Wonder whether USC will be seeing a significant decline in application next year? Or people’s memories could not be expected to last that long? :O)
@blueskies2day excellent post. This is the sentiment I was trying to convey. You articulated it a lot better than I. And, I fully agree with you regarding @privatebanker.
Does every kid who attends an elite college that requires tippy top scores become a pilot, or astronaut, or surgeon? There are no philosophers, or teachers, or researchers?
Here is an interesting example of how fluid freshman class numbers are, look at the situation at U of Cal Irvine
where an extra 500 students said yes ! Really an extra 500 one year, and they actually had to retroactively reject some who did not fill out registration paperwork on time. So there is a lot of slop in the size of the freshman class at many schools including USC. USC also offers spring admission to many, as so many drop out. so I don’t feel that outraged about this scam, although I think there are many levels of scamming. So, for instance, is essay coaching a scam?
I would say YES, but mild and legal. Is asking your faculty friend at Carnegie Mellon to write a recommendation for your son who worked there for three weeks one summer a SCAM? Yes and it actually worked for a kid we know to get into CMU. Not my kid!
@coolweather. I don’t think you have a child with Add or LD. Writing the answers would be horrible. A lot of kids with LD write directly in the booklet and circle the answer. They don’t even use the scan sheet. That gets bubbled in by the proctor. There is a human error element to this also. Why you ask? Many adhd kids have poor processing or slow processing also. It takes time to actually “find” the correct bubble without skipping a line by accident. For many the scan sheet can be an issue since the lines are very close together. Visual scanning is /can be an issue. Before people make assumptions or remarks these are truly real world concerns for some kids with LD issues.
Thanks for the nice words @ShanFerg3 and @blueskies2day
Always learning from everyone here.
This thread, I affectionately call “thread-nado” has opened up a lot of important issues and healthy debate.
It’s good for the soul.
@Coloradomama USC and other schools offer spring admission because so many people study abroad and housing/spaces in classes open up. Dropping out is not the reason. While they accepted 8300 last year they had more commit than expected over the last two years so this year’s acceptance is down to 7000. Big difference for those hoping for a spot.
@makemesmart Actually wouldn’t be surprised if it was the opposite. Did you see the WSJ article titled, “Scandal Brings USC Into the Elite Ranks,” frankly I didn’t even read it (paywall), but the title is out there. What’s that saying about there being no bad publicity? And there’s plenty that don’t believe the schools did anything wrong, that just a few slime-ball individuals did. They just aren’t the ones making most of the posts on the internet, because not as big a deal in their mind. Time will tell.
I don’t think anyone is going to turn down their Stanford acceptance or not apply either because they found more people giving $500K.
@ShanFerg3 students are often admitted for being first generation college students. That can be up to 20% of the Yale freshman class. These students may or may not have the same grades and test scores. Combine first generation college, with URM and you will get into Yale these days. There has always been a lot of unfairness in admissions. MIT now admits a lot of student athletes. Interviewers who mention athletics in an MIT interview write up often see that student get in over others. There are 10X the number of qualified students for the seats at MIT and Yale. Thus is pretty darn random. There is no magic to admissions. its literally random piles and confused admissions officers. There are some clearly not qualified students. They end up in a reject pile early on, but others, then there are stand outs, they get into MIT and Stanford, and then there is everyone else. Its like a random walk to pick between all the middle candidates. Thus first generation college has become a very trendy way to pick students. The idea is, give students who may not have advantages , a boost. Yale actually does that too. so its not all the rich and famous at Yale.
@Coloradomama sounds you like you have it all figured out. You should start a consultant company. Never would’ve thought getting into Yale and MIT could be so easy. Just be first generation, URM and you’re in at Yale. Mention athletics done deal at MIT. Got it ??. Someone should tell these kids stop wasting their time working so hard. They’re guaranteed these spots at Yale and MIT
I thought this was an interesting excerpt from the court documents regarding Olivia Jade’s school counselor. This is an email the counselor sent to her father, Giannulli.
“I wanted to provide you with an update on the status of [your younger daughter’s] admission offer to USC. First and foremost, they have no intention of rescinding [her] admission and were surprised to hear that was even a concern for you and your family. You can verify that with [the USC senior assistant director of admissions] . . . if you would like. I also shared with [the USC senior assistant director of admission] that you had visited this morning and affirmed for me that [your younger daughter] is truly a coxswain.”
The last part of that quote sounds fishy. It sounds as if the school counselor likely knew that Olivia Jade wasn’t a coxswain and that her parents were bribing their way into USC; but the counselor wanted to cover his hide by saying that the girls father “affirmed” it in his personal visit. Even at my daughters’ huge public high school, her overworked guidance counselor knows all of her extracurricular activities. How could a counselor at a high-end private school like Marymount All Girls Catholic School in Bel Air not possibly know the extracurricular activities of a very popular and Insta-famous student?
I think a lot of counselors don’t know all that kids are doing - even the famous ones - but the counselors are smart and saavy (or just plain moral) enough not to vouch for something they haven’t seen first hand. Girl may have rowed next to her friends big yacht and called it rowing for all the counselor knew (which would have been more legit cause at least she actually once rowed) - but either way she/he was just saying (and covering her backside), “Your job to confirm dad.” Smart counselor is what I read more than a corrupt one.
With First gen/Low income approaching 30% and almost half of students paying no tuition, someone has to pick up the tab. Elite colleges depend on this backdoor—$10m+ donations–to be wide open so that 50% low-middle income families there can have their kids education nearly free. If the Congress closes or even narrows this backdoor it will hurt the low/middle income kids the most.
The scandal is about the sidedoor that those" single or double digits" millionaires tried to sneak thru without paying a fair market price that two third of the kids at those selective colleges really depend on for their affordable education.
@blueskies2day I would agree that some counselors don’t know. However, this is a high end private school with a student-teacher ratio of 8-1 and about 396 students total. This girl has a huge Instagram following - she’s not a girl who doesn’t want to be noticed. Further, the fact that the counselor met with the dad that day to discuss the possibility of USC “rescinding” her admission as it related to being a coxswain is highly suspicious to me. I don’t necessarily think the counselor is corrupt, but I think that it would be naive to think that the schools didn’t know that this sort of bribery was going on.
@Colradomama “students are often admitted for being first generation college students. That can be up to 20% of the Yale freshman class. These students may or may not have the same grades and test scores. Combine first generation college, with URM and you will get into Yale these days. There has always been a lot of unfairness in admissions”
No one gets into Yale and or an Ivy or elite just “for being a first generation” nor is it accurate that “when combined with URM you will get into Yale these days”. Statements like this are spurious, typically made out of either ignorance or sour grapes. These elite schools accept extremely qualified students based upon their capacity to contribute to their college communities and ultimately change the world. Statements such as yours unfairly diminishes all those that attend these schools and casts all those rejected as victims.
You say " Its like a random walk to pick between all the middle candidates". No it isn’t…while certainly some element of luck exists the schools scrupulously try and identify the best and most suitable. Not agreeing with the outcomes is understandable and fine, but don’t besmirch those who gain admittance with thinly veiled classism and jealousy.
Not that your comments had anything to do with the subject of this thread, but they merit a response.
We live in the Bay Area where sadly a lot of these people came from. My DS had an outside college counselor to help with essays etc but she made it clear that she has no contact with the schools as their school counselor will write their letter of rec etc. She would help form the list of the schools she thought would be good options but that is where it would end. If they are telling you more than that its a big red flag!! He didn’t get into his top two choices but couldn’t be happier where he is at. The school counselors should raise red flags and it looks like they tried to in a few cases but they raise it with the parents and it gets shut down. So complicated on so many levels, since most of us don’t think that way it is unfathomable that someone would do these things.
@ShanFerg3 said:
“I really think students admitted to the most selective schools are gifted in some compacity, except for those who cheated, and are probably fully aware of that. I think this notion that any student gives a second thought to anyone scrutinizing or questioning the legitimacy of their matriculation is fantasy”
Based on our experience the “Impostor Syndrome” is very common at high-end colleges. D1 went to Harvard and she said that it was very common, especially in the freshman year, for Harvard students to feel that their own admission was a mistake that somehow slipped through, and that everyone else was so much smarter and more accomplished than they were. Some of them spend a lot of time questioning their own legitimacy and wondering whether others question it too.
For example, one of her friends was admitted off the waitlist. His stats and achievements were just as high as everybody else’s. But he constantly went around feeling like he was wearing an invisible scarlet letter than marked him as “less than” simply because he didn’t get in along with the others on the big RD day. She and her friends had to keep assuring him that this was not the case, that they regarded him as a fully legitimate Harvard student.
She said that overall attending Harvard was actually a very humbling experience, because however smart you were back in your hometown and however much you were Queen of your high school, at Harvard so was everybody else. And if you ever began to feel a little bit full of yourself based on your own wonderfulness and brilliance, in any given moment on campus someone was going to come around the corner who was obviously a lot smarter than you, plus humble, kind, polite, and better-looking to boot.
@Scipio you mentioned students questioning themselves. I said I doubt any of these students give any thought to their fellow students questioning the legitimacy of their admission. So, based on your post and the post I originally responded to if both are accurate students at selective Universities spend a lot of time questioning themselves while simultaneously questioning the legitimacy of URM and Athletes lol. Got it.
Not only do you have these people in the news cheating but the number of people checkin a box that they shouldn’t is massive. So sad. Hard on everyone, the ones that feel the need to cheat and live with it and those that don’t.
I’ve heard the same, @Scipio. Like my friend who said everyone in the house he lived in was their Senior Class President, had near perfect SATs and above a 4-point average. In fact “average” was the word he used to describe himself when compared to everyone else at Harvard.
@ShanFerg3 said:
“you mentioned students questioning themselves. I said I doubt any of these students give any thought to their fellow students questioning the legitimacy of their admission. But look, if you believe this, that’s fine.”
I had said:
“Some of them spend a lot of time questioning their own legitimacy and wondering whether others question it too.”
My point is that they give a LOT of thought to their fellow students questioning the legitimacy of their admission