What Rich Parents Do To Get Their Kids Into College

If you were one of those kids who turned down social opportunities so you could study, pulled all-nighters cramming for the SAT, graduated with honors, and still failed to get into the school of your dreams, the recent news about rich parents buying their kids spots in top universities probably pissed you off. Heck, it even pissed off people who didn't try that hard to get into college. But it's kind of even more upsetting when you find out there's a long and honored tradition of rich parents buying their kids' way into top colleges, and most of the tactics they use are 100 percent legal.

Yes, it's true, you don't necessarily need a crooked college entrance counselor to get your dumb-as-a-bag-of-rocks son or daughter into Harvard. All you really need is a little bit of know-how. Oh yeah, and also a ton of money.

But don't worry, if you don't have money your kid can still get in through hard work and academic merit, right? Sure. Just as long as there's some room left after all the dumb kids have paid their entrance bribes ... err ... fees. Hey, though, the good news is if you do have paper money oozing out of your pores, here's a complete list of all the things you can do to buy your kid some academic merit.

Felicity Huffman, who made herself a tidy little fortune by starring in Desperate Housewives and marrying William H. Macy, was also accused in the Operation Varsity Blues crackdown. Huffman's alleged crimes included felony conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud. More specifically, the FBI says she paid $15,000 to a fake charity called Key Worldwide, which helped her daughter cheat on the SATs. According to CNN, a "cooperating witness" says he traveled cross-country to administer the SAT test to Huffman's daughter, and then she magically scored 400 points higher than she did on the PSAT she took a year earlier.

Huffman was evidently just following the herd, though. Similar accusations have been leveled at Gregory Abbott, the founder of a food and beverage packaging company. He's accused of spending $50,000 to have someone correct his daughter's ACT exam answers, and another $75,000 to have someone just take the whole dang SAT for her, because really, why even bother going through the motions. And similar accusations have been made against another dozen or so parents, so Key Worldwide seems to have been doing a rather tidy business in fraudulent test-taking. It's all been pretty much foiled, now, though, so if you still want to buy your kid a college placement, you'll have to keep reading for some less illegal but similarly obnoxious ideas.

This tactic is less shady, in fact, it's something every parent would probably do given the means. The real problem is that most parents don't have the means, so wealth is still indirectly giving some kids an advantage over others.

It seems like pretty standard stuff — sign your child up for a service like Kaplan Test Prep, which offers live classes both in-person and online for between $799 to $2,599 (if you also want to buy tutoring), and in return your child will be prepared when test day arrives. Seems pretty legit. But if you want your kid to really have an advantage, CNN says you can hire a company like Noodle Pros, which will go beyond ordinary classes with elite one-on-one tutoring services for a mere $200 to $550 an hour.

Now never mind that the average family is going to have a hard time just coming up with the $799 for Kaplan's cheapest option — even those who can afford to pay for that small advantage can't possibly compete with the advantage that comes from $200 to $550 an hour for one-on-one tutoring sessions. So it's legal, but there's no doubt it creates an uneven playing field. Take two kids who have exactly the same ability and ambition, give one of them thousands of dollars' worth of professional tutoring and give the other one nothing, and which one is going to get into the better school? Yep.

Prestigious internships aren't easy to get. First, you need background, skills, ambition, academic worthiness, and the ability to write a stellar essay and cover letter. Then, your application needs to rise to the top, where someone with decision-making power might actually see it. Or you can just have your parents buy an internship for you.

Yes, wealthy parents can do this for their kids, too. According to the Wall Street Journal, there are for-profit agencies out there that will, for a fee, place kids in mostly unpaid internships. Or parents can buy their kids an internship on a charity auction site. They could even pay a marketing firm for a direct-mail campaign. That's right, some parents actually resort to sending out "please hire me" postcards to every prestigious company that might be able to give their kid an advantage.

Charity auction sites are particularly insidious, though, because when you purchase an internship outright you can just skip the whole process of trying to impress a potential employer with trite things like postcards, resumes, cover letters, and essays. Internships are often sold as fundraising efforts for a school, which means you can buy your kid an advantage either before college or during, and it's tax-deductible, too. It's a win-win, except for the poor kids who still have to do it all based on merit. For them it's really more of a win-lose.

So you may not have to send your kid to an elite private school, but there's one thing you can do — you can buy a home in a wealthy neighborhood because wealthy neighborhoods tend to be in the better-performing school districts. Hmm, wonder why that is. It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that more money gives schools more resources to hire better teachers and develop more effective academic programs, which basically equals better educated, more college-ready kids.

The Washington Post says this is one of the simplest and most effective tactics for raising kids who get into great colleges — find out what the best local school district is and make sure your nine-bedroom mansion is solidly located within its boundaries. In fact income segregation appears to be growing fastest among families with children, who are more likely to get into real estate bidding wars for the sake of a great school district. A 2016 study found that childless families tend to live in more economically diverse neighborhoods, but families with kids will often buy into wealthier neighborhoods with better schools.

Those schools might not be a free pass to an elite university — your kids will still have to work hard to set themselves apart from peers — but they won't have to do it at an underfunded school in a poor neighborhood, where concerns about crime and violence are often equal to concerns about test scores.

The fabulous thing about wealth, at least from a wealthy person's perspective, is that it tends to run in families. So if your parents got you a place at Harvard when they donated a bunch of money for a new building or if you got in because they paid someone to take the SAT for you, or heck, even if you got in on your own academic merits because yes, that does actually happen occasionally, you might not even need to do any of these other things to get your own kids into college. Colleges will often admit students at least partly based on the fact that their parents are alumni.

How much does it help to be the child of an alumnus? According to MarketWatch, most schools won't say, probably because they don't want anyone to accuse them of giving certain students an unfair advantage. But according to a 2011 survey conducted by Harvard's student newspaper, about 30 percent of students with a family connection to the university got in. That means that being the son or daughter of a Harvard grad makes you around four times as likely to get into Harvard as the average person who actually worked hard in school and/or got in through donations or bribery. So hooray, you can just skip the line and get a "legacy" admission and then celebrate with a $4,000 bottle of champagne because you can afford it.