Which is what the whole fuss is about-colleges would prefer to be bribed multiple millions by people like David Shaw for his kids, rather than a paltry few tens of thousands, like what the CT lawyer or Mrs. Half-the-voices-on-the-simpsons paid in bribes, the filthy plebes. The only people who should be able to corrupt the admissions process are the colleges themselves, and then only for amounts in excess of $1,000,000 paid by the gentry.
That the act of bribing one's way into a particular school is now a federal crime (the so-called "honest services fraud") is risible and out of the scope of what criminal law should concern itself with.
Paying high prices above board and openly for services is not fraud or corruption, bribing an employee to break clear standards and policies at their work place absolutely is.
OTOH, we could accept that no ratable harm has been done to the public at large, and that this comes down to a private dispute between the university, the bribee, and the briber, where the latter two could be sued by the former for negligence in performance and tortious interference respectively. Civil law provides remedies for this, what is possibly achieved by making it criminal?
Moving money like that is also, inter alia, going to corrupt the income tax system - if employees are receiving a significant percentage of their income through cash bribes from customers, it’s unlikely they’d report it properly on their income tax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery
These laws seem quite reasonable to me. Do you also believe an employee stealing or embezzling funds from their employer should be a civil, not criminal matter?
Edit: to add, some of the colleges in the admissions scandal were public, not private colleges - USC and UCLA. So bribery of the officials in that case was bribery of an employee of the state, not just a private business. It should be obvious that legalizing bribery of state employees is a very dangerous path to go down.
No low-trust society ever legislated its way into becoming a high-trust society. I remember America before the "honest services mail fraud" statute was in place, and contra your assertion, 1987 America didn't resemble a third world corruptocracy anymore than it does today.
if employees are receiving a significant percentage of their income through cash bribes from customers, it’s unlikely they’d report it properly on their income tax.
s/bribes/payments/ ...this is a risk you run by allowing cash. Of course, the risks of not having cash as a method of payment are different, and in my thinking more substantial.
Do you also believe an employee stealing or embezzling funds from their employer should be a civil, not criminal matter?
Of course! While we're at it, I also believe that tax fraud is a criminal offense. Note that none of these need the contrivance of honest service fraud to have been well prosecuted in the past, nor should they need the federal prosecutor's favorite GOTOs of mail & wire fraud to secure a true bill from a grand jury.
Edit: to add, some of the colleges in the admissions scandal were public, not private colleges - USC and UCLA. So bribery of the officials in that case was bribery of an employee of the state, not just a private business. It should be obvious that legalizing bribery of state employees is a very dangerous path to go down.
So...any state employee? I mean, bribing elected officials and officers of the court is already illegal; I really don't lump college admissions officers (or college garbagemen, lifeguards, sysadmins, psychiatrists) into the group of people the corruption of whose duty is so serious as to merit prosecution in federal courts, simply by dint of where they get their paycheck from.
Which makes it kind of difficult to feel bad for the colleges who were supposedly the "victim" of these scams: they have no problem with bribery, they were just complaining that they didn't get their cut.