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I think it’s this: we all realize there are buckets set aside for colleges for certain groups: AA, legacy candidates, athletes, true scholars, etc.

These buckets are more or less accepted, but in none of this is cheating supposed to be happening. If someone gets a spot on a track team who wasn’t even an athlete in HS, that means someone else for that bucket was not offered that spot.

One of my kids runs distance track for the NCAA right now, Division 1. He loves his school and he’s in the right place, but what if Stanford may have offered him a running spot, but didn’t because a rich parent cheated and superimposed their kid’s head on an athlete’s body and sent in fake running times?

Who this scam screwed is not the average high schooler, but actual athletes set aside for the bucket of athletes. The fact that that bucket exists at all is another question. It might not be fair that it exists (my son would not have made it to that college via his grades/SAT alone), but at least the athletes had to actually be star athletes in HS to get recruited. That’s a lot of work, even if not academic work.

College coaches aren’t paid that much so perhaps they are easy to bribe unfortunately.

By the way not all college athletes are low IQ morons—track and field athletes collectively tend to have one of the highest GPA of all athletes I believe—perhaps that’s not saying much :)

The single biggest reason these schools accepted these kids was that they came from wealthy families that were willing to pay the full cost -- no financial aid and no scholarships -- to attend. That's it.

Look at that one moron actress who paid half a million dollars ... just so she could then spend almost $300,000 in tuition and fees to send her daughter to USC.

The only "scandal" is that there really are people as dumb as this.

The fact that that bucket exists at all is another question. It might not be fair that it exists (my son would not have made it to that college via his grades/SAT alone), but at least the athletes had to actually be star athletes in HS to get recruited. That’s a lot of work, even if not academic work.

Very true. The athlete brings a set of skills, offers something the college values, and he's actually serious about something; that's more than many "academic" students can claim.

but what if Stanford may have offered him a running spot, but didn’t because a rich parent cheated and superimposed their kid’s head on an athlete’s body and sent in fake running times?

I still can't quite reconcile a kid getting some kind of athletic scholarship without having the athletic skills to back it up. Colleges have a very limited number of scholarships to give, and a university like a USC wants to be athletically competitive. They can't afford (from an athletic reputation) to take on a student-athlete that can't compete.