For Once, Maybe Aunt Becky Shouldn’t Have Mercy

image courtesy of TVLine

The nation is still reeling from the recent college admissions scandal, a sting operation dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues,” which took down fifty parents accused of paying hundreds of thousands––even millions––of dollars to get their (already extremely privileged) children into elite schools like Yale, University of Southern California, Stanford and Georgetown. What really shook the public was the involvement of beloved actresses known for their roles as mothers like Felicity Huffman and especially our dear, sweet Aunt Becky, Lori Loughlin. Olivia Jade, Loughlin’s daughter, was already a career YouTube star through her beauty channel and openly expressed a disinterest in attending classes at USC. That didn’t stop Loughlin and husband Mossimo Giannulli from bribing the school over $500,000 to get both their daughters (the other being the not-so-famous Isabella Giannulli) into the school. What was their cover, you ask? Admitting them as fake crew team recruits. No, really.

 No one has the time to go through the list of every single effed up thing these wealthy parents did to get their underperforming children into some of the best schools in the country. Especially without getting red in the face thinking about how hard you worked to get into school while other people were being photoshopped onto athletes bodies for schools they may or may not have even wanted to attend. Instead, the new question on everyone’s mind is, will women like Huffman and Loughlin actually do the time for doing the crime?

 Due to some (as in a shit ton of) recent political events, the country seems to be a bit in a state of confusion about what exactly is going on with our judicial system. With people being pardoned left and right on account of their fame, socioeconomic status and, let’s be honest, race, it’s within reason to wonder whether or not Aunt Becky is going to be sentenced, or if she will get all that mercy Uncle Jesse droned on about.

 But first, let’s jump back to 2011 and catch up with Kelley Williams-Bolar. Williams-Bolar, a black mother from Ohio, was arrested and convicted of grand theft and evidence tampering for lying about her address to get her kids into a better school district than the inner-city district they were living in at the time. Though she did falsify records, the address she claimed to live at was that of her father, whom she lived with for a time after her house was broken to. She was trying to move her children out of the Akron school district and into the neighboring district of Copley-Fairlawns. According to Great Schools, a nonprofit organization that provides parents with data and information about their children’s’ education, these two districts have a five-point ACT disparity and a 22 percent four-year high school graduation disparity, with Copley-Fairlawns coming out on top both times. A better high school education results in better test prep which results in a better chance at getting into a four-year university which results in…well, you get it.

Meanwhile, the Varsity Blues students were already pretty darn set to succeed with their pre-existing socioeconomic background, and attending a top performing high school at that status statistically does very little for the individual’s overall happiness.

 Say what you will about whether or not arresting Williams-Bolar was just, but using her case as a precedent, one can only hope the egregious level at which Loughlin, Huffman and 48 others have committed the same crime will at least uphold some faith in the judicial system and grant them an equitable punishment.