College admission scandal

The college admission scandal in the United States has one main lesson for us: criminal acts matter only when they are on a micro level. Rick Singer was the man behind the scheme to cheat the college admission process and help rich parents get their undeserving children into top US colleges. The scheme involved a lot of money spent in the right places, tweaking the right rules to the benefit of the applicant whose parents paid up, eventually landing the applicant into places such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc using the “back door”. 

Singer would advise parents to claim that their child had a disability, which enabled them to get extra time at the college entrance test. He used to buy a falsified disability report from a psychologist paying $4,000-$5,000. Then he would create a fake profile and history of the applicant showing him or her to be really good at a certain sport using Photoshop. College admission staff and coaches were bribed to recommend the applicant to the admission committee. Parents would be advised to take their child to certain testing location, where Singer controlled the proctors. In a nutshell, it was a scheme that worked in getting children of rich parents, including celebrities, admitted to top US colleges. 

In this true crime story, the focus is on the smaller crime and the smaller criminal. The pirates always get punished and the emperors, despite committing major and bigger crimes, remain immune from even being called a criminal. Graduates from universities such as Harvard and Yale go on to join government and private sectors. Those in government justify going to wars in distant lands and deny science. Those in the private sector play in sync with their fellow graduates in the government because they have to sell their employer’s products (weapons and oil). 

These graduates may not have used any back or side doors during their entrance exams but upon graduation they become part of a system that creates mayhem and destabilisation worldwide. It was the engineers from major American universities who upon joining ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel corporations realised that digging for more fossil fuel and their combustion was going to destroy the planet. Yet, they kept quiet in order to keep their job and perhaps a hefty pay. It was the journalism graduates that while working for The New York Times and other major American publications made the case for the invasion of Iraq based on nothing but absolute lies. 

George W Bush was a Yale graduate who waged two major wars bringing destruction around the world. He justified the torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees based on “Torture Memos” authored by John Yoo, a Yale graduate. I can confidently state that Yoo did not use a back door for his Yale admission. The Harvard graduate president Obama obviously didn’t use any back door as he clearly is a very intelligent man. He is a constitutional lawyer by training yet, violated the Constitution enormously when he killed US citizens without due process and stood his ground in justifying its legality using a ludicrous legal memo called the Drone Memo authored by David Barron, also a Harvard graduate. No back door. 

Finding it criminal to use corruption and immoral acts to gain entrance to a college yet having no qualms when those graduates play a lead role in wreaking havoc around the world including in the US, is a remarkable trait of discipline of mind and culture. 

Somehow Ivy League schools never stop to look back and ask themselves what they have been doing wrong, which is creating the kind of human beings who very purposefully continue to work against peace, science, and humanity. Ironically, the schools’ worst contribution to society comes from the ones who didn’t cheat their way in.