LOS ANGELES — In the wake of revelations that dozens of wealthy individuals have used fraudulent schemes to gain their children admission to top universities, Americans are reporting utter shock at the discovery that a number of top schools with yearly tuition costs of approximately $50,000 have been made more accessible to wealthy students than middle or working-class ones.

Outrage soon followed the news that parents had paid large sums of money for consultants to improve their children’s applications through fraudulent means, such as faking SAT scores and bribing university administrators. This—and this alone—would be the factor that unfairly secured them spots in schools at which a bachelor’s degree costs over four times the average American’s yearly income.

“Mostly, I try keep my chin up and have a ‘bootstraps’ attitude toward getting the best education I can,” Laura Newman, a sophomore at the University of Akron, told reporters. “Sure, I started working 20 hours a week at a drug store during junior year of high school so I could save enough money to make college work,” said Newman, whose yearly tuition is $10,509, “but so do a lot of kids—why complain?”

“But when I heard—for the first time—that extremely rich kids have this huge unearned advantage, it really made me mad,” Newman added.

The parents of college students across America also reported feeling hurt by the news. Linda DiAmbro, a nurse in St. Louis, Missouri, whose son John is attending Missouri State University for $7,060 per year, told reporters that “me and my husband Greg [a machinist] have worked hard since he was born to save $18,135 to send him to a good school.”

“But now it turns out that if we had just falsified his application, he could have gone to Georgetown?” she said of the elite university whose tuition is $48,611 USD. “With no other barriers to speak of? It really is a shame.”

At press time, Canadians were actually feeling pretty smug about the whole thing.