They Had It Coming

[Professor Emeritus]

Flanagan is an obnoxious writer to me, but this time around she's focusing on an area where she has real personal experience and comes at their heads like a savage. This is a brutal takedown of what White privilege looks like from the inside.

They Had It Coming

The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs.

APR 4, 2019
Caitlin Flanagan

Felicity Huffman leaves a federal courthouse on April 3.GRETCHEN ERTL / REUTERS



I'm gonna skip to the good parts, but the good parts began when the author became the college adviser at an elite prep school in L.A.

Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.

The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. A college counselor at an elite prep school is supposed to be a combination of cheerleader, concierge, and talent agent, radically on the side of each case and applying steady pressure on the dream college to make it happen. At the very least, the counselor is not supposed to be an adversary.

I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it was because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.

Sometimes, in anger and frustration, the parents would blame me for the poor return on investment they were getting on their years of tuition payments. At that point, I was living in a rent-controlled apartment and paying $198 a month on a Civic with manual windows. I was in no position to evaluate their financial strategies. Worst of all, the helpless kid would be sitting right there, shrinking into the couch cushions as his parents all but said that his entire secondary education had been a giant waste of money. The parents would simmer down a bit, and the four of us would stew in misery. Nobody wanted to hear me read “Ozymandias.”

During those three years before the mast, I saw no evidence of any of the criminal activity that the current scandal has delivered. But I absolutely saw the raw materials that William Rick Singer would use to create his scam. The system, even 25 years ago, was full of holes.

The first was sports. Legacy admissions have often been called affirmative action for white people, but the rich-kid sports—water polo, tennis, swimming, gymnastics, volleyball, and even (God help us all) sailing and actual polo—are the true affirmative action for the rich. I first became acquainted with this fact when I was preparing for a meeting with the parents of a girl who was a strong but not dazzling student; the list her parents had submitted, however, consisted almost exclusively of Ivy League colleges. I brought her file in to my boss for guidance. She looked it over and then, noticing something in the section on extracurricular activities and tapping it decisively with her pen, said, “Oh, she’ll get in—volleyball.”

Volleyball? Yale was going to let her in—above half a dozen much more academically qualified and many much more interesting kids on my roster—because she played volleyball? I soon learned that the coaches of all these sports were allowed a certain number of recruits each year, and that so long as a kid met basic academic qualifications—which our kids easily did—the coaches got their way. I never heard an admissions person question a coach; “She’s on the soccer list,” the admissions person would say, and we’d move on to the next kid.

The second flaw in the system was an important change to the way untimed testing is reported to the colleges. When I began the job, the SAT and the ACT offered untimed testing to students with learning disabilities, provided that they had been diagnosed by a professional. However, an asterisk appeared next to untimed scores, alerting the college that the student had taken the test without a time limit. But during my time at the school, this asterisk was found to violate the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the testing companies dropped it. Suddenly it was possible for everyone with enough money to get a diagnosis that would grant their kid two full days—instead of four hours—to take the SAT, and the colleges would never know. Today, according to Slate, “in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent.” Taking a test under normal time limits in one of these neighborhoods is a sucker’s game—you’ve voluntarily handicapped yourself.

And, finally, there were large parts of the process over which no one entity had complete oversight. The kids were encouraged, but not required, to bring us their essays. Ditto the lists of extracurricular activities they were required to submit to the colleges. The holy trinity of documents—transcript, test scores, and teacher recommendations—never touches the kids’ hands. But the veracity of everything else depends on a tremendous leap of good faith on the part of the admissions offices.

And it was through these broken saloon doors—the great power conferred on coaches, untimed testing, and the ease with which an application can be crammed with false information—that Singer pushed unqualified students into colleges they wanted to attend. He told the parents to get their kids diagnosed with learning disabilities, and then arranged for them to take the test alone in a room with a fake proctor—someone who was so skilled at taking these tests that he could (either by correcting the student’s test before submitting it or by simply taking the thing himself) arrive at whatever score the client requested. (“I own two schools,” Singer told a client about the testing sites, one in West Hollywood and the other in Houston, where his fake proctors could do their work.) He allowed coaches to monetize any extra spots on their recruitment lists by selling them to his clients. And he offered a service that he called “cleaning up” the transcript, which involved, at the very least, having his employees take online courses in the kids’ name and then adding those A’s to their record.

The one compliment the FBI paid the indicted parents is that it took college admissions as seriously as they did. The investigation included wiretaps, stakeouts, reviews of bank statements, travel records, cell-site data, emails, and interviews with cooperating witnesses—chief among them Singer, who seems not simply to have thrown his clients under a bus, but rather to have taken them to Port Authority and thrown them under an entire fleet.

How did his scam come to light? Let the reader be introduced to Morrie Tobin, upon whose character and doings much will depend. A 55-year-old stockbroker and father of six who lives in the elegant Los Angeles neighborhood of Hancock Park, he got pinched last spring for an SEC violation that allegedly defrauded clients of millions of dollars. Desperate to lighten his punishment, the Los Angeles Times reported, he offered an unrelated claim: There was a Yale soccer coach, Rudy Meredith, who accepted bribes to let kids into the university. Of all the things Tobin could have given up, this seems an especially cruel one—he had two daughters enrolled at Yale, one had graduated from the university, and a fourth had recently been accepted. At the very least, this revelation put their admissions in an unflattering light. The FBI had Tobin wear a wire to a private meeting with the coach, during which Singer’s name came up, and from there the full investigation—“Varsity Blues”—began.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Most of the families involved in the scandal lived in the California dreamscapes of a Nancy Myers movie: Newport Beach, Hillsborough, Laguna Beach, San Francisco, Del Mar, Ross. The out-of-staters are no slouches either. One family divides its time between Aspen and New York; another lives in Greenwich. Let’s start there, in Greenwich, where not getting your kid into the right college is cause for seppuku. We are in the home of Gordon Caplan and his wife, Amy. Gordon was—until placed on “leave” post-indictment—the co-chairman of a New York–based global law firm, where he was a partner in the private-equity group. Amy is the heiress daughter of the late telecommunications magnate Richard Treibick. He also lived in Greenwich, summering in the Hamptons in a 32-acre spread in Sagaponack that included a seven-bedroom house on the dunes with a pool overlooking the ocean, which his family sold shortly after his death in 2014 for a reported $35 million. (Caplan has not commented publicly on the allegations contained in the filings, or entered a plea; he was scheduled to make his first court appearance on Wednesday.)

Gordon graduated from Cornell, but ended up pursuing his law degree at sweaty-browed Fordham, suggesting the combination of privilege and hustle that can really get a certain kind of guy ahead. He was the board chairman of the world’s most quixotic nonprofit organization, Publicolor, which seeks to “improve education in youth by promoting an imaginative use of color in school buildings.” In 2018—the year he was negotiating with Singer about his daughter’s future—The American Lawyer magazine named him Dealmaker of the Year.

He seems to have had Cornell on his mind for his daughter, having dramatically upped his annual giving to the low six figures during her sophomore and junior years of high school. But her grades and scores were apparently too low for the traditional approach, and he and Singer began talking about a scheme. “What is the, what is the, the number?” he asks Singer, “at Cornell for instance.”

“Hold on a second,” Singer says, carefully bleeding his client one pint at a time. “The number on the testing is $75,000.” (Singer seems to have operated on a sliding scale. He charged Caplan $75,000 for the testing scam, yet he charged Felicity Huffman only $15,000. Perhaps The American Lawyer needs to cast a wider net when selecting its Dealmakers of the Year.)

“I can do anything and everything, if you guys are amenable to doing it,” he tells Caplan, explaining the elaborate system he employed to falsify test scores: “I can guarantee her a score.”

Caplan takes a few hours to digest this idea, and then has a second phone call with Singer. “This notion of effectively going in, flying out to L.A., sitting with your proctor, and taking the exam is pretty interesting.”

“It’s the homerun of homeruns,” Singer tells him.

“So, how do I get this done with you?” Caplan asks. “What do I need to do?”

Singer gives an interesting answer: “I’m gonna talk to our psychologist, and we may have to send her to you, or you to her.” Sure enough, per the criminal complaint, “On or about July 21, 2018, CAPLAN and his daughter flew to Los Angeles to meet with a psychologist in an effort to obtain the medical documentation required to receive extended time on the ACT exam.”

This is the only section of the complaint that mentions the character of “our psychologist.” There are more educational psychologists in Greenwich, Connecticut, than there are Labrador retrievers. Hotfoot it over to New Haven or Manhattan, and you have to beat them off with a stick. Why was Singer so certain that this particular psychologist would produce the documentation the student needed? The government is clearly continuing its investigation—student records have been subpoenaed from several private schools in Los Angeles, and it’s not hard to imagine that more indictments, perhaps many more, are coming. “Our psychologist” might play a role in these investigations.

The problem with getting newly diagnosed with a learning disability in 11th or 12th grade is that the companies that own the tests know they’re probably being manipulated, and will often deny the application for untimed testing. Sure enough, the ACT denied the Caplan daughter’s first request, and also her appeal. But then, a surprising bit of good news. “You were right,” Caplan tells Singer; “it was like third time was the charm … Everybody was telling us there’s no way, and then all of a sudden it comes in.” But one of the delights of this novel is that the reader is often in possession of information the main characters lack. While Caplan crows, we smirk: “The ACT ultimately granted CAPLAN’S daughter extended time on the exam at the request of law enforcement.”

But the Dealmaker of the Year spent considerable time kicking the tires on this one. “Keep in mind I am a lawyer,” Caplan said at one point, according to the affidavit. “So I’m sort of rules oriented.” And, later, “I’m not worried about the moral issue here. I’m worried about the, if she’s caught doing that, you know, she’s finished.”

Much of the discussion of this scandal has centered on the corruption in the college-admissions process. But think about the kinds of jobs that the indicted parents held. Four of them worked in private equity, a fifth in the field of “investments,” others in real-estate development and the most senior management of huge corporations. Together, they have handled billions of dollars’ worth of assets within heavily regulated fields—yet look how easily and how eagerly they allegedly embrace a crooked scheme, as quoted in the court documents.

Here is Bill McGlashan, then a senior executive at a global private-equity fund, reacting to Singer’s plan to get his son (who does not play football) admitted to USC via the football team: “That’s just totally hilarious.”

Here is Robert Zangrillo, the founder and CEO of a private investment firm, talking with one of Singer’s employees who is planning to bring up his daughter’s grades by taking online classes in her name: “Just makes sure it gets done as quickly as possible.”

Here is John B. Wilson, the founder and CEO of a private-equity and real-estate-development firm, on getting his son into USC using a fake record of playing water polo: “Thanks again for making this happen!” And, “What are the options for the payment? Can we make it for consulting or whatever … so that I can pay it from the corporate account?” He can. “Awesome!”

Here is Douglas Hodge, the former CEO of a large investment-management company, learning from Singer that his son will be admitted to USC via a bribery scheme, and that it’s time to send a check: “Fanstatic!! Will do.”

The word entitlement—even in its full, splendid range of meanings—doesn’t begin to cover the attitudes on display. Devin Sloane is the CEO of a Los Angeles company that deals in wastewater management. Through Singer, he allegedly bribed USC to get his son admitted as a water-polo player. But a guidance counselor at his school learned of the scheme and contacted USC—the boy did not play the sport; something was clearly awry. Singer smoothed it over, but the whole incident enraged Sloane: “The more I think about this, it is outrageous! They have no business or legal right considering all the students privacy issues to be calling and challenging/question [my son’s] application,” he wrote to Singer.

There are several instances of college counselors gumming up the works with their small-timers’ insistence on ethical behavior. That someone as lowly, as contemptibly puny, as a guidance counselor should interfere with a rich person’s desires is the cause of electric rage. For this reason, after having read the 200-page affidavit many times and trying to be as objective as possible, I had to conclude that the uncontested winners of Worst People (So Far) to Be Indicted are Lori Loughlin, an actress, and her husband, Mossimo Giannulli, a designer. When a college counselor at their daughter’s high school realized something was suspicious about her admission to USC and asked the girl about it, the parents roared onto campus in such a rage that they almost blew up the whole scam.

The couple paid $500,000 to get both of their daughters into USC on the preposterous claim that they rowed crew. Their daughter Olivia has become a particularly ridiculed character in the saga, because there are pre-indictment videos in which she describes both her lack of desire to attend college and how rarely she attended high school during her senior year. But I have sympathy for her. She knew higher education wasn’t where she belonged, but her parents insisted that she go. Up until the scandal, the girl had a thriving cosmetics line, was a popular YouTuber, and was clearly making the best of what Hillary Clinton would call her God-given potential. Now she’s a punch line, and Sephora has pulled her products off the shelves.

The court filings don’t state when the parents began working with Singer, but they appear to have felt a sense of urgency on April 22, 2016, when they took part in a standard component of prep-school college counseling: the family meeting with a college counselor during spring of junior year. “We just met with [Olivia’s] college counselor this am,” Giannulli wrote in an email to Singer. “I’d like to maybe sit with you after your session with the girls as I have some concerns and want to fully understand the game plan … as it relates to [her] and getting her into a school other than ASU!”

Mentioning Arizona State University to the private-school parents of a freshman is the equivalent of throwing a flash-bang grenade; it won’t kill anyone, but it will sure as hell get their attention. But mention it to the parents of a second-semester junior, and you’re no longer issuing warnings. ASU is the unconditional surrender.

“If you want USC,” Singer replies, “I have the game plan ready to go into motion.”

But the college counselor at the girls’ high school had always doubted that the first girl rowed crew; when the second one got into the same school for the same reason, she realized that something suspicious was going on. She confronted the girl.

The counselor was acting honorably. Loughlin and Giannulli—if the affidavit is to be believed—were in the midst of a criminal operation. Yet instead of hanging his head in shame, Giannulli apparently roared onto the high-school campus apoplectic. Singer got a panicked email from his USC contact: “I just want to make sure that, you know, I don’t want the … parents getting angry and creating any type of disturbance at the school … I just don’t want anybody going into … [the daughter’s high school] you know, yelling at counselors. That’ll shut everything—that’ll shut everything down.”

It’s hell on Earth for college counselors when people like this show up angry that their kid didn’t get an acceptance from Williams. But to endure it because you’ve gotten in the way of a giant scam? Hideous.

One way or another, the counselor was impelled—I would imagine by some freaked out higher-up—to send the parents an email:

"I wanted to provide you with an update on the status of [your younger daughter’s] admission offer to USC. First and foremost, they have no intention of rescinding [her] admission and were surprised to hear that was even a concern for you and your family. You can verify that with [the USC senior assistant director of admissions] … if you would like. I also shared with [the USC senior assistant director of admission] that you had visited this morning and affirmed for me that [your younger daughter] is truly a coxswain."

As Jerry Maguire said about being a sports agent, being a prep-school college counselor is an “up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege.” But no work of fiction could prepare these employees for the fact that there are now L.A. private-school parents who are intent on maligning the guidance counselors whom they have decided must have been in on the scheme. The president of one school sent this email to parents: “I want to emphasize that I have absolute confidence in the honesty of our deans, the accuracy of the information they provide to colleges and their focus on personal character in the guidance they provide our students.” Honesty of the deans? It’s the dishonesty of the parents that’s the problem.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

When I was a prep-school college counselor 25 years ago, I thought that whatever madness was whirring through the minds of the parents was a blip of group insanity that would soon abate. It has only gotten more and more extreme. Anyone can understand a parent’s disappointment if he had thought for 17 years that his child would go to Yale one day, only to learn that it’s not in the cards. But what accounted for the intensity of emotion these parents expressed, their sense of a profound loss, of rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs? They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all.

In the recent past—the past in which this generation of parents grew up—a white student from a professional-class or wealthy family who attended either a private high school or a public one in a prosperous school district was all but assured admission at a “good” college. It wasn’t necessarily going to be Harvard or Yale, but it certainly might be Bowdoin or Northwestern. That was the way the system worked. But today, there’s a squeeze on those kids. The very strong but not spectacular white student from a good high school is now trying to gain access to an ever-shrinking pool of available spots at the top places. He’s not the inherently attractive prospect he once was.

These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bytching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bytching; some of them decided to go MAGA.

 

[Garjxen]

........look at all that text........

 

[RehReh]

Interesting read

Lock those parents up don’t just fine them

 

[mastermind]

Great read.

I need people wake up and realize this shyt is all rigged. Instead of trying to be these a$$holes, we need to overthrow them and create a fairer system.

 

[Smoking With Cigarettes]

........look at all that text........

Be open about having strugglesome literary skills, brehs

 

[Meta Reign]

I dont care. I think the parents should be freed, and paying to get into "elite" universities should be legalized.

They literally harmed no one, and the whole higher education system is a scam to begin with.

 

[Garjxen]

Be open about having strugglesome literary skills, brehs

....breh....my breh....my brehest of brehs....literary and literate have different meanings....you should've used the word "reading" right there [instead of attempting to come off as intelligent]....

....I fukk around on TheColi mostly for fun, this isn't a TedTalks forum....I'm not here to read over 30 paragraphs in a single thread my nikka........

....the poster should've given a summary of it with their own thoughts and a link for those who want to get down and read all that....

 

[Brown_Pride]

Good write up.

Show of hands, who didnt know the college admissions process was a shyt show before these shocking revelation?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Great read.

I need people wake up and realize this shyt is all rigged. Instead of trying to be these a$$holes, we need to overthrow them and create a fairer system.

Exactly.

I dont care. I think the parents should be freed, and paying to get into "elite" universities should be legalized.

They literally harmed no one, and the whole higher education system is a scam to begin with.

If you think elite education doesn't matter at all, then they harmed no one. You should start a thread on that.

But if you believe that our country is evolving into a sort of false meritocracy where a small group of individuals from elite schools are having a greater and greater impact on our lives (like the fact that EVERY current Supreme Court Justice went to Harvard or Yale), then the way the system is gamed towards those individuals is a matter of concern.

It also obvious has a tremendously negative impact on the kids. On every level, the kids who are put through that bullshyt by their parents suffer. The ones whose parents were cheating for them were clearly suffering. The ones whose parents put them through arduous bullshyt all through their young years just to get into the "right" school are suffering. The kids who feel like they have to compete with those kids, either ruining their lives trying to keep up or getting depressed when they fall behind, suffer. The kids who are frozen out of opportunity because these obsessed privileged families take it suffer.

Hell, even imagine the poor kid who just loves tennis and really wants to make the team, but doesn't because 10 rich kids with private coaches who don't even give a shyt about the sport are going all out 12 months a year because they feel a spot on the tennis team will be part of their ticket to an Ivy League.

I agree that it is a scam, but the scam is hurting a LOT of people.

....breh....my breh....my brehest of brehs....literary and literate have different meanings....you should've used the word "reading" right there [instead of attempting to come off as intelligent]....

....I fukk around on TheColi mostly for fun, this isn't a TedTalks forum....I'm not here to read over 30 paragraphs in a single thread my nikka........

I mean "strugglesome" isn't even a word if we're playing grammur nazi.

I read an interesting article in the Atlantic that was relevant to an HL discussion from last month, so I posted it. The issue matters in our lives. To be nice I cut out about 1/3 the article to make it a quicker read. If you don't come here to read that's fine, but you don't need to gripe about it and one-star the thread just because you don't feel like reading today.

 

[BillBanneker]

Yup, get them outta here

These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bytching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bytching; some of them decided to go MAGA.

This really embodies the whole thing. Meritocracy is all good and fine until it applies you then folks ready to throw it into the bushes, and i bet the folks suing against AA have no problems with this either

 

[Garjxen]

@Rhakim - Breh, my breh....you just reaching for things to say breh....I'm the grammar Nazi, but you're the one who doesn't validate words outside of the dictionary?....that was super weak of you to go there....I like how you represented yourself with the hoe icon in that moment....that was awesome [thanks for the laugh]....I didn't say anything about "strugglesome" because it was an appropriate linguistic exercise....it presents itself with a clear meaning that fits within the context, hell he even spelled it right....but if he's gonna clown me about my reading skills, he could at least not fukk up the single sentence he used to do it....dude was just reaching for the air of intelligence to validate his critical stance....

....I appreciate where the thread is coming from, but not how it was executed....I'd like to see more threads like this, focused on important things - but imagine if each one of those threads had 30+ paragraphs just from the OP....my reaction to your thread reflects the activity I'd like to see on the website....I didn't neg you, because I see you're trying to bring enlightenment into TheColi [thanks for that, 1 star was too harsh - I'll bump it up to 3]....I griped because this is primarily a social platform and we're here to clown around....I thought it would be funny to represent that response to your thread....you're just a victim of my sense of humor....

[edit - lol, this bytch nikka negged me with the quote "breh, consider this a lesson learned on [the] internet" like his neg is so powerful it's teaching me a lesson....I called you out breh and if you coulda really said something, you woulda said it....you just reaching for the neg cuz your back is against the wall....]

 

[Jhoon]

Interesting read

Lock those parents up don’t just fine them

Now that’s a good, fictional story.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Good write up.

Show of hands, who didnt know the college admissions process was a shyt show before these shocking revelation?

I'm interested to know the real answer to this question nationwide. Cause when things like the Harvard lawsuit or arguments about AA come out, there are millions of people coming out of the woodwork, "Well, college should be restricted to those who DESERVE to go there" and other bullshyt. Or when the intelligence of a public figure is being debated, then his Ivy League education is trotted out, even if he came from a rich-as-fukk family who paid his way in there. Did all those people not realize the bullshyt involved, or were they just cynically ignoring it for argument points?