Someone posted below that surprising not-at-all surprising story of someone bilking an Asian family out of a couple million bucks by promising (allegedly promising) to help get their kids into Harvard. (They should have read this story in Worth.)

The only really shocking thing about this matter is that it hasn’t happened sooner. So many faculty members at Harvard have little-known side gigs which exploit their relationship with the university, it was inevitable that someone would get into the biz of selling access to admissions—and since you really can’t sell access to admissions, it’d make sense that it would be someone who could claim ties to the university but was in fact a marginal figure.

The alleged bilker is Mark Zimny, who is being described in the Boston Globe and elsewhere as a “former Harvard professor.” This appears not to be true; from what I can see, he was a lecturer in sociology, which is—sorry, sociology—pretty far down on the Harvard totem pole. He was also a “visiting assistant professor” at the GSE. About which, ditto. But as I’ve argued before, most laypeople won’t appreciate the significant professional difference between being a professor and being an assistant professor or lecturer.

Mr. Zimny has been in legal trouble before: According to Harvard police records, he was arrested in 2005 and charged with “domestic assault & battery kidnapping”; I can’t find any record of how the case was resolved. But it is probably not a coincidence that this is the period in which his professional connection to Harvard ends.

From an economic perspective, the case is fascinating. Think about it: A family thinks that a Harvard education is so valuable, it’s willing to pay $2.2 million just to get a kid in. How much would a Harvard grad have to make over a career—as opposed to what he or she would make graduating from another college—to make that investment fiscally worthwhile? Because if you just stuck that money in an ETF, it’d probably double over ten years; then again in another ten; etc. So 16 years after college, you’d have close to $10 million in the bank—if you hadn’t spent it on trying to get your child into Harvard. And that’d be on top of the salary you’d earned after graduating from New York University or something.

Of course, there are other reasons why you might pay $2.2 million to get your child into Harvard. I’m not sure what they are, but…well, family pride and/or prestige, I suppose.

Perhaps what Harvard may take out of this is the strength of its brand in Asia—that there are folks in Asia (as, I’m sure, there are elsewhere, but perhaps not as many.) who will pay an economically irrational sum, an amount that’s very unlikely to provide an economic return on the investment, to get their kid into Harvard. (One has to wonder about Bo Guagua).

(And with Harvard reportedly soon hawking Jeremy Lin jerseys kind of like this one overseas, the university is fueling this money-is-no-object desire for the Harvard brand.)

Is such pay-to-play behavior the definition of a bubble? Or just the reality of the future?