That’s possible. Another possibility is that someone who got outbid (tried to bribe someone who’d already taken a bigger bribe) got pissed and decided to get their revenge by blowing the whistle.
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USC has already fired at least a couple of coaches over this scandal, as have many other universities.
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Can confirm.
More generally, this is hopefully the beginning of a discussion on the entire system of college access in the US.
From my perspective, it’s difficult to see why anything other than academic merit should be considered, as the subjective wiggle room is where students over here find themselves edged out by the well-connected elite.
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Same with UCLA’s soccer coach. Fired or placed on leave, if they’re convicted they’re gone.
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Agreed, with an addendum: even “academic merit” is a dodgy measure when it’s based upon an education system so heavily stratified by race and class.
Segregation academies, tutors, technology, cops in schools.
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Well, this is true, largely because the sheer numbers of folks who are sufficiently wealthy to make those enormous megadonations and also have kids of college age are relatively small. The number who can swing a few hundred grand or so is exponentially larger, and the number of slots affected is, therefore, approaching a quantity that may keep less affluent folks out of the elite schools. Also, the whole illegality issue plays into it, as well!
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The Ivies are so enormously over endowed that they really should not be charging tuition at all. To say they are “dependent” on much of anything is at least an overstatement, if not an outright misstatement.
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It’s a comparative point:
the public schools are not as dependent on the backdoor as the Ivies and private liberal arts colleges are
Some Ivies (like Harvard) don’t charge tuition to households under a fairly high (above U.S. median) annual income. But they use their endowments for this purpose, and the backdoor (and in part tax-deductible) donations aren’t going into the endowments but directly into specific infrastructure projects (usually ones that slap the donor’s name on a wall). Public schools don’t have to do this as often, since the state will usually cover such projects.
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That’s the theory.
I work at a public school of some repute in the richest state in the Union, and we are repeatedly told that hiring and salaries must be frozen (or there have to be layoffs and salary cuts) because of budget shortfalls while the campus itself is a sea of cranes for the all the new named buildings being constructed.
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Yep, this. A huge can of worms needs a-openin’.
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Yeah. I went to Cal, so making fun of Stanford was a mandatory activity. However, there was still a lot of (grudging) respect for our rival school since it was academically rigorous. USC on the other hand had the reputation as the place your parents sent you if they had the money to pay for Stanford but you weren’t smart enough to get in. I know things have changed a lot in USC’s academic reputation but the “University of Spoiled Children” moniker dies hard.
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The 'sweeps stakes!
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Wait, what?
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Limited position, not many other options, outside of the trap of adjuncting.
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That doesn’t sound too good…
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My dad spent his entire career as an adjunct prof, having to work multiple side gigs to put bread on the table. I remember my mom being a single parent most of my childhood. As a musician it was probably easier to find those than as a historian, though.
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It’s not, but it’s the way things are going. At my school, we have had between 5 and 10 tenure track profs leave in the last 10 years - not a single one of them have been replaced with a tenure track position, but with lecturers, Visiting lecturers, or a couple of adjuncts…
There are probably more adjunct positions now for newly minted phds in my field, which means no job security or benefits. I’m lucky, because I’m not the primary bread winner in my family. Others aren’t so lucky. It’s still disheartening and depressing.
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It’s not like people in athletic scholarships are getting truly free rides, either. As you hinted at, they are exploited mightily.
They don’t get paid, can’t accept gifts or sponsorships, and study is discouraged. If they get injured, they could lose their scholarships and be out on their ass unless they are moneyed.
Only a tiny percentage of these athletes actually go on to the big time of being actually signed to a professional team.
For most of them, they end up with a half-assed college education and their prospects no better than the average person other than having stories about how they played college sportsball.
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