Grand jury adds money-laundering charge for four local parents in college admissions scandal

Posted by Martin Engel
a resident of Menlo Park: Park Forest
on Apr 11, 2019 at 12:01 pm

Yes, fraud is a crime. So is money laundering. And so are the various conspiracies detailed in this article.

However, these parents (whose celebrity status makes them meat for the media) responded to a well established culture of quid-pro-quo college admissions practices the burden of which rests with the colleges and universities themselves.

Why? These institutions have, perhaps since forever, been highly responsive in their admissions practices to not only "legacy admissions," but also to generous donations to their endowments by affluent parents. Or, to put it bluntly, the universities themselves created this culture of greasing the admission wheels.

Those parents whose names today are so prominently displayed in the media have, apparently, over-stepped the rules of the game, illegally, but they have done so in a culture, which they obviously didn't fully understand, in which it has been a long standing practice for university development offices to not discourage parental generosity as a buy-in for their kid. To the contrary.

Don't we often ask ourselves, about somebody who has become President, how did they ever get into and through college?

Which is to say, there's more than enough blame to go around.