The “real abuse of privilege” is when elites like Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin use their money to break the law and buy “educational status” for their children, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said Tuesday night on “The Ingraham Angle.”

Huffman and Loughlin are actresses known for the shows “Desperate Housewives” and “Full House,” respectively.

Both women became caught up in an alleged scam revealed on Tuesday involving wealthy elites — elites who shelled out millions to ensure their children were admitted to top colleges across the country.

The scandal has been dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues.”

The parents involved allegedly paid bribes to counselors and coaches to get their children into schools that included Yale, Stanford and the University of Southern California.

Some of the parents allegedly paid William “Rick” Singer, a college prep business founder, to fabricate their children’s SAT or ACT scores.

Authorities also allege that Singer used bribes to get some of these kids into college by pretending they were athletes.

“Today we saw what the real abuse of privilege looks like when elites of different ethnic backgrounds and races used their money to buy status — educational status, that is — for their children,” Ingraham said.

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There once was a time when colleges mostly admitted students based on their merit alone, Ingraham noted. But there have been “institutionalized abuses of the admissions process” present for quite some time now.

“Then they started various legal forms of corruption — legacy admissions, lowered standards for athletes, admission for big donors and, of course, affirmative action,” Ingraham added.

“But this latest bust takes the corruption to an entirely new level where the elites played the process, turning what was a partial scam into a full-scale racket,” the Fox News host continued. “Once college admissions is perceived as a scam, well, guess what? It attracts scam artists.”

The solution is “to bust these scammers” and “to reconsider the legal schemes the elites have used and abused for years,” Ingraham argued. These schemes have hurt the “hard-working qualified kids who deserve admission.”

“The reputation of elite colleges was built on merit,” Ingraham said. “The[se schools] were not supposed to be clubs for the elites. Now we need to return to the principle of merit-based admission again.”

Harmeet Dhillon, founder of the Dhillon Law Group Inc. and the Republican National Committeewoman for California, told Ingraham that “these kids have this entitlement mentality these days,” where “everybody gets an award, everybody is number one, and there’s no such thing as competition anymore.”

“So these kids are already spoiled brats, just to be very frank. And you know, they weren’t expected to excel, apparently,” Dhillon added. “You’ve got people who have all the money in the world and you have all these loopholes that are there for exploitation. And this is what smart people do and desperate people.”

Ingraham agreed, saying this scandal “truly is the use of positions of privilege to open doors.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with the color of your skin. It has everything to do with the money and … in some cases celebrity,” Ingraham argued.

Dhillon predicted this was “just the first shoe that’s going to drop.”

“This is probably a much bigger scandal than what we’re seeing here,” Dhillon warned.

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