People Are Talking (Again) About How Jared Kushner Got Into Harvard
In the wake of the wild roller coaster of a college admissions scandal, people are talking about another lucky rich kid: Jared Kushner. Jared Corey Kushner, to be precise (yes, “Corey,” you read that right). Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Ivanka Trump’s husband, and real estate heir, is now apparently under scrutiny again for just how he managed to get into Harvard 20 years ago. Though the answer doesn’t seem to have fallen quite into the Photoshop-and-SAT-doctoring realm of Felicity Huffman/Lori Loughlin-gate, it seems that Kushner was the recipient of some dubious help from his own wealthy parents.
In 2006, ProPublica editor Daniel Golden stumbled on Kushner’s admission while writing a book about how wealthy donors to elite colleges routinely get their kids who otherwise wouldn’t make the cut into those schools. While investigating Harvard’s Committee on University Resources, a.k.a. donors, for The Price of Admission, Golden discovered that both Kushner’s parents, Charles and Seryl, were members. He also found that in 1998, when then-unknown New Jersey high school student Jared was looking at colleges, Charles Kushner pledged a gift of $2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in annual installments of $250,000. Jared eventually graduated from the college in 2003.
Which seemed like an extraordinary feat to those who knew Kushner in high school: “There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told Golden. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”
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Golden told Vogue that he wasn’t totally shocked by the latest cheating scandal that swept up a few people even more famous than Jared Kushner, but “it takes the practices that I wrote about to another level.” The blatant fraud that some of the parents who were taken into custody on Tuesday engaged in (paying proctors to doctor tests, staging photoshoots of their children playing sports) may be “a big leap” from making a donation, but it has clearly helped to call attention to technically legal methods that skirt ethics—and remain tax-deductible. “When parents make a big donation directly to a university that’s tax-deductible,” Golden said, “is that really a gift or is that a purchase of a good or service?”
As we know, after Harvard Kushner’s career was buoyed by another engine of American “meritocracy”: nepotism, through his wife, Ivanka Trump, with whom he was appointed White House advisor (despite continued questions about his security clearance). He’s made criminal justice his pet issue there, in honor of Charles Kushner going to prison in 2005 for tax violations, illegal campaign donations, and retaliating against a witness. But putting people who have no business being there into positions of power has some annoying complications, apparently. A new book alleges that Trump has wanted to fire Ivanka and Jared but is having trouble. Kids these days!
