Lately the college admissions scandal has been everywhere, on twitter, the news, YouTube and various other platforms. Carleton University is no exception; here on campus students and professors alike have much to say concerning the scandal and as much is to be expected considering its pertinence to students such as ourselves.
For those of you not completely familiar with the situation, a man named Rick Singer allegedly got paid 25 million dollars over the course of seven years to perform one of two scams. The first scam involved getting an individual’s SAT or ACT scores corrected by a prompter in order to achieve a better score or even at times writing one’s SATs or ACTs for them for the same purpose. The second scam was to bribe athletic coaches to admit students as athletes even if they didn’t play a sport.
Some of the universities involved included USC, Yale, Stanford and Georgetown. And some of the celebrity parents involved who paid for these “services” include Lori Loughlin, Massimo Giannulli, Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy.
Felicity Huffman paid a total of $15,000 to arrange for a prompter to pay for her eldest daughter’s SAT scores. She has since been charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, which is punishable by 20 years in prison. She has since been released on a $250,000 bond. Lori Loughlin on the other hand paid $500,000 to admit her two daughters to USC as members of the crew team, even though they don’t play the sport. Her bond is a whopping one million dollars, for which she put up her Los Angeles home.
Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade Giannulli, has also faced a lot of backlash in light of the scandal. Giannulli, a YouTube star with almost two million subscribers, has since disabled the comments on many of her videos. She has also been dropped by sponsors such as Tresemme and Sephora. Her mother has also been dropped by Hallmark, Fuller House and other shows and films she had in the works.
Personally, I was astonished to find out these privileged students were not only able to commit fraud and be admitted in conjuction with these top universities, but they took spots away from very deserving students. Especially in the case of Giannulli and her sister, Bella Rose Giannulli, who not only took these places they did not deserve but they in fact took the spot away from a student athlete who in all probability trained most of their life and was well-deserving of the position. University level athletes must be extremely serious and dedicated to play at the level they do, and its unbelievably unfair that their spot was bought away by less-deserving individuals.
After having read up and looking into the scandal, I came across as video of Giannulli that left me completely and utterly disgusted.
“I don’t know how much of school I will actually be attending but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone and try and balance it all,” she said. “But I do want the experience of game days and partying. I don’t really care about school as you all know.”
Apparently, many of her subscribers shared the same opinion as me and had reacted negatively to the video. To counteract the negative response, Giannulli soon after came out with an apology, but in light of the scandal, this video has resurfaced.
In my case this video further infuriated me because it showcased that at the very least, from the beginning she was not grateful for the spot her parents had “worked” so hard to acquire for her to such an elite university. Her priviledge and entitlement showed way before this scandal became big news.
Ultimately I feel bad that Loughlin has been dropped from her shows, that Giannulli is losing sponsors, that Huffman may face jail time and at all the other ramifications the individuals involved are facing, but I feel worse for the students who had the moral decency not to go down this route and were rejected by universities in order to make spaced for the privileged who are only there for “game days” and “partying.”