Vanderbilt’s immune system worked: Scammers were unable to find anyone to bribe in order to admit the rancid rich.
Fact is, not all American universities are criminal in this way. Yale and University of Southern California certainly are: Both seem to offer multiple avenues of corrupt access. But there are other Vanderbilts out there, schools that avoid, among other things, hiring greedy shits to coach their students. (Along those lines: Did the University of Rhode Island not know why its new tennis coach was fired at Georgetown? How could they have hired the dude?) As this big-time story evolves, I think we’ll see more and more universities touting their … well, their legitimacy.
For the record: The more you monetize these non-profit settings – the more you look like, say, Yeshiva University, which spawned Madoff, Merkin, Rennert, and Wilf, the more bad actors you’re incubating across the entire system. People get the message, people! Look at the University of Louisville with its high-profile, highly-paid, low-lifes, from athletics to the office of the presidency. What do you think other people at the university, pondering this cast of characters, are going to conclude?
March 14th, 2019 at 11:35AM
Thought experiment: imagine that there were a lot of wealthy & prominent parents who desperately wanted their kids to become air traffic controllers (improbable, I know.) And also imagine that a scam was set up to get these kids into the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City. Further assume that the educational practices of the FAA were such that once you *got in*, you were almost certain to pass successfully through the Academy and the apprenticeship program….regardless of your actual performance…and start controlling live traffic.
We would certainly consider these parents as criminals, rightfully…but we would also think there was something very wrong with the training program.
Similarly, if unqualified & sometimes unmotivated people are getting into these colleges and graduating successfully, it suggests that something, in addition to the sleazy parents and their bribees, is very wrong.
March 14th, 2019 at 1:24PM
David: Absolutely.
March 15th, 2019 at 3:40PM
David what federal crime do you think was committed by the parents who would pull the scam you mentioned? It seems a more apt comparison to what the parents did would be if someone bought something by misrepresenting his credit score, so that there was actually a greater risk of nonpayment than he portrayed, but he then paid the full amount to the seller, so the seller wasn’t really out of anything.