The colleges didn't accept bribes. Individual coaches did for themselves - no benefit to anyone other than themselves. No way the students didn't know either.

VelvetPineapple Sorry, I still don't accept that as an excuse. You describe this happening to a qualified architect, and expect us to believe that in all the years this was going on (school, then university, then after that) there was no other architect's job this person could have applied for or taken up that would have paid the bills? It's far more likely he decided the money was rather handy and he could live with setting his moral bar at a low level. He's part of the problem here, not some blameless victim.

Depends where you live I suppose. In London etc you have options. In regional areas or niche industries it is quite often difficult to get another job, especially if you’re highly paid and couldn’t afford a salary cut.

You're making it sound like this is the only job he could get "to pay the bills", like a person living on the breadline turning to prostitution to feed their kids.

If he's highly paid, he clearly doesn't NEED this particular job and wouldn't die without it, he's probably just used to a certain standard of living (nice house, cars, holidays, private school) which he wouldn't want to cut down for a more moral job. Absolutely not a victim.

I don't understand how this is morally different to legacy places (legally different yes). I've always found it baffling that it is an official policy of Ivy League universities to give preferential treatment to children of alumni when it ought to be the opposite.

Yes Cambridge and Oxford favour the affluent for myriad reasons but they don't enshrine their acceptance into their admissions process. Look up the stats - they're mind boggling - you're something like 6x more likely to get into Harvard as legacy student than Joe Bloggs.

I've always found it strange in the supposed Mecca of meritocracy.

If a child is not good enough to get in,then how will they manage to do the actual work required of them?

Apparently once you're in, the work actually quite easy and the more elite the college, the less likely they are to fail students.

Hmm I'm not sure we're above all that. I was at college with someone whose dad had just paid for the new library wing...

But at least we don't formalise and enshrine it with legacy admissions. Yes it happens but I don't think on the scale of 1 in 5 or whatever it is at Harvard.

PS was that a Rothschild with the library wing?

if that happens in the uk it would explain the state of the country