A White Mom Who Lied About Son Being a Minority for College Admittance Is Going to Prison

The college admission scandal isn’t just about wealthy white parents cheating the system so their children could get into schools they didn’t qualify for. It also reveals how their illegal activity can cause minority students to be turned away from those very same schools. While most headlines regarding the college admission scandal revolve around actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin — 50 other people have been subsequently embroiled in this debacle.

One of those people charged is Marjorie Klapper, a mom who not only paid to get her son’s testing score revised but also claimed her other son was black and Latino in order for him to get admitted into college. A judge ordered Klapper three weeks in prison and a $9,500 fine. Klapper paid $15,000 to Rick Singer — who ran a college admittance scheme under a fake foundation — so he could boost her son’s ACT scores. Klapper also lied about her son’s background and claimed he was a first-generation college student and was black and Latino in order to get admitted into schools.

“She purposefully sought to portray her son as a minority, and the child of parents who did not attend college, despite the fact that he was neither because she thought that lie would further bolster his college prospects,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, according to BuzzFeed News. “She thereby increased the likelihood that her fraud would come at the expense of an actual minority candidate or an applicant who was actually the first in his or her family to attend college.”

If it wasn’t already difficult enough for minority students to get admitted into schools, we now have white people posing as such for their benefit and the disadvantage of others. Klapper took advantage of the Affirmative action policy, which helps to improve “opportunities for groups of people, like women and minorities, who have been historically excluded in United States’ society” by claiming her son was a minority.

While Affirmative action policies have been in place since the Kennedy Administration, the courts have long battled the placement of it for decades. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Affirmative action must remain in place. However, not all schools follow this requirement. Just this year, Texas Tech School of Medicine said they would “not consider race in the admissions process, per agreement with Trump administration.”

All of this is to say that minority students continue to be at a significant disadvantage both by officials who want to dismantle Affirmative action and by privileged people who lie in order to take their place.