People are literally committing crimes to try to get their children into universities considered prestigious:
The scheme was uncovered by the FBI and federal prosecutors in Boston, who discovered that dozens of parents had paid a total of $6million in bribes to get their children into elite schools including Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, and UCLA. In many instances the children were unaware that their parents had paid these bribes, according to federal documents.
Most of those charged either paid to get higher SAT scores or faked an athletic resume that, with the participation of a bribed college coach, helped the children get accepted to a college as a team’s recruit. Prosecutors said in court on Tuesday that some students also lied about their ethnicity on applications to take advantage of affirmative action.
William Rick Singer, the founder of Key Worldwide Foundation, had been identified as the alleged mastermind behind the scandal. The documents claim that since 2011, Singer has received $25million from parents which was used to payoff or bribe individuals who could ‘designate their children as recruited athletes, or other favored admissions categories’. In his biography on the website for the Newport Beach-based Key Foundation, Singer is heralded for his ability to get children into the college of their choice. Singer is also praised for ‘helping students discover their life passion, and guiding them along with their families through the complex college admissions maze’.
Huffman paid a $15,000 ‘charitable contribution to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter,’ according to the complaint. She also ‘later made arrangements to pursue the scheme a second time, for her younger daughter, before deciding not to do so’.
The charging documents state that Huffman had the site where her daughter took the SATs moved from her own high school to a test center in West Hollywood. Her test was then administered by a proctor who had flown in from Tampa and told investigators that he ‘facilitated cheating, either by correcting the student’s answers after the test or by actively assisting the student during the exam’. In this case, Huffman’s daughter scored a 1420 out of 1600 in December 2017, which was a 400 point improvement from her PSAT results just one year prior….
Problems arose however when Olivia’s guidance counselor became curious as to how she managed to receive admission based on her involvement in crew since she did not row. At the same time, Loughlin complained that her daughter was having difficulty filling out her other college applications, prompting Singer to ask an employee to take care of the task. This was done so as not to draw attention to the fact that it was already confirmed Olivia had received conditional admission to USC.
At some point, there was a very heated and public altercation between Giannulli and the counselor, which elicited an email from Heinel asking that it not happen again in the future so as to avoid detection. Everything began to fall apart in October 2018 when the IRS audited Key Worldwide and began to look into donations made by parents whose children were then admitted to USC. Loughlin and Giannulli were told by Singer to say they had given the $500,000 to the foundation to help ‘underserved kids.
The whole system is going to collapse soon. The lawsuit filed by a number of Asian families against Harvard is almost certainly going to expose far worse practices being committed systematically by the universities themselves as a result of collusion between the admissions offices and a specific identity group that dominates the admissions offices.