Admissions Fraud

[Chris '03]

Yikes. This apparently implicates at least one Yale coach (women's soccer) and many others in a scheme to fake entrance exam results.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme

[marty]

Yikes. This apparently implicates at least one Yale coach (women's soccer) and many others in a scheme to fake entrance exam results.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme

In one instance, prosecutors said, the head women's soccer coach at Yale accepted a $400,000 bribe in exchange for admitting a candidate as a recruited athlete. The student didn't even play competitive soccer, according to prosecutors. After the student was admitted, her parents paid a college admissions consultant $1.2 million.

The consultant, William Singer, is expected to plead guilty to racketeering and other crimes Tuesday afternoon. He allegedly facilitated the fraud through Newport Beach, Calif.-based the Edge College & Career Network LLC.

::popcorn::::drunk::::coffee::::stupid::

[George64]

Yikes. This apparently implicates at least one Yale coach (women's soccer) and many others in a scheme to fake entrance exam results.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme

This is a switch!  Usually it's the coaches who bribe the "student-athletes."

[Trotsky]

Why didn't they just directly bribe the school the way every rich parent of a stupid kid has done throughout history?

[ugarte]

Why didn't they just directly bribe the school the way every rich parent of a stupid kid has done throughout history?

https://twitter.com/Ugarles/status/1105530687975759873

[Trotsky]

That's great.

I knew some rich legacies at Cornell who couldn't find their ass with two hands and a map.  I'm actually more impressed with them that they cheaped out, too.

[Swampy]

Then there's the various "crowbars" rich kids have to get in via the "front door": private tutors, summers in France to help learn French, prep school extra-curriculars, etc.

It also would be interesting to know exactly how these kids compared to the typical profile at the college where they wound up. If they otherwise wouldn't have been competitive for admission, then part of the scandal is that the "elite" school they got into has enough gut courses that the kid doesn't bust out but can earn receive a degree instead.

[ugarte]

Then there's the various "crowbars" rich kids have to get in via the "front door": private tutors, summers in France to help learn French, prep school extra-curriculars, etc.

It also would be interesting to know exactly how these kids compared to the typical profile at the college where they wound up. If they otherwise wouldn't have been competitive for admission, then part of the scandal is that the "elite" school they got into has enough gut courses that the kid doesn't bust out but can earn receive a degree instead.

All the schools have enough gut courses for that. Don't kid yourself that ours doesn't. One of the lessons of the TM Landry scandal was that most of those kids with fake applications - the poor kids who didn't have all of the privileges of wealth - also did fine at college once they got there. And the TM Landry kids were much more victimized - their high school was fake and the scammers preyed on the desperation of the parents and bled them dry.

[billhoward]

May Ezra forgive me for this unkind thought: Is there somewhere on campus a freshman man whose parents got Cornell to believe their long-haired, dope-smoking, Fortnite-playing kid was in fact America's greatest FOGO, and they even had a photoshopped image to prove it. And the kid can barely pick his clothes off the floor.

[billhoward]

1. This is embarrassing, that no parent thought highly enough of Cornell to want to blow $500,000 on a back door way in. But they would spend money on USC or Northeastern.
2. You get older, sometimes your sense of moral outrage isn't as sharp. I'm seeing a continuum between funding a new dormitory, or endowed chair, and by coincidence your marginal HS senior gets in  ... and just slipping a wad of cash to the sailing, fencing, soccer, whatever coach. The first is honorable, the second gets you hauled into the same court in Boston as the Boston Marathon bombers.
3. It is not every day that you might hear someone high up at Yale, Stanford or USC say, "We're the victim here."
4. When a school admits an Olivia Jade Loughlin because OJ needs a nicer photo background for her Instagram feed, it's hard to say that any one other applicant was thrown under the bus by OJ's matriculation when there are 5,000 entering freshmen (admit rate 13%, yield 40%).
5. All this underscores the inflated value people put on a select group of universities, which ironically makes them all the more desirable.

[Trotsky]

1. This is embarrassing, that no parent thought highly enough of Cornell to want to blow $500,000 on a back door way in. But they would spend money on USC or Northeastern.

Wake.  Forest.

[Swampy]

Then there's the various "crowbars" rich kids have to get in via the "front door": private tutors, summers in France to help learn French, prep school extra-curriculars, etc.

It also would be interesting to know exactly how these kids compared to the typical profile at the college where they wound up. If they otherwise wouldn't have been competitive for admission, then part of the scandal is that the "elite" school they got into has enough gut courses that the kid doesn't bust out but can earn receive a degree instead.

All the schools have enough gut courses for that. Don't kid yourself that ours doesn't. One of the lessons of the TM Landry scandal was that most of those kids with fake applications - the poor kids who didn't have all of the privileges of wealth - also did fine at college once they got there. And the TM Landry kids were much more victimized - their high school was fake and the scammers preyed on the desperation of the parents and bled them dry.

Maybe so. But it still ought to be different.

What follows is a true story.

In the fall of my fifth year in Engineering a group of about six of us decided to sit in on a first-semester economics course for MBA students. The lecture hall had perhaps a few hundred students. We had the usual complaints engineering students have when exposed to introductory economics courses -- "Boy, this would be so much easier and better if the professor just used calculus!" -- and we were glad we didn't have to do the homework or take the prelims. Nonetheless, although we thought the course was difficult, it was not nearly as difficult as many of the engineering courses we'd taken. (Thermodynamics, Materials Science, Game Theory, and the optional, non-credit gateway course for the honors math sequence come to mind.)

Then, at the first class after the course's first prelim had been graded and returned, a student stood up and angrily shouted at the professor: "Professor, this course is ridiculous! In all my undergraduate years at Yale I never had a course with this much work or covering this much material in such a short time." To my dying day I'll remember the smiles on the faces of my fellow engineering classmates and their chuckles. We were all thinking, "Yalie wus!" :-D

[RichH]

1. This is embarrassing, that no parent thought highly enough of Cornell to want to blow $500,000 on a back door way in. But they would spend money on USC or Northeastern.

Wake.  Forest.

UC San Diego was the one that got my second eyebrow raised.

[billhoward]

1. This is embarrassing, that no parent thought highly enough of Cornell to want to blow $500,000 on a back door way in. But they would spend money on USC or Northeastern.

Wake.  Forest.

UC San Diego was the one that got my second eyebrow raised.

If, as Oliva Jade apparently was doing, the SoCal location made it an exotic jumping over location for her personal wellness, fashion and beauty posts. For a worldwide audience, San Diego sounds exotic.

[RichH]

Yikes. This apparently implicates at least one Yale coach (women's soccer) and many others in a scheme to fake entrance exam results.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme

More details about the Yale coach from the Hartford Courant:

Longtime Yale coach Rudy Meredith, who resigned in November, is accused of accepting a $400,000 check from the family of a Yale applicant he ensured would be admitted to the university as part of the women's soccer team, according to court documents. Meredith, who is accused of working in concert with Singer, has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud, honest services wire fraud, and conspiracy and has been cooperating with the government's investigation since April 2018 with the hope of receiving leniency when he is sentenced, according to the government.

Bribed around 2015, flipped to help the investigation in April 2018, resigned in November 2018.