Elites Bribing their Kiddies’ Way into Top Universities By Charles Tsaylor

     I know from Chris that you Aussies have a lot on your plates at the moment. Here in the States, we have been worrying about the fact that the elites who have less than bright kids, simply buy their places at university:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6802515/Scandal-renews-attention-Jared-Kushners-admission-Harvard-father-donated-2-5million.html
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-13/college-admissions-scandal-perfect-example-how-deeply-corrupt-america-has-become
  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/12/us-college-admissions-fraud-scheme-charges-georgetown-southern-california-universities

“The “mastermind” behind this college admissions scam was a con man named William Rick Singer.  He had been successfully getting the kids of wealthy people into top colleges for years using “side doors”, and he probably thought that he would never get caught. But he did. There were four basic methods that Singer used to get children from wealthy families into elite schools.  The first two methods involved bribes… Bribing college entrance exam administrators to allow a third party to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams, in some cases by posing as actual students,’ is the first. Bribing university athletic coaches and administrators to designate applicants as purported athletic recruits – regardless of their athletic abilities, and in some cases, even though they did not play the sport,’ is the second. Because many of these kids didn’t even play the sports they were being “recruited” for, in some cases Photoshop was used to paste their faces on to the bodies of real athletes… In order to get non-athletic kids admitted to college as athletes, Singer often had to create fake profiles for them. Sometimes this involved fabricating resumes that listed them having played on elite club teams, but to finish the illusion Singer and his team would also use Photoshop to combine photos of the kids with actual athletes in the sport.

A number of college coaches became exceedingly wealthy from taking bribes to “recruit” kids that would never play once they got to school, but now a lot of those same coaches are probably going to prison. The third and fourth methods that Singer used involved more direct forms of cheating… ‘Having a third party take classes in place of the actual students, with the understanding that the grades earned in those classes would be submitted as part of the students’ application,’ is the third. The fourth was ‘submitting falsified applications for admission to universities … that, among other things, included the fraudulently obtained exam scores and class grades, and often listed fake awards and athletic activities.’ Of course the main thing that the media is focusing on is the fact that some celebrities are among those being charged in this case, and that includes Lori Loughlin from “Full House”… It was important to “Full House” star Lori Loughlin that her kids have “the college experience” that she missed out on, she said back in 2016. Loughlin, along with “Desperate Housewives” actress Felicity Huffman, is among those charged in a scheme in which parents allegedly bribed college coaches and insiders at testing centers to help get their children into some of the most elite schools in the country, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.”

     What is astonishing about all of this, is that this corruption has been an open secret for generations, where rich elites who have dumb kids, buy their little treasures’ way into universities. Probably Australia does not have the same problem, running on a different system, where everyone goes to university to clock up massive fees, then become unemployed, but no doubt, dig deep enough and you will find corruption too.

     In any case the internet has made universities obsolete, and it would be far better to have government testing institutions, where people could take tests and get qualifications. Cut out the middle man.