Exploring the recent college admissions scandal in which wealthy parents bribed school officials to get their offspring admitted to prestigious American universities.

By now you’ve definitely heard the story about the college admissions cheating scandal, but let’s take a moment to explore the details. The U.S. Attorney in the District of Massachusetts just charged 50 people in federal court who participated in a nationwide college admissions conspiracy dating back to 2011. The parents allegedly paid between $200,000 and $6.5 million dollars to get their offspring illicitly accepted into prestigious schools through various falsifications and a heavy amount of bribery. The parents in question are all high ranking professionals, including actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, who now face jail time. These duplicitous parents donated exorbitant funds to fake charities, which not only allowed their undeserving offspring to weasel their way into prestigious colleges, but also afforded the parents income tax deductibles.

Much like last year’s Fyre Festival catastrophe, it’s a story that the average American relishes reading, because it exposes the ridiculous lengths some extremely wealthy people will go in order to exude a winning appearance. We all watched in awe and amusement as rich young adults paid insane prices for a fantasy festival just to end up in hurricane relief tents with cheese sandwiches, and now we can feel that karma has once again been served as rich scammers are exposed.

It’s dizzying the lengths these parents went to in order to get their children accepted sans merit. In addition to donating bribery money to a fake charity organized by admission scandal kingpin William “Rick” Singer, various coaches were bribed to falsify athletic records in order to secure false athletic-based acceptances (many have since lost their jobs), and the students cheated on their admissions exams that some of them even went so far as to have other people take.

Now that some of the salacious details have been laid out, let’s explore the moral transgressions of this scandal. (We’ll leave the legal mess for the courts to sort out.)

From a logical standpoint, is it wrong to pay money to have your kid accepted into a prestigious school? This practice has been happening for decades, and while not necessarily respectable, it does make sense in a practical, if not moral, way. Universities need steady and deep cashflow in order to provide premium services to students. My SAT tutor (since my parents chose to use their money to fund my education and not bribe schools into accepting me) told me that when it comes to colleges, the real challenge is getting into them. Once accepted, you essentially reap what you sow. You can pick the easy courses and stick to the motto “C’s get degrees,” or you can pick up a tedious course load and dedicate yourself to success. Getting accepted into the school is therefore only part of the equation— what you do at the school is entirely up to you.

So if you find yourself attending a school under suspect circumstances, logic would have it that you’re not going to do well at said school once classes begin. After all, you weren’t accepted on your merit. Unfortunately this theory would only ring true if we were operating in a moral world, which is clearly optimistic thinking. If you’d cheat to get into the school, why not cheat at the school? The parents who bribed their children into schools are likely related to the students who pay others to write their papers, share their answers, and complete their online classes for them. Hell, this is 2019, you don’t even need to pay someone in person to write your papers anymore when you can just pull out your credit card and search the Internet.

One has to ask, not if this entire admissions scandal was all worth it (because the answer is obviously “no” now that both reputations and educations are in the trashcan), but why it was done in the first place. ‘

Take Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade, for example. Her mother allegedly paid $500,000 to have both Olivia and her sister accepted into USC, even though Olivia stated in a video “I don’t really care about school, as you guys know,” clarifying that the only aspects of college she wanted to experience were game days and partying. Though the social media influencer included her status as a student in some of her brand deals to boost profits, she was captured partying on yachts as the term began, backing her claims that she could not care less about the college education that her mother now faces jail time for. (Thankfully USC booted both Olivia and her sister.) But really, how could you expect Olivia to care about college when she reportedly couldn’t even be bothered to fill out her own application? (Yep, the lengths people went to in order to get their kids accepted as well as the sheer incompetence of the falsely accepted students goes this far.)

Olivia, and likely a number of the other fraudulent students, didn’t want to be in college, nor did she participate in her education. It’s one thing to purchase a building in order to have your child accepted if they actually work for their degree, but a far more dismal and pathetic affair to go through such extreme a level of fraud to get someone accepted who doesn’t even want to be there. ‘

What does it say about our society that wealthy people are literally attempting to buy degrees for their dimwitted children so that they can appear more prestigious and uphold their family’s reputation? Olivia was already using her wealthy upbringing and familial connections to carve a name for herself as a social media influencer, a career path that is now in the toilet since her true nature has been exposed. It’s a wonder why she even had to feign attending college in the first place when she could have obtained success without a degree due to her blessed life.

There are a lot of brilliant people who can’t afford an education or who don’t mesh well with the confines of formal education, and it is seriously unfortunate that their educational resumes might hold them back on the job market. But let’s be real, these celebrity offspring were not trying to buy degrees so they could move up in a company and prove their intelligence to hiring managers. They just wanted another shiny trophy to stack on their shelves to justify that they’re better than others, while their parents just wanted another reason to tell the world that their lineage is superior. Well the joke is certainly on them now.

Overall the real tragedy of this whole fraudulent affair is both the fact that hardworking students were robbed of a position at a school where they would have likely sought to apply themselves in the hopes of leading an accomplished life and the fact that the wealthy people involved in the admissions scandal thought that bribery was the best way their money could be used to obtain an education for their children.

It’s undeniable that there is an education bias in standardized testing which favors students belonging to an elevated socio-economic background. The very people who cheated in order to secure collegial spots are the ones the system favored in the first place. Rather than use their wealth to fund SAT tutors, extracurriculars, and all the other modern day essentials for getting into a reputable college, these families decided to take the lazy way out. For all the wealth and prestige that their familial names might have previously held, the truth has finally surfaced (as it so often does), and there is nothing respectable about being a lazy fraud.

Though the courts will ultimately decide what price all those involved in the scandal will pay, it’s undeniable that the reputations of all involved have already been irreversibly sullied. And in a way, that’s punishment enough. After all, the very people involved in the scandal were the ones who cared most about preserving their reputations in the first. Call it poetic justice.