College Admissions Scandal: FBI Targets Wealthy Parents - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Charges are also being brought against 13 college coaches, including Yale’s head women’s soccer coach, who allegedly accepted a $400,000 bribe to admit a student as one of his recruits even though the student had never played competitive soccer.
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“Every year, alumni contribute to their alma matters with the expectation of special treatment for their children,”
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“This more genteel form of bribery is considered perfectly legal. Not only that, the donors get a tax break to boot, undercutting the fundamental legal principle that a charitable donation should not enrich the donor.”
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A famous example involves Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor whose father, then a wealthy real-estate developer, in 1998 pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University. Kushner—who, the investigative reporter Daniel Golden notes in his 2006 book The Price of Admission, was described by administrators at his high school as a mediocre student—was admitted to the school shortly after that
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fraud and bribery’s lawful cousins—legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and other admissions practices that lower the bar for progeny of the rich and famous—are ubiquitous.
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At elite colleges, athletic recruitment is arguably another form of affirmative action for the wealthy. As my colleague Saahil Desai has written, Harvard’s admissions office, for instance, gives a major boost to athletes with middling academic qualifications. Athletes who score a four (out of six) on the academic scale Harvard uses to score applicants were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent, Desai reported; the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score, on the other hand, was 0.076 percent.
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Today, legacy students account for an estimated 14 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate population, and applicants who enjoy such alumni connections are accepted at five times the rate of their non-legacy peers (a nearly 34 percent acceptance rate, versus just under 6 percent for those lacking those coveted alumni connections)
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the U.S. attorney perhaps unintentionally emphasized this irony when he said: “We’re not talking about donating a building … We’re talking about fraud.”
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His comment highlighted the mundanity of admissions favors for upper-crust children—when executed legally