As with the federal investigation into college basketball recruiting, the college admissions scandal announced yesterday seems to fall into FBI jurisdiction only because of the overly broad mail and wire fraud statutes and federal racketeering laws — which make every tort or contract violation into a federal crime. Put differently, if rich parents bribed Yale or Stanford to take their kids, this is between those schools and their employees who took bribes, the kids and parents who lied on their applications, and possibly the other kids who attended (or were denied admission) around that time. Why is the US taxpayer funding this investigation?
