College admissions should be anonymous and strictly based on standardized tests.
I'll say the opposite - all college donations and income should be publicly available as soon as the ACH transaction clears. Questionable sources immediately flagged. Make every single dollar within the education system completely transparent. Then if some kid gets admitted, and we also see their parents made a $5 million donation, we can go ahead and appropriately stain that kid's admission.
What about the kids who really earned that admittance and their parents made a sizable donation? Then the parents donate their funds to another educational institution. Or the kid attends another institution. Wherever these two actions overlap - immediately assume fraud over anything else.
On bribes directly to individuals - their funds are all publicly available as well. If that's a problem, there are millions of other jobs they could pursue rather than being a useless parasite on the education system.
There's people who spend their whole adolescence studying for the SATs and their parents pay for every possible tutor and advantage they can find. Side note, my friend's mom got him diagnosed with ADHD so that he could get extra time on SAT (spoiler: he never had ADHD).
> From 1981 to 1990, three separate analyses of all the prior studies were published in peer-reviewed journals. They found a coaching effect of 9 to 25 points on the SAT Verbal and of 15 to 25 points on the SAT Math. In 2004, Derek Briggs, using the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, found effects of 3 to 20 points for the SAT Verbal and 10 to 28 points for the SAT Math. Donald Powers and Donald Rock, using a nationally representative sample of students who took the SAT after its revisions in the mid-1990s, found an average coaching effect of 6 to 12 points on the SAT Verbal and 13 to 18 points on the SAT Math.
I have not seen any studies on the effect of accomodations, though.
I think the amount parents will pay for those relatively meagre extra points, and the fact that the parents in this case had to resort open bribery, speaks relatively well for the meritocraticness of the current system.
Open the books, show us that nothing is being swept under the rug, and just let the undeserving children of millionaires go to third tier schools.
It's a pity accents aren't properly fakeable yet.
Furthermore, the Harvard case has also demonstrated that interviews are used as a tool to suppress the chances of Asian applicants. While it may seem cold to reduce candidates to their applications, if the goal is to provide a consistent admissions process interviews are not a good choice.