You know, the thing that surprises me most about the ‘revelation’ that rich people pay off colleges to get their kids in is that it surprises anybody.
Like I thought we all knew that this was going on? Are people seriously shocked by this?
I think it’s the nature of the scheme (photoshopping kids’ faces onto stock photos of athletes) and the fact that some of the kids apparently weren’t aware that made this one unique.
Maybe you’re right about that. I guess…well, my father is a college professor, and rants about this sort of thing all the time, so perhaps I didn’t realize that the truly brazen stunts wealthy people will pull to get their kids accepted weren’t widely known.
Also I’m surprised that it’s illegal! Like, we all knew that those ‘so and so’ libraries were buying the families some nice perks, but I honestly thought that it was just part of the whole process
Yeah! Like I just assumed that everyone knew that a college having a sports field or a library or a science lab or whatever named after a family meant “This family bribed us with a real fat check to get their uninterested child admitted”
And also that people who completely didn’t deserve admission got in because they were good at sports. Like, everyone knows that. I’m just shocked that people are actually getting in trouble for it
Right?
That’s literally the only thing that surprises me about this whole thing.
And I just had someone come into my inbox and try to shame me for saying people don’t deserve a college education just for being good at sports. Like. I was a TA/tutor for the first two years that my college had a football team. Do you know the people who were the rudest about needing help, or the whiniest about having bad grades, despite me having a pretty generous grading policy? The football players.
If they canget the grades and scores to get in on their own, and then maintain them, cool. Awesome. Our nationally ranked soccer teams did. But if they get in purely because they’re good at a sport, and expect to coast through school on that? Fuck ‘em, and I hope they fail out
YEP.
I worked in the computer lab in college, and one of my jobs was helping students who needed it…we had little signs that we put on the door saying “Hi! ____ is in the lab today, they have passed (list of classes I’d taken and passed). If you need help with any of these, please ask!”
And a lot of students did ask for help and I always liked helping them. Usually it was just normal study help or going over a particular concept or breaking down problems in a way that made it easier for the student to solve. You know, normal tutoring stuff.
Now, the volleyball, basketball, and tennis teams. A bunch of kids had sports scholarships. Most of them were perfectly nice and normal students who worked hard both in sports and in class.
But then there were the few who would come stomping in and expect me to do all their work and assignments and papers for them, because they were there on a Sports Scholarship and therefore thought that they did not have to actually do anything else. A couple had the absolute gall to complain to my boss that I ‘wouldn’t help them’. I almost got written up, until I explained that their version of ‘help’ meant ‘write their entire midterm lit paper for them’.
The athletes who took their classes seriously? I hope they did well, and I did everything I could to help them when they needed it. But the entitled assholes that thought throwing a ball real good meant that they were too special to learn algebra like the rest of us?
Fuck ‘em.
To contribute to the discussion of student athletes, there were a lot of them that were rude and didn’t want to do the work. However, there were also a fair few who had no idea how to even start an essay. I worked as a writing tutor and I had some students that came from very poor areas and the only way they were even able to get into college was through sports. Thing is, they could barely read at a 6th grade level because their school system was so broken that no one cared to help them and just kept passing them along. I did everything I could to help them just be able to catch up to their peers. That being said, yeah there’s a bunch of stuck up athletes that honestly probably don’t want to go to college, but know that it’s the next step for sports.
We had a few kids like that too, and they were honestly eager to learn! I liked helping them. I compiled a list of web tutorials for stuff like starting essays and how to format papers in APA style and how to do proper citations at one point that I emailed to kids who were desperately trying to get their skills up to college level but who had never really had any help.
I think the issue with this current situation is that the schools themselves weren’t bribed. Like y’all said before, Rich parents can buy nice, fancy buildings for the school and their kid would get in. But apparently… these parents didn’t do that. These kids were such bad students that these parents had to fake data. I was reading (and people are talking about) how the kids cheated on entrance exams and records were falsified. A big joke is that kid’s faces were photoshopped onto athletic bodies. All of this money also went to a single “company”; a guy who had the access and resources to pull this stunt. At least with some “legal” cases, mommy and daddy bought a nice computer lab and you could actually see that the kid had shitty/average grades, but in this instance, the schools were also scammed.
I think that’s the other reason; I feel like if the schools got the money, they wouldn’t care, but some random dude got it, so they’re upset. On top of that, the schools know when a kid is there because of money, but not even the schools knew. This also makes the schools look bad because they didn’t know either. Because let’s be real, students represent a university. shitty students= shitty university. It’s putting all of these school’s legitimacy on the line and that’s what’s making it such a big deal
I think you hit the nail on the head there.