Too bad it didn’t include Harvard:

As detailed in U.S. Department of Justice filings, the scheme involved a company, known as “the Key,” that illegally manipulated two main “side doors” to secure the admission of its clients’ children to elite universities. The Key, run by William Rick Singer, bribed officials at college-entrance examination companies to allow third parties to take the students’ tests for them. And it bribed college coaches to identify the students as recruited athletes — guaranteeing them preferential treatment by the admissions office — even though they were not so recruited.

Although let’s be real, Harvard already has legacy admissions. The price tag for a side door into Harvard is likely in the millions, rather than the multi-hundred thousands.

Here’s the sales pitch:

What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school … They want guarantees, they want this thing done. They don’t want to be messing around with this thing. And so they want in at certain schools. So I did what I would call, “side doors.” There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in. Because the back door, when you go through institutional advancement, as you know, everybody’s got a friend of a friend, who knows somebody who knows somebody, but there’s no guarantee, they’re just gonna give you a second look. My families want a guarantee.

I’ve never worked at a school that had refereed undergraduate admissions, but now I wish I had. After seeing the different tensions and fault lines that split through a graduate-level admissions committee, I can only wonder at the amount of political jockeying that happens at the undergraduate level. Graduate school at least had a lot of technical ability and raw knowledge by which to disqualify applicants.

What’s interesting to me here is how this is yet another example of how elites game the system, while the rest of us dupes try to do the right thing. And yet, these aren’t even the elitest elites.

Do it right, and you get your name on a building or an entire academic program or an endowed chair, AND your kid gets an auto-accept.

With the famous actresses named, this feels a lot like the Seungri scandal that broke in the k-pop world over the last week: a token investigation that will drum up a lot of media hype and general outrage, blowing off steam from the real corruption.

There are people that the public already knows to provide a “face” for the wrongdoing. A scapegoat, really.

And when those people see justice, it’s all taken care of—right?

Yeesh.