Originally Posted by Choro&Swing
(Post 1836671)
Also, I’d be surprised if her legal fees are much under a million.
Actually, as a retired university professor, I don’t have much of a problem with people making very large donations to schools in exchange for the schools admitting a student or two—at full cost. It’s a good way for a school to get something it needs. Even arranging a phony sports scholarship doesn’t bother me much—the real players recognize the ones who aren’t. If they shame the fakes, so what? If the real players make good contacts with the fakes with money, that may help the real players down the line.
I have no doubt that Harvard and Yale are amazing schools, and they have a lot of students who are among the smartest people in the country. The academic competition with other great students and the opportunity to share ideas and learn is terrific for these exceptional students. However, for a lot of students in business and similar fields, the great thing about Harvard and Yale and some of the other Ivy League schools is the opportunity to make contacts with executives and top companies and the children of the elite families in the world. Why does this matter. I have a friend who works at Morgan Stanley and earns three times what I ever earned, but is not an executive. She paid $72,000 or so cash per year to send her son to Colby College, in Maine, which is hard to get into, but nowhere near Harvard level. He played Lacrosse. So, he made powerful friends and had a great Wall Street internship every summer. Before his senior year, he had a firm job offer at a top hedge fund with a starting salary after graduation of $150,000 a year. He didn’t know much, but he was “the right sort of people,” so he was welcomed in. His mom got great value for money. That’s how the system works. That’s what it is for. If your kids don’t want to enter that world or marry into that world, they needn’t both to apply.
The thing is, there are outstanding universities in California, as good as Harvard: UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, Cal Tech, USC, and a lot of others nearly that good. This woman shamed herself, her daughter, and her entire state, mostly for bragging rights.
As they say in Hollywood these days, “Orange Is the New Black.”
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