Oh really?
This is news in the same fashion that the Americans don't want to be ruled by the British is news, or that dogs bark is news, or that Justin Trudeau doesn't really have any qualifications for his job is news.
It isn't.
2 Stanford Students File Suit Over University Admissions ScandalBy Ross ToddLawyers for Stanford students Erica Olsen and Kalea Woods claim that the value of their education has been tarnished by the scandal. Their lawyers are also pursuing class claims on behalf of applicants who were rejected by schools caught up in the scandal.
M'eh
I'm actually stunned that this is a surprise, or that there's been a big news outcry about it. Indeed, it's only been a very recent innovation that using influence to get into certain universities wasn't the absolute norm.
This of course has come up as it's been discovered that USC was involved in this, at least to the extent that an actress associated with a popular but second rate old sit com apparently passed a lot of cash to get her daughter into the institution. USC is a private university, and so once again I'm not sure why its supposed to be a surprise. Private means private cash.
Of course, part of this has to do with the American belief that everything in the world has to be perfectly fair all the time, which includes the world being so fair that people with a lot of cash don't use it for their own aims. Well, they do.
In USC's case this may have been compounded a bit by the name of the school, the University of Southern California. It sounds like it's a state school, but it isn't.
Now, state schools should have absolutely fair admissions policies, more or less. In truth they don't fully, but there's a reason for that. As state schools, they cater to the education needs of their states, which means that they weight admissions toward residents, and they very well should do that. Most people accept that.
But in our modern era universities, including private ones, have tended to go as far as they can in public pronunciations of extreme fairness that they actually operate unfairly. Efforts to balance out admissions have become so strained that they now operate to keep people out who in former years would have fairly gotten in. That encourages bad behavior to a degree.
Beyond that, let's be honest. The American association of some sort of super niftyness with private schools has lead to the demand that they let everyone in while at the same time their cache has grown. At one time graduating from a school like Harvard or Yale would have indicated that a person's parents had a lot of money, and it might not actually have meant much beyond that. Sure, the education was generally pretty good in almost every Ivy League school, but they were not all MIT.
Indeed, if you look at the degrees conferred they very often tended to be in the liberal arts and weighted towards educating individuals in a broad sense who would be entering a monied broad life. Most people didn't enter such a life and their educational focus would have accordingly been much different. Professional schools in these institutions did offer a professional education, but it must be noted that in a very real sense going to one of the former big private schools tended to indicate that you were of a certain class, more than anything else.
The confusion of class with education in the US, and the liberalizing effect of everything during the 1960s and 1970s, really opened these up, but at their core, that's what they were and there's an element of that which must remain. The focus on them, however, has become absurd. The United States Supreme Court, for example, is now an all Ivy League institution, and it shouldn't be.
At any rate, it's always been the case that parents paid big money to get their kids into big name schools. The fact that this still goes on isn't really news. If it didn't, that would be news.
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