So Only 50, In Over Eight Years, Have Been Accused Of This?!
Since 2011 an investigation by the FBI only netted 50 in this racketeering conspiracy in this recurrent college admissions scandal
While MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-anchor, Mika Brzezinski performatively gave the appearance of being so stunned and taken aback by this revelation that those amongst her peerage would stoop so low as to go through criminal lengths to feign hereditary nobility upon their heirs by the means necessary and privilege conferred, I am left perplexed as to how few have been caught in something widely known and facetiously overt in our society.
The college admissions scamming process feeds into this anxiety producing perpetuation of social mobility embedded in pursuing the American dream. But many, many Americans know all to well the nightmarish scenarios of the obstacles and its agitations that may or may not lead to economic empowerment or prospering under livable wages, and or attaining successful careers.
And the students didn’t know?
This is irrelevant, but generally you know what you know and don’t know. And if you still wondering how you got there then it will all be clear to you as you go along.
But only 33 parents though?!
I was accepted to the University of Virginia, which currently has an acceptance rate of 29%, but regrettably ended up not going because of familial and financial reasons. I also lacked the support and confidence to go that far out of state to attend and excel at this college. When your only means is this less than scholarship worthy SAT score you instinctively stay in your lane and wait on the financial aid lines (in my day that is what they were) to pay your tolls along this higher education highway.
I have had the pseudo profound honor of partying alongside and then working alongside some of the Ivy League school elites, and outside of access and network there is little to no intellectual distinction, yet classism offers them better options for opportunity based on a presumption this type of credential carries alone.
But as Frank Bruni of the NYTimes writes, the institutions themselves are enabling.
It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as your son is applying — which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him — and illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over accomplishment. Both are ways of cutting in line.
It may be legal to give $50,000 to a private consultant who massages your child’s transcript and perfumes your child’s essays, and illegal to pay someone for a patently fictive test score, but aren’t both exercises in deception reserved for those who can afford them?
One thing remains conspicuously evident as a college admissions yardstick measure from the most selective of schools is that the more diverse population must standout both scholastically and in personality type above and beyond the expectations and standards set by their majoritative counterparts. This is quite possibly the reason they are so visible as to glaringly stand out as affirmative action cases when in fact they are proportionally over-evaluated. So if you are Asian you better be stereotypically Asian, or if your Black you better be stereotypically athletic or gifted scholastically, and so forth and so forth. Meanwhile, the standard bar set for most whites (not all) attending these schools seem predicated on the privileges conferred as a racialized collective, and means necessary as a class.
This institutionalized effort to engage this vanity and insanity, and entrench this unsolicited subscription to the scam based on racializations and classisms taints the legitimacy of meritocracy, in turn making it even more difficult to justify what would normally be rational propositioning for an advanced society.
To add more insult to the injury received to our emotional psyches is the connotation that only 50 thus far have been inculpated in this racketeering scheme that goes back more than just decades.
