Or you can pay $1.50 in late chages.
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Spertus that that Guo’s (as yet unnamed) parents did not realize that this was a bribe at all, and also that they paid too much.
Someone needs to tell Charles Kushner that he really paid too much when he paid $2.5 million to get Jared into Harvard. They saw that round-eye coming from a mile away and knew he was an easy mark.
And, on the face of it, if $500k is a “rational” amount to pay for USC (a third-tier college), how is $1.2 million “irrational” for Yale (the highest tier)?
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Thinking that illegal bribe prices should always be cheaper than quasi-legal bribe prices seems wrong too.
This is basically ticket-scalping. If the legal tickets are in some way quantity-limited, then the black market tickets are going to end up costing more.
Even though universities obviously trade admissions with endowed chairs or whatever, it still doesn’t mean they have an infinite number of libraries to name every year.
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Run that logic by us one more time?
The question isn’t whether they knew they were buying special privilege - the expenditure of funds speaks for itself - but whether they thought they were taking the legally acceptable path or not.
The Americans can reasonably be expected to know where their advantages lay - including the fact that giving millions in charitable “gifts” is a publicly accepted way to get their kids into desirable schools, even when the kids don’t meet the requisite requirements - and where they (legally) end.
Someone from China can’t necessarily be reasonably expected to have that same understanding, especially given that they’re paying millions of dollars into a “charity,” which might seem to be the same “legitimate” path that the wealthy use in this country to legally bribe their kids’ way into college. The Americans who took their money were clearly taking advantage of some ignorance of how things work - that they demanded almost enough to get Jared Kushner into college proves that.
Jared Kushner was the son of a wealthy New Jersey developer, (ultimately disgraced sure, but an American). It wasn’t an admitted “legal” donation for admittance, Harvard denied that the gift influenced his admission (flying in the face of obvious common sense). It’s not odd to think it might take a similar amount of money to bribe a similar no-name Chinese student into Yale in the same way. The amount of money has nothing to do with whether they knew it was extra-dodgy or not.
I’m sure some of the Chinese families believed, or allowed themselves to believe, that it was all legal enough. I also think some of the American parents found a way to tell themselves it was legal enough because no one was stopping them from doing it.
But I don’t know why people are twisting themselves into theoretical knots to keep up this idea that Chinese multi-millionaires, as a class of people, are only about as knowledgeable about the world as baby lambs in a cartoon forest.
If you want to believe only the Americans were hardened razor-sharp connivers, and that all of the Chinese families live simple lives on farms without basic access to the internet or history or any reasonable idea of the value and power of their own money, I’m not going to stop you. But I will say there’s a weird whiff of bias in infantalizing only them that way, however you find a way to rationalize it.
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I don’t know why sympathy for getting shaken possibly for extra money is conflated with some kind of original state of innocence. It’s on you to make sure you’re not breaking the law when doing something possibly questionable in a new country. If at no point when making a HUGE bribe do you question whether this might ALSO be against the law in this country… no I’m sorry I know too many Chinese people to think they are all or even generally that naive in some fundamental and unavoidable way. If he was jaded by pervasive corruption then how is his jadedness more pure somehow than Loughlin’s because he’s from another place?
Bribery like this may happen in China but it’s still illegal and when caught people can be punished legally and pretty fiercely. They have strict laws and high fines for it because they have a long history of problems with bribes and people want that to stop.
So there’s almost no way they thought it was fine. If they thought the American legal system was weak, selectively applied to poorer people, and that this was a common exploit that rich Americans use, then they’re not even wrong but they still chose to try to use that method, and they thought that the law wouldn’t apply to them or didn’t matter enough to even check.
I feel… no… sympathy for that aspect. Put it this way, if the father made the same mistake in China with a US business he’d be facing charges there or here for the same action, and I doubt people would be saying “this poor business man didn’t understand the concept of bribery laws…”
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There are times I think it would be so much better if we lived in a society where universities could openly say something like, “You know what, our mission is to educate as many people as we can and well as we can, and that takes money. So if you donate 25x annual tuition to our endowment, that’s enough to provide a full scholarship to someone else forever, we’ll let you bypass the admissions process and increase our total enrollment by 1 each time that happens. No refunds if you flunk out because you went to a school you weren’t prepared for.” But I also know PR is just the first of many ways that would go horribly wrong.
Yeah, people ripping other people off for millions in illegal schemes may or may not be racially biased in the way they rip people off, but obviously they don’t give a shit about any of their “clients”, race aside.
Still, even if we find it unlikely Singer thought, “Chinese people! I hate them, I’ll charge them double!”, I think it’s more than possible that Singer thought that Chinese people were dumb or that they were suckers or that they are more culturally open to paying bribes and thus charged more. All of that is still racism.
And, to be honest, if someone is running a large illegal scheme, I think it’s better than even they are racist, even if that doesn’t make a big difference in the way they run their “business”.
I could be that institutional racism made it harder to get a Chinese student in than a white one. That’s quite likely the case. That said:
- participating in systemic racism is racist;
- Singer wasn’t expensing clients for legitimate material & labour expenses that go up or down depending on how big the project is so how “hard” it was entirely subjective;
- as I suggest above, it’s not like Bayesian analysis of the proportion of the population that’s racist and the way that intersects with criminals making millions and misanthropy would lead us to believe it’s unlikely Singer is racist
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My first thought was “isn’t Yale worth at least twice as much as USC?”
Or international airports, for that matter
preying on naive, super-rich…
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In criminal law, ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse. Ignorance of fact is valid, but the law is written and available to read via officially published documents.
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Ignorance of the law not being a defence against guilt is a standard principle 99% of the time. However, some specific laws require criminal intent, which can be harder to find when ignorance is argued and plausible. Depends.
It’s not my argument. I said more than once that I don’t think their argument will convince anybody to not find them guilty, but maybe it will affect sentencing. Who knows? It will play out in court without any help from the world’s armchairs.
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Cynic in me thinks none of this was aimed at anyone in the US but rather to frame it for those in China that might ask about the money used for the bribe and all other money held by the family.
Something that was never brought up in the discussions about comparing this to the legal bribery of buying in with a building-level donation is the whole issue of US colleges allowing themselves to be dependent on foreign students paying full tuition, and the nature of scholarships. Even before Trump depressed foreign student numbers to the point some colleges were seeing budgets blown, it was apparent to me that at least in my area of study standards are lower if you can pay full tuition. That strikes me as very much a flavor of bribery, even if it doesn’t go through a middle-man.
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