The wealthy has always received all kinds of unfair advantages, and it’s really nothing new.
So said John Legend, who weighed in on the college bribery cheating scandal that involves actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Both women, along with 50 others, have been accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their children into some of the top schools in the country.
John Legend talked about the college bribery cheating scandal. (Photo: Getty Images, Phillip Faraone)
Specifically, Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli were accused of paying $500,000 in bribes so it can appear that their daughters Olivia Jade and Isabella Giannulli were on the crew team when they weren’t — just so they could attend the school.
Legend, who went to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude in 1999, said a real dialogue needs to take place regarding the scandal.
“I went to a good school,” he told ET on Wednesday (March 13). “I think it’s a longer conversation because I think a lot of people look at this rightly as fraudulent and dishonest.”
“But the bottom line is, the system has been rigged for wealthy people for a long time,” added Legend. “The admissions system rewards people’s parents being wealthy and people’s parents having gone to a certain school. There’s a lot of legal ways to do that that still aren’t really that fair to a lot of other people.”
Another person who’s been blamed in the college admissions scam, which has been called the biggest in U.S. history, is former NFL player Lynn Swann, USC’s athletic director.
Besides the crew team, the accused parents allegedly paid for their children to appear on other water sports teams at the Los Angeles based school, and USC’s polo coach Jovan Vaviv was arrested in Honolulu and fired. So was the senior associate athletic director Donna Heinel.
Some have called for Swann to step down for not overseeing his department better, which according to Deadline he’s not considering at all.
“The reason why no one would no that this was happening is because we had one person in charge of submitting the academic records to our admissions department,” he said.
