Cheating College Admissions Scandal by Vincent Apostolico

        Earlier this month, nearly 50 people have been charged with bribing officials and university coaches to get their children into elite colleges. The parents would pay a great amount of money to Rick Singer, the man behind all of this madness, and he would either do one of two things. He would bribe officials involved with the SAT and ACT scoring process to have the scores of these parent's children raised or he would bribe college coaches to classify their children as athletes for their teams even when they never even played the sport. It has been reported that Singer had accepted payments in the amount of approximately $25,000,000 with the highest bribe being $6,000,000. Some of the schools that have been involved with this scandal include Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southern California. Lori Loughlin, the actress who played Aunt Becky on Full House, is the most famous person involved with this case. She was arrested for paying $500,000 to get both of her daughters into the University of Southern California by paying to have their SAT and ACT scores raised and to have both them classified as athletic recruits for the rowing team.

Lori Louglin and her daughter Olivia Jade

           This is completely unfair to all of the students who are more qualified but were not accepted into these schools because parents like Lori Loughlin bought their children's spots into these same schools. These parents think they are more powerful because they can buy a spot in a competitive school even if their children are unqualified and haven't earned the spot on their own. The parents are also sending a message to their own children that they are not good enough to make it into these high ranked schools based on their own credentials.  However, many of these students didn't even know that their parents were committing these illegal acts. This really angers me because since these parents bought a spot for their children at these prestigious schools, they may have taken a spot that might have been given to a student who was more qualified but less financially lucky. This really concerns me as the college application process is right around the corner because my potential spot at a high level school could be bought by another student who may be less qualified. I feel for all the students who got rejected by these schools because their spots may have been slotted for an applicant whose deceitful parents bought their way in. I am very fortunate though that all of this chaos has come out now so that these parents get punished for these disgraceful acts and deceitful others are now on notice that this type of bribery will not go unpunished.  Qualified, hard working applicants should be given a fair shot at a spot in their dream schools. The damage has been done and must be resolved right away so that no other future college student has his or her spot ripped away by an act of bribery by a less qualified student.