03/12/2019
The Washington Post reports that
The Justice Department on Tuesday charged more than 30 people — including two television stars — with being part of a long-running scheme to bribe and cheat to get their kids into big-name colleges and universities.
Here’s a report from Steve Sailer in 2010:
Here’s some fun gossip I heard from a fellow about the Harvard Number. He’s a reasonably well connected gentleman. On the other hand, he’s my only source for this and I don’t have the connections to check up on this, so take it for whatever it’s worth.
The Harvard Number is the amount of money Harvard would want as a donation for accepting your kid as an undergraduate. It’s not the kind of information they post on their website. You have to ask the right people in the right manner.
He said he just found out that the current Harvard Number — assuming your kid’s application was "competitive" (i.e., there’s some chance your kid would get in even if you didn’t write a check) — is $5 million.
If your kid’s "not competitive," then it is $10 million.
If there are about 1,800 freshmen at Harvard each year, then Harvard could admit, say, 100 competitive applicants whose fathers (typically, hedge fund guys) write the Harvard Number on a check — without tangibly lowering the quality of the class. That’s, theoretically, a half billion per year in virtually free money. How could an institution resist that temptation?
Quid pro quo arrangements aren’t supposed to be tax deductible as charity, but how often does the IRS get the goods on this? In practice, a big chunk of the Harvard Number gets refunded by the taxpayers.
In a later article, Sailer recounted this conversation:
And in Jared Kushner, Birdbrain Of Alcatraz,Ann Coulter said that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was pushing "sentencing reform" because he wanted something on his Wikipedia page besides "Got into Harvard because his felon father gave the college millions of dollars."Last week, I heard from one tiger mom who attributed her daughter’s success in getting accepted by famous colleges to the $1,500 she paid a consultant to more or less write her daughter’s essay about the Real Me.
But, $1,500 is nothing compared to what I heard last spring from a Harvard man with some old money who wants his son to follow in his footsteps:
Him: I made some calls. I found out the Harvard Number.
Me: What’s "the Harvard Number?"
Him: It’s how much you have to donate to Harvard to get your kid off the waiting list and into Harvard.
Me: You can do that?
Him: Yeah, but it costs five million,
Me: Five million dollars? Who can pay five million?
Him: Hedge fund guys. They ruin things for everybody.
See
The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance Into Harvard, by Daniel Golden, November 18, 2016.
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