I am a student who is attending a great university and getting a great education…and get this, I actually earned it.
On March 12th 2019, over 50 families were charged with fraud for being part of a college admissions scheme, granting their children into some of the top schools in the country. Schools like Stanford, USC, University of California, Yale, and Georgetown were all involved and are facing major backlash for these shameful accusations.
College is supposed to be this amazing experience where you work the hardest you can to get into a school that you earned a place in and are qualified to be granted admissions into. It doesn’t help that there are people out there who are bribing coaches, faking SAT scores, and paying thousands of dollars to get the SAME education that you ACTUALLY earned.
When applying to colleges, I got into some amazing schools. I just couldn’t afford most of them. It angers me that there are privileged people out there who have no academic or athletic capability to get into these amazing schools, yet they are still able to have the opportunity at these types of education because their parents had the means to cheat their way into them. College is an opportunity…an opportunity to get an education, experience adulthood, get away from home, and hopefully (god willing) receive a job offer at the end of it. College is NOT an opportunity to just go to “like, game days, partying. …” and not care about the education itself. Yes, it is awesome to do that kind of stuff, but it is a privilege that comes along with the actual learning aspect, not the main focus.
Students like Olivia Jade, daughter of Lori Loughlin, received admissions to a top tier school that has an acceptance rate of 13%… just like that, because her parents were able to bribe the university with the $500,000 they had lying around. There are THOUSANDS of kids out there who would KILL for the opportunity and it just saddens me that they could not because of this country’s collegiate system, which built by this hierarchal, capitalistic standard.
Yes, you must have the scores and grades to get in, but at the end of the day, it really depends on what you have in your pocket. It is discouraging to me as well as many others, as college students in the US, that this is the name of the game when it comes to college admissions in some of our so-called “dream” schools…