Scandalous College Admissions?

Last week Californian insurance executive, Toby MacFarlane, pleaded guilty to ponying up $450,000 to fraudulently get his son and daughter admitted to his alma mater, the University of Southern California. MacFarlane was charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and something which is apparently illegal called "honest service mail fraud." The latter is a federal crime which involves a scheme to defraud others of opportunities. So when MacFarlane agreed to falsely represent his daughter as a soccer star and his son as a basketball recruit, he was robbing another more deserving athlete of a chance at USC.

It didn't matter that his daughter never actually played soccer and was not a "US Club Soccer All American" in high school as her online profile boasted. She made the team anyway. When advised to clear her Friday schedule in order to travel to games, her father consulted with Rick Singer, the college advisor and mastermind behind the scandal. Singer, who pleaded to four felonies, told her to say she was injured and couldn't play for some time. She graduated in 2018 after never playing a single game.

MacFarlane's son's athletic profile listed him as 6' 1" and having played varsity in high school. The dude is 5' 5" and probably doesn't own a basketball. After the school conditionally accepted his son, MacFarlane stroked a check for $50,000 to USC Athletics. A month later the school formally accepted the diminutive basketball player. A year later he withdrew from the university. Along with not getting an actual degree, he never played basketball either.

A judge is recommending that MacFarlane serve 15 months in prison, but having to buoy up his unscrupulous protégés for the rest of his life is punishment enough. My guess is that after shoveling out thousands of dollars, MacFarlane's daughter graduated with a degree in Psychology and now works the floor at TJ Max. His son likely washed out of Communications and is currently working on promoting his mixtape. I thought insurance executives were supposed to be well versed in risk analysis.

It was big news in March when celebrities, Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, were swept up in the Justice Department's investigation of bribery in college admissions. To date 20 parents and university officials have pled guilty with at least 30 more defendants waiting their turn to explain why they gave thousands of dollars to a real estate holding company. The mainstream media is covering the Justice Department's investigation, the scope of which doesn't include this one obvious fact.

This has been going on since Jesus had a paper route.

Let's face it, the Hollywood elite have been sliding into the front door of ivy league schools for decades. Jodie Foster graduated from Yale with a degree in English Literature as did Anderson Cooper in Political Science. Natalie Portman majored in Psychology at Harvard while Emma Watson took five years to earn an English degree from Brown. At Harvard, Tommy Lee Jones, another English major, roomed with Al Gore, who also went to Vanderbilt. The real inconvenient truth is that Gore lost his presidential bid to Yale alumnus, George Bush, who also earned an MBA from Harvard. President Trump went to Wharton where he graduated with a bachelors degree in Economics. Some news outlets are questioning Trump's son-in-law's appointment to Harvard. Jared Kushner's father, Charles Kushner, a New Jersey real estate developer, donated $2.5 million to the school a year before his son was accepted. James Franco took a 62 credit semester while at UCLA as an English major and is currently enrolled as a PhD student at Yale. He also has a Masters in Fine Arts from Columbia.

All these really famous smart people didn't get to elevated places on their own cylinders, but not all were so privileged. Tommy Lee Jones went on a needs based scholarship, and I'll bet Jody Foster and Emma Watson did their own work. I'm sure their was quite a bit of green skid greasing, though, to get some of these dimwits into the most exclusive educational institution in the country. It's well documented that the first George Bush, a Yale grad himself along with his dad, Prescott Bush, got his son into Yale where he was a member of the notoriously booze flowing fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon. The military academies are no exception either. The late John McCain graduated fifth from the bottom of the Naval Academy in 1958. No doubt his acceptance into the prestigious military school was influenced by his father and grandfather, both admirals and academy grads themselves.

One could argue that greatness runs in veins and the apple falls where it lays, but I don't necessarily agree. Wealth and celebrity has always helped the less deserving get ahead of the rest of us. After the well connected are accepted into these elite institutions, they're allowed to stay even as they profoundly underachieve. Perhaps after the Justice Department's investigation we might return to a system which evaluates candidates meritoriously rather than genealogically.