found online by Raymond
From Mock Paper Scissors:
Giving It The Ol’ College Lie
We’ve long said that the one thing that John Edwards got right was that there are two Americas, and I gotta tell you, the whole notion of meritocracy just got blown out of the water. America is about money and power. Our great wealth inequality problem has not been laid so bare —in public—in a long time.
The fact that you can get into Stanford and Yale based on sailing prowess is why giving the finger is the only response to any article complaining about affirmative action.
I’m surprised by the shock and outrage. Money is power, rich people have a lot of it, and there are many people who are willing to compromise their stated values or break the rules if the pay is right. None of this is a revelation.
And while the people in this particular story were dealing with large amounts of money, you can find fraud and bribery happening on a regular basis even when much less money is involved. It’s not only the rich who pay others to write their essays or take tests for them, attempt to influence professors, etc. Kids getting in because their parents bribed others with tens of thousands of dollars is not substantially different from kids getting in because they paid someone to get a 1500 on the SAT for them. It’s just a matter of scale and certainty.