The College-Admissions Scandal and the Warped Fantasy of the American Scam

One of the heavily populated tags on magazine’s website, its pieces collected on featuring a large and varied group of stories, is “Summer of Scam.” The tag—it from the nickname given to the scam-addled summer of 2018—includes stories about and Theranos, about the “,” about the “,” about a scheme thieves dreamed up to sell $40,000 worth of insects and lizards in an “.” (There’s also a story, published in November, acknowledging that “.”) What is not yet included on the page, at least’s collection of stories about the to become a national news event: the one involving a network, including business executives and celebrities, that reportedly used bribery and other methods to ensure that the power brokers’ children would secure admission to a collection of elite colleges and universities.