Lori Ruggiero Ivy League and other elite schools caught up in the college admissions scandal will likely suffer little or no damage to their PR reputation. The episode, though, is yet another reminder that smaller and mid-tier colleges need to rethink their branding and overall image because they don’t enjoy the same exalted status as the Ivies. Social and broadcast media featured plenty of outrage about the elitism on display in the scandal. But, this too shall pass. Numerous books and studies have previously detailed questionable and legacy college admissions processes. They've been happening in plain sight. Ivy and elite schools aren't worried about the opinions of the masses. That’s not their target audience. The class of people they hope to attract will perpetuate, both financially and reputationally, their elite status. Right or wrong, wealthy and influential people aren’t necessarily concerned with “fixing” a system that benefits them. For those on the outside looking in, it’s much easier to bemoan this reality. Some call into question the value of an Ivy League education. While undeniably there are plenty of colleges and universities offering excellent educations, few offer the social status and access that Ivy and elite schools do. And that access is tied to future success, even if it hurts to admit it. Let’s look at some facts: The past six U.S. Presidents have at least one Ivy League diploma each. The founders of the country’s five largest companies graduated from, or attended for a period of time, an Ivy or elite private school. Internationally, a significant number of billionaires attended top, well-known schools in their respective countries. This list goes on and it’s not a coincidence. So, from the standpoint of these Ivy and elite schools, sitting atop multi-billion-dollar endowments and on the winning side of supply and demand, little needs to be done in the wake of last week’s indictments. Their carefully crafted statements cast the schools as victims of the alleged crimes and distance the schools from the individual employees implicated. None of the statements bother to address any backlash by condemning wealth influencing admissions or by suggesting the need for a revamped or transparent admissions process. It’s not in their best interest to do so. Unless lawmakers step in, or over-step depending on your perspective, changes are unlikely. It’s a very different situation for the vast majority of colleges and universities across the country, where enrollments are down and closings and consolidations are up. Population shifts, rising costs, and other factors have taken a toll on higher education. When faced with changes in the marketplace, brands, and in this case colleges and universities, need to pivot, adjust business models, and, or rebrand. Overall market share is shrinking and only those who differentiate and successfully target their audiences will be left with a piece of the pie. For example, it may no longer be enough to offer a top-notch liberal arts education, as many schools claim. Once a highly vaunted area of study, there is an emerging stigma that a liberal arts degree translates to lack of the specialty expertise that produces career-ready skills and the ability to quickly earn enough to cover oppressive student loans. When the average person questions, “Is a college education necessary?” they are not debating a Harvard education. They are considering the, on average, $25,000-$50,000 a year cost of a typical four-year school. This questionable value is the image problem the other colleges and universities need to address. In an era where legacy brands are told to embrace transformation for future growth, the very legacy of these Ivy and elite schools is what fuels their success. Smaller, state, and mid-tier colleges and universities that don’t have this luxury, may want to instead focus on some marketing basics: creating educational programs that address a specific need or gap in the current labor force, creating clearly articulated differentiators, and effectively targeting would-be college students and their parents through the channels they use most. The room for error is slim, much slimmer than it is for elite schools, and devastatingly slim without a huge endowment as a safety net. *** Lori Ruggiero is executive VP-strategy at North 6th Agency.<doc-sep>Apparently, working hard and getting good grades is no longer the only path to success, there is also a shortcut: corruption and bribery. One would think top educational institutions of the world would be an exception to corruption, but they aren’t. More than 50 people, some of which are extremely famous as well, have been accused of bribing college coaches and insiders to help their children secure a seat in some of the prestigious colleges of the world. Read on to know more about this scandal and the famous people involved! Biggest College Scam Prosecuted Apparently, this is the biggest college admissions scams ever prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department. It has been revealed that rich parents have bribed admission consultants to bribe coaches and administrators of colleges and asked them to admit their children in top colleges such as Yale, Georgetown, Stanford, Wake Forest, the University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles, under the tag of ‘recruited athletes.’ Furthermore, these parents asked them to change their scores and also arranged for proxy students to attend the online classes. These parents belong to the elite class of the society and have spent massive amounts of money ranging from $200,000 to $6.5 million to ensure their children’s admission. Some of these parents include famous Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin as well. Investigation and Arrests The names and the scam were all disclosed by an investigation called ‘Operation Varsity Blues,’ in which nine coaches and 33 parents have been charged. The students have not been charged with anything and reportedly, in many cases, students were not even aware of any such scams. The US attorney, Andrew Lelling in handling this case and has announced a case of $25 million bribery against 50 people. He said, “These parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege. For every student admitted through fraud, an honest and genuinely talented student was rejected.” These bribes were accepted by an admissions consulting company by the name Edge College & Career Network in Newport Beach, California. The founder of this company, William Singer has been found guilty of accepting $25 million from parents to get their children into colleges. As per reports, Huffman paid $15,000 under the clever ruse of donation, which was, in reality, a bribe so that her daughter could take part in the college entrance exam scam. A transcript of a call recording has also been found that includes a shady conversation between a desperate Ivy League parent and a cooperating witness from Key Worldwide Foundation. This Foundation is guilty of accepting as much as $25 million as a bribe to get children into elite colleges. Image Source<doc-sep>Series: A Closer Look Examining the News This story was co-published with The Washington Post. My 2006 book, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates,” was intended as a work of investigative journalism. But many of its more affluent readers embraced it as a “how to” guide. For years afterward, they inundated me with questions like, “How much do I have to donate to get my son (or daughter) into Harvard (or Yale, or Stanford)?” Some even offered me significant sums, which I declined, to serve as an admissions consultant. They may have been motivated by a tale I told in the book about a youth whose admission to Harvard appears to have been cemented by a $2.5 million pledge from his wealthy developer father. The then-obscure Harvardian would later vault to prominence in public life; his name was Jared Kushner. Those requests from people who misunderstood my aim in writing the book came back to mind on Tuesday when I heard about the latest and most brazen scandal involving upper-crust parents — including chief executives, real estate investors, a fashion designer and two prominent actresses — manipulating college admissions. One would think that the rich and famous would care less than the rest of us about foisting their children on elite colleges. After all, their kids are likely to be financially secure no matter where, or if, they go to college. Yet they seem even more desperate — to the extent, according to a complaint, that dozens of well-heeled parents ponied up six or seven figures for bogus SAT scores and athletic profiles for their children to increase their chances at Yale, Stanford and other brand-name universities. The Daily Digest Get the latest news from ProPublica every afternoon. The parents allegedly paid anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million to William Rick Singer, who ran a college counseling business in Newport Beach, California. Singer in turn bribed standardized test administrators and college coaches in upper-class sports like crew, sailing and water polo, even staging photos of the applicants playing various sports, prosecutors said. The parents “chose to corrupt and illegally manipulate the system,” Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said at a press conference Tuesday. “There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy.” Perhaps these parents were pining to boast at Hollywood cocktail parties about their Ivy League imprimatur. Possibly their offspring, like those of many successful families, lacked the motivation to strive and excel academically, and without a substantial boost would have been consigned to colleges of lesser repute. In any event, such allegedly criminal tactics represent the logical, if extreme, outgrowth of practices that have long been prevalent under the surface of college admissions, and that undermine the American credos of upward mobility and equal opportunity. Although top college administrators and admissions officials were apparently unaware of the deception, their institutions do bear some responsibility for developing and perpetuating the system that made it possible. I began looking into this issue in 2003, at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the fairness of affirmative action for minorities. I documented another form of affirmative action — for the white and privileged. According to one poll after another, most Americans believe that college admissions should be based on merit, rather than wealth or lineage. Through their own intelligence and hard work, students with the best grades, the highest test scores, the most compelling recommendations and other hard-earned credentials achieve a coveted ticket to higher education — and with it, enhanced prospects for career success and social status. So goes the legend perpetuated by elite colleges, anyway. But decades of investigating college admissions have led me to conclude that, for rich and famous families, it’s more like a television game show, “Who Wants to Be an Ivy Leaguer?” complete with lifelines for those who might otherwise be rejected. Instead of phoning a friend or asking the audience, the wealthy benefit from advantages largely unavailable to middle-class and poor Americans — what I described in my book as “the preferences of privilege.” The best-known and most widespread of those preferences is conferred on alumni children, known as “legacies,” who tend as a group to be disproportionately white and well-off. But rich applicants whose parents didn’t attend the target university, like Kushner, still have a leg up. Read More The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance Into Harvard ProPublica editor Daniel Golden wrote a book a decade ago about how the rich buy their children access to elite colleges. One student he covered is now poised to become one of the most powerful figures in the country. Rich candidates can enhance their standardized test scores with test-prep and tutoring. They don’t have to rely for college recommendations and advice on an overburdened public high school guidance counselor with a caseload of hundreds of students. Instead, their parents can afford a private counselor who discreetly advises the desired university that the family has a history of philanthropy and, in case of acceptance, would be inclined to be especially generous. Similarly, inner-city schools often don’t field teams in patrician sports like crew, squash, fencing and the like. But prep and suburban schools do, giving their affluent students an opportunity for the significant edge given to recruited athletes, even in upper-class sports limited to a relative few. Colleges favor recruits in these sports at least partly for fundraising reasons; they’re important to wealthy alumni and donors who played them in college or enjoy them as leisure activities. So the parents charged in the current case followed customary practices of the entitled: hiring a private counselor, getting test help and participating in a patrician sport. The difference is that they allegedly took blatant short cuts: The counselor was unscrupulous, a stand-in secretly took the tests and the applicants didn’t actually play those sports. But, without the tilted system of preferences already in place, the parents would have had to choose a different route — or actually let merit determine their children’s college destiny.<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON – The college admissions bribery investigation that led to charges on Tuesday against 50 people, including CEOs and Hollywood celebrities, has placed a new focus on how President Donald Trump's son-in-law got into Harvard. Jared Kushner, who serves as a top aide to Trump, and his acceptance to the Ivy League school was investigated as part of the 2006 book "The Price of Admission" written by ProPublica editor Daniel Golden. The book examined how the nation's wealthy buy their children into prestigious schools with tax write-offs and other donations. One such donation was made by Kushner's father, real estate developer Charles Kushner. Golden wrote a 2016 story after Trump won the presidency, about his book and specifically a legal $2.5 million donation that Charles Kushner pledged to Harvard in 1998. It wasn't long after, according to Golden, that his son was accepted to the prestigious school. Start the day smarter:Get USA TODAY's Daily Briefing in your inbox More:Felicity Huffman released on bail after allegedly bribing to get kid into college as part of sweeping admissions scandal Golden noted that at the time, Harvard only accepted one out of every nine applicants and those at Jared Kushner's high school didn't believe his grades or test scores were good enough to attend the school. In response to the allegations, Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Kushner Companies, told ProPublica that it was "false" that the donation was linked to Jared Kushner's acceptance. She said that his parents "are enormously generous and have donated over 100 million dollars to universities, hospitals and other charitable causes." He continued: "Jared Kushner was an excellent student in high school and graduated from Harvard with honors." While others who made large donations to Harvard had been former students, Golden noted Charles Kushner had not attended the school. Golden said he examined why Kushner would give millions to the school and found both of his sons enrolled there. Golden reported that unlike other large gifts to the school, Harvard hadn't sent out press releases announcing the donations. He said he found the donations in Kushner's finances after subpoenas from federal authorities made them public. Charles Kushner was convicted in 2005 of tax evasion, making illegal campaign donations and witness tampering. But the tale of Kushner's donation and his son's acceptance was only one case. The book also examined how others, including the sons of former vice president Al Gore, were admitted into schools. Those admissions became the center of conversation on Tuesday after federal officials announced what they called the nation's largest-ever college admissions bribery case prosecuted by the Justice Department. The investigation netted charges against 50 people, including CEOs, prominent financiers, college athletic coaches and actresses such as Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. More:'Full House' fans express shock as Lori Loughlin is indicted in college admissions bribery case More:Fake disabilities, photoshopped faces: How feds say celebrities, coaches and scammers got kids into elite colleges Federal prosecutors say it was all part of an elaborate conspiracy that involved cheating on the SAT and ACT and parents paying coaches "enormous sums" to get their children into elite universities and colleges by fabricating their athletic credentials. Huffman, best known for her role on TV's "Desperate Housewives," is accused of paying $15,000 to a made-up charitable organization that then helped her daughter cheat on the SATs. Huffman also discussed the scheme in a recorded phone call with a cooperating witness, according to the investigation. Loughlin, who starred in the 1990s sitcom "Full House," is also facing the same felony charges — conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. Prosecutors say Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, another defendant, paid bribes of $500,000 in exchange for having their two daughters designated as crew team recruits at the University of Southern California even though neither participated in the sport. As part of the nationwide conspiracy, coaches agreed to pretend that the children of parents who paid bribes were highly recruited athletes when they didn't even compete in that particular sport, prosecutors said. More individuals, including additional parents, could be later charged amid the still-ongoing multi-state FBI investigation, which took on the code name "Operation Varsity Blues" by law enforcement when it was launched 10 months ago. The schools, including Yale, Georgetown and Stanford universities, USC, UCLA, the University of Texas and Wake Forest University, are not targets of the sweeping investigation, prosecutors said. And no students were charged.