I'm not sure that what she did here should even be characterized as "wrong" in any sort of legal context. Consider this:
1. She paid a lot of money to bribe college admissions officials to get her child into a school. Rich donors engage in different forms of "back-door bribery" to get their unqualified children into schools all the time -- by making large donations to the endowments of these schools.
2. She paid someone to rig her child's SAT scores. Colleges have already rigged their admissions processes to admit unqualified minorities all the time -- so clearly the SAT scores aren't relevant to the process for EVERYONE.
3. Her child allegedly wouldn't have qualified for admission to the college without these "illegal" actions by the mother. And yet the child was still in school a couple of years later -- which meant she was obviously capable of meeting the school's academic standards for a student.
Like I said ... I don't think this woman committed a crime at all. Her only "crime" was that she exposed the entire college admissions process as a farce.
There were laws. Not many laws, mind, but still laws and she broke them. Since her defense was that her daughter had a learning disability, it makes even less sense to break the law since the system is heavily tilted in her favor to begin with. Learning disabled students are allowed to do things, like take untimed tests at a time of their choosing instead of in 50 minutes with the rest of the class for example. Also there are a buttload of tutoring opportunities available to say nothing of private assistance her mom could legally line up. Then there is the grade socialism that results from good students being assigned charge of crappy students for group projects for which the entire group receives the same grade. Typically these projects weigh heavily as a percentage of the final grade. Staying in, if you have the money, is a piece of cake. The problem is getting in.
Like it or not the colleges do still have knowledge that people need, so it’s not like you can just say a pox on all their houses and hit the library. My problem is that between work, school, family, there’s pretty much no time to hit the library or for side projects. The biggest benefit is the professors themselves, fellow students, and the textbooks. I’ll be honest and say that the “too socially desirable to fail” athletes and others that I got stuck with in group projects seem very unlikely to fall into the asset category later. They just take your work and move on without a backward glance, like they are entitled to it.