College admissions scandal a crash course in shame
The irony is Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin may have just given their kids an education.
Lesson No. 1: Hard cash beats hard work.
Lesson No. 2: Where you go to university means more to us than you.
The actresses were among 50 wealthy alleged swindlers charged this week in the largest college admissions scandal in U.S. history. Lying! Cheating! Bribery! Surreal headlines such as “Felicity Huffman Released After FBI Arrest With Guns Drawn” and “Lori Loughlin Expected To Surrender Wednesday To Face College Bribery Scandal Charges!”
The months-long dragnet, dubbed Project Varsity Blues, has it all.
Everything, that is, except responsible grown-ups and ace parenting.
The accused, all of whom have more dollars than sense, allegedly paid thousands — and in one case, more than a million — to get their privileged offspring into prestigious universities they neither deserved nor were qualified to attend.
Lesson No. 3: Rules are for those who can’t afford to break them.
You know how the rest of us tell our children to get good grades so they can one day go to a good school? You know how we fret about tuition and majors? You know how we believe university is a springboard into future success, a life-altering experience moulded inside a citadel of merit and fairness? Lesson No. 4: None of this is true. As laid out in the criminal complaint and indictments, these rich but morally bankrupt cons set out to game the system by greasing the admission gears.
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If their kids did not earn a coveted spot at an Ivy League school, Plan B was fraud.
Lesson No. 5: Higher learning is bought, not earned.
So bribes were paid to proctors who falsified scores or, in some cases, did the scholastic tests themselves, it is alleged. Money was peeled off to athletic coaches on the take.
Loughlin and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, a fashion designer who was also charged, are alleged to have paid $500,000 (U.S.) to create fake profiles so their daughters could get into the University of Southern California as potential star recruits for the crew team.
But since neither girl is a rower, this was like getting a football scholarship because you have feet. In the future, perhaps Loughlin and Giannulli can get their daughters jobs with NASA by staging a moon landing.
Lesson No. 6: Deception is a primrose path to success.
Huffman and her husband, actor William H. Macy, who curiously was not charged, allegedly paid $15,000 to William “Rick” Singer, the ringmaster who became the FBI’s lead co-operating witness. In a meeting at their Los Angeles home, it’s alleged Singer explained the scam and his fake charity, and how he could inflate test scores.
Authorities noted, Huffman’s daughter “received a score of 1420 on the SAT, an improvement of approximately 400 points over her PSAT” from the previous year.
It was like a magic trick in which an Einstein is pulled out of a gilded hat.
Lesson No. 7: Our vanity matters more than your possible shame.
There has always been a murky nexus between wealth and privilege and access to top-tier education. Are you seriously trying to tell me Donald Trump Jr. got into Wharton on merit and graduated with a degree in economics when he couldn’t multiply 17 and 6 in his head when asked by Howard Stern?
Lesson No. 8: Your education is part of the family brand.
Though Project Varsity Blues is shocking in detail, it’s unsurprising in silhouette.
And, tellingly, no student has been charged. As prosecutors pointed out, most of them were unaware their parents were committing crimes on their behalf.
Lesson No. 9: We don’t accept you as you are.
Lesson No. 10: We did what was best for us.
Ultimately, that’s the takeaway.
The parents charged do not see their kids as branches to be nurtured and left to grow in independent sunlight; they see them as reputational ornaments.
You can’t be serious about education when you behave this stupidly.
And you can’t act so recklessly and call it love.
These parents were not helping their children. They were serving their own egos. This was about never having to endure small talk at a swish cocktail party and, while surrounded by parents of Yale and Princeton students, sheepishly muttering, “Well, Johnny is in the welding program at DeVry.”
The parents charged thought they were opening doors. Instead, they slammed their children into a brick wall, bludgeoning their prospects and happiness.
Overnight, Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, went from an “influencer” to a pariah. No matter what she does in the future, it will come with an asterisk and raised eyebrow. There will be those who claim, as is happening now on her social media channels, that she is a fraud and a disgrace and a joke.
The same goes for the scions from all of the families charged. As it turns out, they got into the best universities via the school of easy knocks.
Their parents paid handsomely for a crash course in humiliation.
That will be the one lesson they never forget.