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Yusi Zhao, a former Stanford sophomore, was expelled after the university discovered that her application contained falsified sailing credentials, which in turn were linked to a $500,000 payment to the school’s sailing program.

The Stanford Daily has further reported that the bribes went far beyond the $500,000 payment. Her family paid a total of $6.5 million to get her into Stanford. The girl’s father, Tao Zhao, is a co-founder and chairman of multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical company Shandong Buchang. The amount is the largest sum discovered by the investigation into college admissions fraud––so far.

Students and families are resorting to any means necessary to get into schools, a matter exacerbated by elite schools’ increasing selectivity. The biggest names––schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and USC––have posted record low admissions rates this year. Yale’s admission rate was less than 6%, while Harvard and Yale both posted rates less than 5%. Stanford has announced that it will no longer post admissions rates, since their low rates only fuel the college-admissions madness amongst college seniors.

Not all families have the resources to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to elite schools––which will cost another few hundred thousand. But there are other ways. Expensive test prep classes are becoming increasingly popular, and perfect test scores are on the rise.

Whether its bribery, test prep, private admissions counselors, or whatever, college admissions is going to get more and more competitive. And the looming student loan crisis is beginning to make many question the worth of a college degree, at least insofar as it’s weighed against crushing debt.

For students, the admissions scandal has broken their spirits. The admissions process is so obviously biased and broken, they think, that it’s not worth bothering about.