For most top schools, getting in is much harder than graduating for a student who would remotely reasonably consider the school.

In this case, the students are alleged to have been less qualified which does not imply unqualified.

Admissions is a rat race, where you have to run as fast as you can just to keep up. You may have a 4.0 GPA, and 1550 on your SAT, and are the quarterback of the hockey team, but you'll be passed over for someone with a 4.0 GPA and a 1550 SAT, who is both the quarterback of the hockey team, AND spent three weeks building orphanages in East Oblastan.

Once you're admitted, you no longer need to participate in the rat race. You just need to meet the criteria for passing your classes, which do not scale up, just because the person sitting next to you in lecture is an orphanage-builder.

i guarantee you there are a number of people every year who get rejected from Berkeley but accepted to Stanford (or equivalent) -- just a lot of noise in the process and after a certain point it becomes pretty arbitrary.

i bet this fact is how the admissions officials rationalized this corruption -- if the line between acceptance and rejection is arbitrary anyway, how much worse could it be to try to get some money out of it? (a lot worse)

One of my kids applied to Cal a few years back...at Cal you apply to the individual college (such as the college of engineering) when you apply. Some colleges are much easier to get into than others and it's very difficult to change colleges once you are admitted, it's like applying to get into the school all over again. Obviously getting into the CS or Engineering programs at Cal is very hard but many of the other programs are much less competitive. I don't know if that's how all the UC schools are or not, but the difficulty of admissions seems like a mixed bag at UC Berkley.

If they can manage to make "student athletes" pass classes they’ve never been to (and who they pay tuition for) then how hard do you think it would be for someone that’s actually paying to go there?

The admissions criteria for universities don't make a lot of sense. The standardized tests select for students that are good at writing those tests.

Malcolm Gladwell (yeah, yeah, I know) did a podcast series about the admissions process for law schools and the role that test taking speed plays in the admission process.

This is one of the papers he referenced:

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

I presume they are average students or pick an easy route through the school, considering they had an _easy_ route into the school.

Easier majors

Colleges rarely if ever fail students. There’s a known phenomenon of grade curving (adding +x% to exams if it was difficult for some students) which I never understood during my time in higher education.

Yet it makes sense because universities want to lessen liabilities and have rich alum give back (esp. the case with the children of wealthy donors).