This is Stephen Robbins. Welcome to the Get It Done Guys, quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

Scandal. We just love scandal. And today, it's a college admission scandal. As Harvard Law School

Professor Michael Sandell points out in his book, What Money Can't Buy, The Moral Limits of Markets,

money is increasingly letting rich people use their wealth to buy things, like college

admissions that used to be obtainable with other currencies.

Once you could be poor, but if you studied hard or worked hard at sports, it could help you

get into a top college.

Now it seems that rich kids can bypass the accomplishment route,

and they can instead crowd out everyone else by using their money to game the system.

In the current scandal, rich parents hired a consultant to falsify their kids' records, to bribe college coaches to say the kids should be admitted on athletic grounds, and to falsify test scores.

The result, rich kids getting into

elite schools they aren't qualified for. And the highly qualified kids who don't have the money

to bribe their way in? Well, they don't matter, do they? Because they're not rich. I was a not

rich kid, and this is a big deal for me. I take this personally. I grew up lower middle class.

We even lived for a bit in a trailer where I had three cubic feet of space for all my

worldly possessions.

I moved out at 15, and I supported myself, barely, programming computers.

There were days that I literally could not afford to eat.

My friends all knew my situation, and I found out decades later, decades, that they and their parents would actually conspire to invite me over for homework.

And if dinner happened to be served during a study break, well, of course, I was welcome to join.

I studied my butt off.

I worked super hard.

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