If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.
Or maybe the solution should be to stop accepting bribes. I really am surprised that almost all of the public outrage is being directed at the parents and more of it isn't being directed at the people who actually received the cash. I think lots of parents are willing to stretch their morals in order to give their kid every possible advantage in life. That isn't exactly noble behavior, but it is more forgivable to me than the old-fashioned financially motivated corruption of the people who accepted the bribes. And even the school agreeing to the "buying a building" style bribe has some type of altruistic motive to improve the welfare of the school. The people accepting these bribes were just trying to get rich.
[1] - http://collegerowcoach.org/crca-salary-survey-results-2/
The tradition is nepotism and bribes. It's a relatively recent thing for the state to go after the moderately wealthy for doing what they've done for millennia.
Source: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/14/admission-case-info/
"A donation does not purchase a place at Stanford, and we work very hard to ensure that prospective donors understand this. Stanford does not accept gifts if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the admission process."
(not saying I agree, just that there is more utility)
If that rich family didn't end up having a kid that needed to get into that school then the building would never be built - but the family is certainly able to afford funding the construction of that building. I think that's unfair in it's own way on all parties involved.
Thanks to the current tax environment the school doesn't have some alternate choice; the state is not going to step in and provide that funding.
As an administrator do you take the money or do you skip out on expanding a department or admitting 20 kids who need a full ride scholarship to attend?
> In my local public schools, the average SAT is 1470, higher than half of the Ivy League (this pretty much tells you where I live). A lot of that is due to selection of middle class Bay Area professionals, but much of it is due to focussed test prep. Local test prep (which is ridiculously intense) can add 200 points, if you commit to doing it. As a result, all those people who have near straight As can increase their score until their SATs (or ACTs) are near perfect. This leaves a huge pool.
...
> Can you get into one of these schools by being academically brilliant? Essentially no. The professors have no power to help a student get accepted. There is just no way for them to intervene. People joke saying a first author paper in Nature would do the job, but as no teen has published a paper in Nature as first author in time for admissions (the paper needs to be accepted by November of your senior year, 6 months of review time would be fast, a high schooler is unlikely to get a straight accept, so most likely will need to revise and resubmit. Realistically, submitting your ground breaking research by the end of your sophmore year would be in time. This does not happen.) I know of cases where students have had published papers by admission time. Harvard, Yale and MIT have a way to upload published papers in the admission process, but in the case I am familiar with, the papers were not reviewed by professors. How do I know this? The student was in email contact with the relevant professors (in all three colleges), as about 80% of college professors will get back to high school students who send them papers, with marked up comments (professors are wonderful). They told the child the admission committee did not contact them, and said they would admit the child to graduate school, but had no power over undergraduate admissions. At least one child with one publication in Analytic Philosophy do not get admitted to these schools.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bdpv1f/comm...
This is false, speaking from my experience at a top high school in the Bay Area (I was never +4 standard deviations, but did come close in some isolated cases). 90+% of the people who did well in math competitions were on Art of Problem Solving at some point. It's entirely possible to coach for these, it just requires coaching from people who are extremely talented (and expensive!)