The college admissions scandal, which involved eight Ivy League schools, outraged honest Ivy League students as well as outsiders of the Ivy League system. According to The Intelligencer, the documents in the college admissions scandal are hundreds and hundreds of pages long. Two cooperating witnesses reported who the scandal involved, where they occurred, and how much money was exchanged. One witness happened to be a co-founder of the scheme that organized all of the court listings. Another worked for the same company. Both reported that around 33 high-profile parents took part in the scheme, eight different high-profile colleges were (involuntarily) involved, and most of the students involved had no idea what their parents were up to.
Generally, parents paid anywhere between $15,000 – $105,000 to either bribe a coach to recruit an unqualified athlete, or to hire someone else to take the SAT or ACT for the student. The bribes were so influential on the admissions process that some of the recruited athletes had never even played the sport they were recruited for and recipients of high marks on the ACT had never even taken the test. Since college admissions counselors are swamped with a number of college applicants, they did not detect the false information that they received.
Families relying on wealth for admittance into to top-quality programs is not a new occurrence, nor is it specific to the United States. Besides the U.S., other countries experience similar corruption within the education system. India, for example, has an incredibly high absentee rate among teachers, who tend to spend more time giving private tutoring sessions than they actually do teaching. While there are no past email leaks that reveal exactly how college admissions scandals took place, it is no secret that financially successful alumni give money to their alma-maters. The “donation” acts as a shoo-in for family members of the alumni. In a roundabout sense, they are hardly more qualified than those that fake an ACT score. But perhaps the most shocking part of the entire scandal is that anyone found it to be shocking.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/college-admissions-scandal-what-every-kid-knew.html