@Nocreativity1 Excellent, thoughtful, intelligent post.
So black and brown kids aren’t normal kids? You might want to rephrase that.
If USC called H.S. Counselor with questions, doesn’t the counselor have to disclose that the school has no rowing team to USC? Was that how the rescinsion process/conversation started? Did Gianulli then double-down and pressure the HS counselor into using damage-control talking points? How the heck did the Gianulli and Laughlin possibly keep this crisis/near-miss from their daughter? These calls happened after admission was notified, right?
@PragmaticMom Yes it was April 12th, and she received her formal admission letter in March,
90% of the seats are reserved? Please link the source of these numbers. Thank you.
@bud123 Jeez…
@blueskies2day If Kylie Jenner got into Harvard, I wouldn’t begrudge her. I don’t care if her family gave her a ton of exposure - she turned that into a billion dollar business. There are so, so many celebrities out there, so many famous people, famous kids…how many make a billion dollars?
Funny thing is, Kylie Jenner doesn’t NEED Harvard or any other school. Unless she just felt like indulging some academic interest. But it would cost her a lot in lost money. She works it.
@Bud123- “The frustrating thing is about 75-85%% of the spots at many top U’s are gone before “normal kids” applications are considered”.
Before responding to your comment please note, I don’t define students as normal or abnormal. Even taking your statistics at face value (which I suspect are biased) why should “normal kids” as you refer to them as be entitled to more than 15-25% of spots.
For the record my kid would fall under the “unhooked in any way” category, and his accomplishments managed to get him into several great schools. My point however, is that we as a family never looked to blame others or whine about how competitive it is to get into the schools he got denied from. Typically when aspiring to elite opportunities one should anticipate disappointment. Somehow when it comes to college admissions disappointment has been replaced by deflection, denial and blaming others.
We are a society of participation trophy winners that can’t accept failure but to blame the other team, refs, field conditions or the that sun obscured our vision.
@scipio wrote:
I read the article and don’t think this is quite accurate. The article did mention that while a number of “elite” schools have been subpoenaed, they are not targets of the investigation. The article made no mention of investigators looking into staff at these schools and “finding some evidence of bribery and other shenanigans of the times already exposed in this scandal.”
No doubt these kids went to a number of fancy private schools, but so far at least nothing has come out implicating the schools.
“I think that any reasonable adult - especially one that specializes in admissions to a selective college - also wouldn’t just take the word of a parent that their child is a recruitable coxswain.”
They weren’t taking the word of the parent. They were using the parent as a second source to verify the claims of their own university’s crew coach and women’s athletic director. Sort of like getting two signatures on a check. People can still conspire to commit fraud, as they did here, but it’s harder to pull it off.
Great article about Pell Grant recipients - thanks for linking to it. The University of Southern California - along with Emory – are the private universities with the greatest share of Pell Grant recipients at 22%. (Compare that with colleges like Wash U. at 10% and Yale at 15%). Both USC and Emory rose in the rankings by offering significant need-based aid to high-achieving low-income students (both colleges also have among the highest percentages of students from the bottom 60% in family incomes) and both colleges also offered large merit scholarships to middle class and upper middle class students for whom $70,000 after tax tuition is still a stretch.
It’s ironic that one likely reason that USC was caught up in this scandal is because it raised its standards and didn’t seem to provide a legal back door entry for students whose parents just donated $500,000 directly to the university. Students who might have been admitted decades ago needed a much bigger hook than just “I’m very rich and can pay”. Those seats were now filled with lots of low income and middle income students and more affluent (but not rich) students getting merit scholarships. And a very few parents still desperately wanted their kids there – enough to make them spend a lot of money to illegally game the system.
What I didn’t like about this scandal was how this unfolded. Singer’s college advising service was so well known that famous people like Phil Mickelson were giving testimonials about how great it was. These parents spent a lot of money to hire a guy who - if we are to believe the other people who hired him - helped many students to get into colleges using only the most upright and honest methods. Singer got caught and the federal government should have shut down his advising system and gone through his past records immediately. But instead they decided to have him first scare some more parents into believing their child would never be admitted to the college they wanted and then offer up this way of getting their child in that he implied always works and he had successfully used for many hundreds of other clients. Singer seemed to offer desperate parents a way to help their child’s future when he could have just come up with a list of other good and suitable colleges and played them up. Talk about setting them up.
I’d have less sympathy if the real story was that these parents wanted to cheat the system and asked their friends for a recommendation of a corrupt guy who would help them cheat the system and then hired him. But what seems to have happened (and the full story is not clear), is that all these rich and famous people hired Singer and his firm because they believed it was a highly recommended, all-knowing college advising group and then Singer convinced some of the parents who hired him to let him help them cheat. To me it almost appears to be entrapment – convincing someone to join you in committing a crime that you would never have thought of committing if they had not convinced you what a good idea it was. Those parents still committed a crime and did something wrong – I am not excusing that. But it seems to be a crime they did not intend to commit when they first hired Singer, but one he sold to them as the best way to help their kids get what they (wrongly) believed was so important - admission to a college that wouldn’t just admit the kid via a large direct donation to the school.
@hgtvaddict I suspect someone, after finding out that Gianulli/Laughlin daughter was in at USC, blew the whistle… USC then investigated. It’s not routine, is it, to revisit a done-decision unless someone tipped them off? There’s the tell-tale clue that this is only the tip of the iceberg…
Re:sailing: it is totally possible that the GC thought “eh, must do that with her family, they never tell us anything”. I am not usually one to defend ignorance but with teenagers and artsy types it is not a stretch to think they failed to mention critical information due to scattermindedness/self centeredness.
If a legitimate reporter researches the +50% or near %50 stats for extended time on tests - they will find it to be true (at least in Florida’s top schools)
@Hanna thanks for the clarification. I do wonder, however, like @PragmaticMom why this is being done in April after USC decisions have been finalized?
It just occurred to me that Singer probably has an account on CC. If he’d been in this business for so long, how could he not have been on CC?
I wouldn’t focus on pell grant numbers. Some schools give out a lot of aid across the board. They do not need to be a pell grant recipient to be reported as a statistic. I think the “statistics” create a lot of these problems. Schools focus on rankings and the curriculum, etc are subject to that goal.
@observer12 #2182 ???
@Nocreativity1 great post
Schools have institutional goals. Harvard in their law suit indicated the numbers. They recently built their class to meaningfully consider candidates including :
-Economically disadvantaged
-historically underrepresented ethnic groups
-international students
-“building” level development candidates
-children of professors and staff
- directors list (think David Hogg, Chief Jusitce Roberts and President Obama level),
-z listers who were in one of the above groups but needed a gap year to round out
-student athletes
I think the remaining spots numbered in the 270 or so students from each gender.
All of the students in the categories listed above are superstars- literally or figuratively- or institutionally valuable. For the school, for the class, for the staff or for the future.
The average excellent Caucasian and Asian student who does not fit one of the above categories, has a very uphill battle. I try personally to this point out to students and parents on CC who are crushed with the rejection. 1.9mm USA High schoolers in the process. 270 spots for a broad group of candidates. Bad odds.
But so what? Why be mad at Harvard or anywhere else?
Harvard, like any private organization has priorities and long term goals. It’s designed to fit their vision. Not ours. The students enrolled are equally prepared in their view to make a difference.
Did my D want to attend. Sure. Did she have the chops. Absolutely. Do we think the process is unfair. Hell no. There’s a lot of fish in the sea.
The obsession with rankings, selectivity, worthiness weighting , prestige illusion etc is at the root of this scandal. We all are party to it in lesser degrees. Myself included.