The seemingly never-ending stream of HS posters who want help getting into the Ivies and a recent thread about not living up to a school as a alum got me thinking. Clearly, attending a top college is no guarantee of a happy, successful or productive life and it certainly does not mean one cannot be convicted of criminal activity.
Just for fun, I wonder how many notorious criminals we can think of who went to top colleges?
I’ll start with Lyle Menendez (originally Princeton class of 1991, then suspended so he ended up in the class of 1992 before he was arrested). Convicted of the shotgun murders of his parents. So violent that it was thought to be related to organized crime before the detectives started investigating Lyle and his brother Erik. Serving life sentence without parole.
Ted Kaczynski also springs to mind. Harvard grad and Unabomber.
well, no one ever postulated that attending a top college meant someone was immune to criminal activity or had a higher moral character than the “losers” at East Directional State.
I know a Harvard MBA who sexually abused his young adopted daughter :-(. Of course, that just makes him a horrible human being who happened to have gone to Harvard, that’s all.
This is actually quite interesting. There are the usual killers but one difference with Ivy leaguers seems to be a high rate of financial crimes. This is one of many lists that can be found on Google.
@ucbalumnus Exactly. Perhaps crimes related to greed are more prevalent in the Ivy world. I am sure someone, someplace has done a PhD dissertation on this.
Bernie Madoff briefly attended the University of Alabama before transferring to Hofstra. What exactly does this show? Any school will have some bad apples. There’s no point in trying to single out selective universities.
I attended a seminar on financial crimes (and how to avoid hiring criminals which was why I was there) and it was fascinating to learn that the bulk of financial crimes are NOT committed by the high flying/masters of the universe Wall street types. Most financial crimes are committed by low-level employees who do routine lock-box admin or process expense reports. It starts with a $50 transfer (someone is behind on their cable bill or can’t make the minimum payment on a credit card) and when that is never discovered, slowly starts to escalate.
There is often a co-conspirator (someone who signs off on fake expense reports; two employees who cover for each other during the mandatory vacation required by the banking industry, etc.) and the total amounts are often shockingly low (shocking in the sense that if you’re going to steal $750K over three years, why not a million?).
The BRILLIANT criminals are hackers who quickly learn how to shave a fraction of a penny off of every transaction of a certain type (like certain kinds of option trades) and have that siphoned off to an off-shore account they’ve opened. But these are tough crimes- the capital markets industry is heavily regulated and has lots of controls (many quite effective) in place. So the criminal needs to outsmart both the system, and the checks and balances on the system, and the auditors, and the “something looks off” head of risk or compliance or the exception reports which run regularly to detect anything that’s out of the ordinary.
But a not-so brilliant criminal who works for a regional plumbing supply company- which does not have an army of compliance people to evaluate a printout of every transaction every single night to highlight irregularities- dummy up a fake purchase order and pay yourself.
And who is going to suspect Andy in accounts payable? Such a nice guy, graduated from Western Community College with a degree in business?
It is fun to read about the high end crimes but sadly, they do not constitute the majority of “white collar” criminals.
Of course. There are few people who have access to millions of $, and probably millions with access to expense reports/lock boxes. I think the aggregate dollar amount would make them close. Unfortunately I can’t find any readily available studies on it.
The Ivy (or any) application process does not look into the mental health of applicants. Dr. Amy Bishop Ph.D. Harvard University in jail for killing three colleagues and wounding three others after being denied tenure at UAH. She had previously “accidentally” shot and killed her brother in her youth.
The fact that she went to Harvard is completely trivial and has nothing to do with anything. I don’t see the real point. “Bad people” and mental illness can be found everywhere.
I really, really doubt that the Ivy League has a higher percentage of criminals among the ranks of its graduates than other famous athletic conferences do.