College admissions scandal questions value of college education
The fallout continues in the college admission scandal rocking the nation.
Hallmark Channel and its parent company Crown Media have fired actress Lori Loughlin saying that they wouldn’t work with her after the former “Full House” star was charged with paying $500,000 in bribes to boost her two daughters’ chances of getting into the University of Southern California.
Loughlin has been a regular on the channel for years starring in “When Calls the Heart” and “Garage Sale Mysteries.” A spokesperson for Hallmark Channel told The Wall Street Journal that “We are saddened by the recent news surrounding the college-admissions allegations. We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin and have stopped development of all productions that air on the Crown Media Family Network channels involving Lori Loughlin.”
A spokeswoman for Loughlin declined to comment.
And to make matters worse, Loughlin’s daughter, Olivia Jade, is also losing sponsorships with Sephora, HP, and TRESemmé. All have said they are cutting ties with the social media influencer and her mother.
Meanwhile, pro golfer Phil Mickelson admitted that he hired William Singer, the man behind the cheating scam, to help his children out with the college admission process. However, Mickelson says he’s innocent and denied knowledge of the scheme.
FOX Business’ Charles Payne says that the story keeps getting “more salacious” but while “there’s this sort of schadenfreude kind of thing against those celebrities that like to point their finger at the deplorables, there’s also a lot of other serious issues here.” One of those issues is the fact that many of these high profile parents hired Singer without consulting their own kids.
New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz believes it’s “a really sick thing to do to your kids to tell them that you don’t believe in them and that they have to go to a certain college for you to treat them like they're an accessory.”
She said the blame falls on the parents for setting an example of “no morals or ethics” and adds that “if the kids knew, they just went along with what the parents are doing.”
Markowicz adds that “if you let your kid be who they’re going to be that’s a much better path for everybody involved. Trying to make your kid into something they’re not to have bragging rights, that’s the real problem here.”
The college admissions scandal comes to no surprise to the majority of Americans, according to National Taxpayers Union senior fellow Mattie Duppler.
“They already kind of assumed that the elite have connections that the rest of the average Americans don’t," she said on "Making Money.
Duppler adds that this whole situation puts the broader idea of getting a four-year college degree into question when, for some kids, the investment they are putting into college may not be worth what they are getting out of it.
“The notion that taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans simply for a four-year degree that, in a lot of cases, forces kids out of the labor force and deprives them of work experience that could be very useful is extremely damaging to a society where we have 7.4 million jobs open and not enough workers to fill them. The notion that our kids are all overeducated is fueled by this kind of neuroses that says the four-year degree and the letters behind your name are more important than the work you put in and the opportunity in front of you."
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However, Duppler does see this as an opportunity to take another look at how much value we as a society should be placing on a college education.
“I hope this catalyzes a conversation about how much value we actually place on a four-year university and whether or not that’s actually the investment that we’re willing to make in our future generations. To say that the only path forward for your child is a college and a four-year degree is one wrong but it’s something that these parents were willing to make at the cost of a federal indictment and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of money. That cost to me is completely unjustified but it speaks to the broader malaise of arguing that there aren’t any other opportunities for American youth and I think that that’s just not true.”
The firing of Loughlin and her daughter comes as coaches involved in the scandal have also been fired or put on leave. Universities involved in the scandal have announced that they will review their enrolled students to figure out who had knowledge of the scam and will determine the fate of their enrollment on a case-by-case basis.