Something I noticed about this college admissions scandal

Most of the parents are roughly my age!

William McGlashan, 55 . . . Agustin Huneeus Jr., 53 . . . Elizabeth, 56, and Manuel Henriquez, 55 . . . Jane Buckingham, 50 . . . Gordon Caplan, 52 . . . Marcia Abbott, 59 . . . Robert Zangrillo, 52 . . . Stephen Semprevivo, 53 . . . Davina Isackson, 55 . . . Felicity Huffman, 56 . . . Mossimo Giannulli, 55, and Lori Loughlin, 54 . . . Diane, 55, and Todd Blake, 53 . . . Gregory Colburn, 59 . . . Elisabeth Kimmel, 54 . . . Toby MacFarlane, 56 . . . Peter Jan Sartorio, 53 . . . Marjorie Klapper, 50 . . . Devin Sloane, 53 . . . John Wilson, 59 . . . Homayoun Zadeh, 57. That last dude is a USC professor who paid a bribe to get his kid into . . . USC. I didn’t even know they played lacrosse in California. I thought lacrosse was an east coast thing.

Also a few people on the list in their 60s and older but only one person under 50 years old, and she’s 48.

Anyway, this makes me happy because I feel like we don’t see enough people my age in the news. The politicians are all in their 70s and the zillionaires and Hollywood types are in their 30s.

It’s good to have a new story I can personally relate to.

It seemed odd to me that there weren’t more younger parents in that list. But then I saw that more American women are having babies in their 30s than their 20s. Have a baby when you’re 30, in 18 years the kid’s going off to college, the scandal hits the press two years later, and, bam!, you’re already 50. So I guess it does make sense that almost all the parents involved are in their 50s and older. I just hadn’t thought it through.

P.S. As I wrote awhile ago, following James Flynn, meritocracy won’t happen: the problem’s with the “ocracy”.

10 thoughts on “Something I noticed about this college admissions scandal

  1. The only good thing about finding ourselves in yet another Hesiodic Iron Age is that the Fourier wheel keeps on spinning and soon enough we’ll find ourselves in the next Golden Age, should we, God willing, live long enough to see it.

  2. Hey, I hadn’t thought about it. I’m in that age range too and my daughter will be going to college in the fall, and my wife and I have been talking about what we’ll do with all the time and an empty house.

    There are a few couples on that list but given the number of individuals, it looks like there are a bunch of partners/spouses who will soon be looking to expand their social circles. Good news for us!

  3. Not only do they need to have college-age kids, they also need to have lots of money to spend in bribes. Probably the people who have children in their twenties are unrepresented in that population. (That’s for the “rich” part, I don’t now if the “assholes” bit may also be biasing parental age somehow.)

  4. “It’s good to have a new story I can personally relate to.”

    One of the few movies about people in this age range is “Enough Said” with Julia Louis Dreyfus and James Gandolphini. Its quite good.

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