I've spent probably 90 minutes reading over the various stories relating to this college scandal....involving the some ultra-rich folks....paying down cash bribes to get their kids into prominent schools under athletic programs and faked-out scholarships. So this is my humble opinion.
Basically, if you went to one of these college (say USC), and you asked them to identify all sport scholarship athletic-participants.....the 'HR' guy for the college would say 1,588 kids. You've got the basketball guys and gals (probably ten of each), the football crowd (probably forty of them), the baseball guy (probably sixteen of them), the ladies softball crew (probably twenty of them), and so on.
Eventually, you'd add up the group and realize that they only accounted for 1500 kids, and there 88 missing folks.
Then you'd find these four kids on the water polo team, via a scholarship.....who apparently can't swim....so they've been barred from the team until they can swim.
Oh, then you have the four ladies on the track and field team who've never gone to a single competition and most of the real runners have never met the four in question.
Then you'd find these seven guys on the sword or fencing team.....who admit that they've never handled a sword in their life.
Fake athletic-participants? Yeah. The amusing thing here is that the system is so large (figure 25,000 kids at the USC)....that you'd never notice 88 fakers in the system.
So what did the parents really figure out here? First, if you got a marginal kid as a student in high school.....they'd never make it in a real college. But with the fake football program that goes on.....you bring in lesser students via that door, and treat them as marginalized college students, with lesser expectations. It makes sense for the millionaire guy to take this onto the next level.
Here's the sad thing.....we might actually be pumping out 25,000 college graduates a year (football players included), who really can't produce in a real college format. Fake degrees? Yeah.
