The Real College Scam

The recent college admissions scandal has been a delight. Somewhat surprising has been the sustained level of outrage, as if people truly did not realize that our country is immoral and corrupt. Admissions bribery is hardly the biggest scandal in academia; it isn't even the biggest scandal in college admissions. They openly discriminate students based on legally protected factors such as race and gender, so it's hardly shocking that they'd discriminate based on whose parents are sending massive piles of cash. The only scandal here is the widespread naivety, which will only persist despite the revelations. Tell the average mainstream American that the global warming models are a scam, that much cancer research is a scam, that social science spending is, on average, a scam, and they'll look at you like a crazy person.

For us anti-establishment types, the sounds of masses of citizens, from the left and from the right, condemning a corrupt system run by immoral elitists is fantastic. It's fuel for populism on both sides. It plays well to the politics of either a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. (At least, a pre-Hillary-endorsement Bernie Sanders.) There's a difference between the populism of the two, however. Bernie Sanders says that the system is rigged and the elites are evil. Donald Trump says the system is rigged and the elites are incompetent. So who is correct in this case study of crooked elites? Do the actors paying to get little Johnny into state college seem evil? No, they don't, but they do seem incompetent. Not only did they raise a midwit, not only did they push him towards college (which is a ripoff most of the time), but they paid several times the cost of a degree so that little Johnny could get further ripped off wasting four to six years of his life for a piece of paper he doesn't really care about. The real college scam is they paid the bribe! And now they'll go to jail for it. Hilarious, but cruel. Haven't they suffered enough already?

One actress's daughter was very blunt. She doesn't care about the college aspect, but wants the experience of campus life, game days, etc. Perhaps there's a business model here: charge young adults hefty fees to live in a campus-like environment, with none of the educational obligations. But then, that basically is the college business model these days, at many places, and it only gets worse as the federal government fuels the cancer of fake academia.

To the people seriously outraged about the unfair advantage of the elites, they should calm down. It's really the kind of thing you might actually wish on your worst enemy; that he pay a million dollar bribe so that his sweet beloved daughter can enroll in Harvard or Berkeley and degenerate into a blue-haired shrieking femi-Nazi who will never spawn him grandchildren (at least not of his own race). There's nothing to be jealous about. All that's happened is we removed a hidden self-imposed tax on the incompetent elites.