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College Admissions Scams, From Jared Kushner to Hollywood

Amy Wilentz on bribery and cheating, Rebecca Grant on abortion in Mississippi, and Bryce Covert on Medicaid in Arkansas.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

March 21, 2019

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner stands behind Donald Trump during a news conference. (AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Fifty people in six states were accused by the Justice Department last week of taking part in a major college-admissions scandal. They include Hollywood stars and business leaders, who paid bribes to elite-college coaches. But that’s not the way Jared Kushner got in to Harvard—his father just paid the university directly. Amy Wilentz comments on the legal, and the illegal, ways wealthy people get their unqualified children into elite schools.

Also: In 2017, the Trump administration announced that, for the first time in history, states could impose a work requirement on the low-income people who rely on Medicaid for health insurance. Arkansas was the first state to implement one, staring last June. A number of other states, including Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, are chomping at the bit to follow suit. Bryce Covert reports on the impact of the work requirement in Arkansas.

Plus: Mississippi has only one place you can get an abortion—it’s in Jackson, and the state also has a wonderful organization based there called the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. Rebecca Grant reports on the remarkable woman who founded and leads that organization: Laurie Bertram Roberts.

 

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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