Commentary: College admissions scandal shows how desperate the privileged are to keep it that way
Stories don't usually survive very long in the swift churn of news these days. But the college admissions criminal scandal has legs, probably because it has everything a big story needs: famous people, rich people, the FBI, renowned universities and major-league cheating, including the irresistible detail about Photoshopping kids' heads onto real athletes' bodies. It's one thing for the rich and renowned to leverage their fame and fortunes into better stuff - wouldn't we all want that? - but another thing altogether when it comes to breaking the law to advantage their own kids, at what looks like the expense of everyone else's.
An Oakland woman - a mother and former teacher - has already filed a half-trillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against the defendants, saying that their kids got into top schools but students like her son didn't, "not because he failed to work and study hard enough but because wealthy individuals felt that it was OK to lie, cheat, steal and bribe their children's way into a good college."
Jerome Karabel, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley and author of the book "The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton," has parsed what we're getting wrong and right about this new iteration of privilege that's as old as our universities themselves.
Q: When
