Bribery, greed: All for a little bit of Ivy League

So if you pay someone to take a state contractor's license test for you clearly that is unlawful because you are defrauding the state with the potential to do great harm to the public. Where is the crime though for paying someone to take an SAT test? When did padding your resume become a crime, much less a federal case?

Is this now the standard for job applications as well? Is the FBI going to knock down Mike F.......'s door and charge him with mail fraud?

 

A perhaps better comparison to what the parents did for their kids is plagiarism (excluding tax fraud for phony charitable donations). Should plagiarism be criminalized, or are the current consequences, shame and losing a job/career enough?

It seems to me that publicly shaming these kids and kicking them out of school would be appropriate. It's being spun in the media that the kids may not have known what the parents were doing, which IMHO is unmitigated bullshit. In any case, the kids should be held responsible, kicked out for cheating and have that go on their permanent record for other schools and employers to take into account. By the way I have to date not seen any reports of any of these kids being expelled. Not surprising as the schools now have leverage to encourage future donations from the parents.

And yes, whatever the statutes and charges, bail up to a million dollars for paying to fake SAT tests and bribing educators for admission is beyond bizarre, it is insane.

 

So what else do you think is going on? Students who have dormitory rooms that don't live there (USC is in a shithole neighborhood)? Students paying other people to write papers? Students paying other people to go to class and take notes? Students paying others to take finals for them? Students getting class credit for outside activities that are bogus? The school looking the other way because "we used to be nerds, now we are getting paid?" Feel free to pass this on if you know an investigative reporter.

 

Say you knew a famous contractor and you wanted him to build you a house. You went to him and he told you "I could not fit you in for a couple of years because of a back orders. Instead let me refer to another contractor who can do an excellent job for you at a reasonable price."

Your response was "no, I am famous and rich and I will pay you double your usual fee if I can get to the front of the line." He responds, "no it wouldn't matter, I would have to hire a new crew and I would not have time to supervise them well. You would be better off with the other guy that I recommended".

Your response was "I do not care about the quality or value I want to put a sign in front of my house that says 'built by famous contractor'. Would you take three times your usual fee?"

 

This is exactly it, right here. To a large number of people, the APPEARANCE of quality is way more valuable than quality itself. And it's something I'll never understand.

 

That’s trump, the veneer of class covering cheap and shallow work. Everything with him was gold and glitter. Always fake and cheap.

 

Without it, Alfa Romeo would not exist.

 

SEC values?

 

I've known people born on second base who've done worse with their lot in life than these two. They're douchebags, 100 percent. But they're also gentlemen of Harvard

 

Your obsession with nut jobs continues.

 

It's a long-held truism that the hardest part about the Ivies is getting in. I'll add that my father was part of Harvard's Jewish quota in the 40s -- admitted at 16 -- and went on to be an eye surgeon and chief of staff at a large hospital.