The crime in U.S. college scandal is that parents had no moral compass.

Who would have thought that wealthy celebrities such as model and actor Lori Loughlin, best known for her role as Aunt Becky on the inextinguishable TV sitcom Full House, would be snobs about academic pedigree?

This week, federal officials in the United States charged Loughlin and 49 other people, including actor Felicity Huffman, for their roles in an alleged scheme to cheat in the college admissions process.

Loughlin , whose Wikipedia entry lists no record of her having completed any post-secondary education herself, is accused along with her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli of paying US$500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into the University of Southern California (USC) on false pretences.

According to allegations in court documents, the USC admissions committee was purposely misled into thinking the daughters were promising recruits for the school’s women’s rowing team. Both young women got into USC. Neither young woman has spent any time in a sweep or skull.

In another case, according to criminal charges against a senior executive at a global private-equity firm, USC got duped into thinking a prospective student was a promising prospect as a football kicker despite the kid’s high school not having a football team.

For her part, Huffman is accused of spending US$15,000 to help boost her daughter’s admissions chances. According to investigators, their confidential informant told Huffman he could have someone correct Huffman’s daughter’s SAT answers once the young woman had completed her standardized test. And what do you know, Huffman’s daughter reportedly did significantly better on her SAT than she had on her practice test.

So, obviously, this is an ugly scandal that probably helps explain generational wealth loss. (If bribing a school to take your kid isn’t bad parenting that sets the kid up for moral, psychological and professional failure, I don’t know what is.)

And obviously, everyone involved in this scandal emerges looking awful, especially the coaches at elite schools who are alleged to have accepted bribes to help con admissions committees. (Speaking of elite schools, once Loughlin and Giannulli were paying, why didn’t they aim higher than USC? A sailing coach at Stanford is said to have been on the take, too.)

But you know what? As awful as all this behaviour is, it seems wrong to me that most of it is considered illegal. Not cool to scam your kid’s way into college, to be sure. And not fair for colleges to get stuck with star water polo recruits who can’t swim. Yet wouldn’t the more sensible remedy be for the schools that got scammed to sue civilly, rather than to have federal authorities go around arresting privileged parents for having no moral compass?

These colleges are large institutions with enviable endowments. There’s not an access-to-justice issue for them the way there would be for, say, a small shop owner getting squeezed for protection money by the Mafia, or a gullible grandma getting swindled into buying swampland in Florida (the sort of victims with whom the criminal racketeering and mail fraud statues were designed in mind).

Yale and Stanford already have high-end legal teams on speed-dial, and they have every interest in taking their own legal actions to help protect their reputations and prevent future messes of the same sort (not to mention recovering financial losses).

And the people the schools would be suing?

Well, let’s just say there is unlikely to be any problem collecting on judgments against parents who were OK with paying a million dollars to get their kid into college. (Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, told a news conference Tuesday that people paid “anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million for this service.”)

Same goes for collecting from the man who is alleged to have masterminded and controlled the whole scheme, and therefore alleged to have been receiving up to millions of dollars per client.

Better that these private parties bear the legal costs of righting these wrongs than the taxpayer, who may or may not care about Yale’s reputation being sullied or about a kid getting into Wake Forest when he really should have gotten into Boston College at best, even on a good day.

Criminal law is supposed to be reserved for offences against society or the state or the public. Top-tier private universities are not society or the state or the public.

As gross as it is for rich people to throw their money around in this way (“These parents are a catalogue of wealth and privilege,” Lelling told the press, as though that were crime enough), it’s not the kind of transgression that is well suited for the criminal justice system.

Monetary awards make more sense than imprisonment, here, and frankly so does civil law’s lower standard of proof (which makes it more likely those who deserve to pay will pay).

Buying one’s way into the Ivy League is disgraceful, but it shouldn’t be a crime.