In September 2018, Olivia Jade Giannulli shared a sponsored post to Instagram.
The influencer had just started college. A major milestone that she marked with a post advertising Amazon’s Prime Student offering to her 1.3million followers.
Just six months later, Olivia Jade’s college admission has been called into question after her parents, Full House star Lori Loughlin and her fashion designer husband Mossimo Giannulli, were arrested in a nationwide college admissions bribery investigation.
It is alleged Olivia Jade’s parents paid bribes totalling US$500,000 (AU$705,000) to have her and her older sister Isabella Rose listed as recruits for the University of Southern California’s (USC) rowing team, despite the fact they were not rowers, to facilitate their admission to the college.
Olivia Jade is an influencer and beauty vlogger with close to 2 million YouTube subscribers.
She's (still, for now at least) in her first year at USC in Los Angeles, but has previously admitted she's not actually that interested in her education.
"I don't know how much of school I'm gonna attend," she said in a video last year. "But I'm gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all. But I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying. … I don't really care about school, as you guys all know."
Following backlash, the 19-year-old apologised for her words and acknowledged that attending college was a "privilege" she was "really grateful" for.
"I said something super-ignorant and stupid," she said in a follow-up video entitled 'I'm sorry'.
"It totally came across that I'm not grateful for college – I'm going to a really nice school, and it just kind of made it seem like I don’t care, I just want to brush it off, I’m just gonna be successful on YouTube and not have to worry about school. … I’m really disappointed in myself."
Since the bribery case broke, Olivia Jade's social media accounts have been spammed by trolls calling her out for cheating the system.
USC issued a statement on Wednesday amid speculation that Olivia Jade and other students connected to the bribery scandal could face expulsion. It said current students and graduates involved will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, Yahoo Entertainment reported.
Actress Felicity Huffman has also been charged following the investigation for allegedly paying US$15,000 so their daughter could double the time to complete her university entrance exam.
"These parents are a catalogue of wealth and privilege," U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said at a news conference in Boston.
"For every student admitted through fraud, an honest and genuinely talented student was rejected."
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Top Comments
I'm not saying its right, but most do it and these ones just got caught. Most UNI's are a money making, time wasting joke anyway. In Asia where i spent 5 years. you needed some kind of Uni degree even to work at a 7eleven. I had a friend who had uni students pay him to do their assignments. Cheating is rife. And many of the poor complained that if they managed to get into a Uni on a scholarship they wouldn't be given a job anyway because they weren't from a rich family who could influence or bribe their way into a job. We met many street vendors with uni degrees that couldn't get a job. The whole system is broken. Like its been mentioned its not much better here in Oz, with overseas students passing because they pay the high fees etc...
This supposes that the main aim of uni is to get a job. Its certainly part of it, but uni isn't a waste of time if you don't get a job- the point of uni is to encourage critical thinking, research and higher knowledge. If you don't think thats important and worthwhile in and of itself, you really shouldn't go to uni anyway.
And yeah, overseas students pass. Everyone knows how and why, and employers aren't stupid. While they might be highly regarded for jobs back home, they don't devalue degrees within Australia because they don't compete for jobs here.
Yes, being able to buy an education... no different to Aussie universities who are selling out Australian kids for full-fee paying overseas kids. My friend worked as an English-as-second-language teacher at one of Melbourne's uni's and it was her job, as she described it, to get them to be able to string a sentence together in English so they could do the study (and pay big bucks to the uni to do so). She said many of those students, from rich overseas families, would turn up in their expensive cars and live in expensive apartments, not study or often show up and therefore not learn how to write in English or would cheat (rife) and the uni would pass them anyway and the pressure was on her to keep churning them out. How disrespectful of honest, hardworking students from families who have struggled to get them to Uni. Unfortunately for the Uni's in Melbourne that pander to OS students, their academic reputations have been diminished by it and rightly so.
Yes, Australian universities and their degrees have lost alot of integrity due to this. Cannot believe it has been allowed to happen.
I've heard the same from friends here in NSW - one in a similar role, another doing her PHD and another as a lecturer, each working at a different university including a top 8. If only it stopped at universities and didn't flow into the workplace too.