As more details of the $25 million college admission bribery scandal emerge, nobody's looking any better. "Some of these parents allegedly paid up to $6.5 million, which is insane," Trevor Noah said on Wednesday's Daily Show. "Honestly, for that amount of money, just buy a smarter kid." The wealthy parents paid either to boost their kids' test scores or bribe them onto sports teams.
"So reportedly, these college coaches would take bribes to pretend they needed these non-athletes on their teams," Noah explained. "I think the perfect punishment for these coaches would be forcing them to compete with a team full of all the fake athletes that they recruited. ... And then on top of that, we say that they have to win the championship or all of them go to jail. Yeah, it would be like a really uninspiring Disney movie."
"Before you feel sympathy for these parents for just 'wanting the best for their kids,' remember that these kids already had so many advantages," Noah said, and a lot of the parents also seem like real jerks. But most of these kids had no idea what their parents were up to, he added. "And this is such a s-itty way to find out that your parents think you're a dumbass."
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"The past 24 hours have really pulled back the curtain on how wealth and power operate in America," Seth Meyers said on Late Night, tying together Paul Manafort's legal woes with the college-admissions scandal. "Once you have that much money, it poisons your brain. You either end up bribing a soccer coach to get your kid into Yale, or if that doesn't work, you leave all your money to your cat."
"Now, there's already all kinds of normalized, accepted pay-to-play in the college entry process," but these parents eschewed the "back door" for a "side door," Meyers said. "Imagine having enough money to legally bribe your kid's way into an elite college and thinking, 'How about instead we Photoshop his head onto Michael Phelps' body'?" He also tied in President Trump and Scooby-Doo. Watch below. Peter Weber
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