@alwaysamom I am on mobile. Would LOVE a quote function. How can I do that? How can I see where I have been mentioned? The mobile site is way less friendly to quoting and tracking than most apps.
@MmeZeeZee The little Earth at the bottom of your screen. It flags followed threads and when you’ve been mentioned by actual @screenname . And perhaps the search function on a word set.
There seem to be a couple important misconceptions in this thread. First, the reason these parents didn’t go the traditional route of donating a building was because this option costs roughly $25k, whereas that could run into the millions. Secondly, the students who received fraudulent acceptances do not deserve your pity. There are allegations circulating that they were unaware of their special leg up in the admissions process, but all evidence points to the contrary – kids who weren’t athletes were dressed up in shin guards and cleats to stage photos on a soccer field. They were instructed to stay home and watch TV while a smarter, harder-working student took their SATs for them. This is a case of rich parents bribing officials so that their spoiled children don’t have to work as hard, of course they’re going to claim that their kids are simply victims in order to protect them. If anything, feel bad for the parents, who were willing to do anything to support their child, but only ended up hurting them.
This raises another important point, one that’s frankly under-discussed in the college admissions process: the epidemic of coddling parents. We’re biologically inclined to want to support our children as much as possible, but study after study shows that spoon feeding your children success ALWAYS serves to set them up for failure when the day comes that you’re no longer there to hold the spoon. People grow and develop through adversity, so it’s truly a shame that the generation that grew up during Vietnam now calls the school principal when a teacher gives their kid a bad grade.
Not to point fingers, but the fact is that even this very forum is dominated by parents essentially working as their kids’ personal secretaries. Again, supporting your children is a good thing, but when you’re protecting them from having to work to earn things, you’re only hurting them.
By the way, the high school seniors I teach, tutor, and coach (not athletically) are major disillusioned right now.
Second point, regarding the “system” of college admissions and the perception or misperception about the “difference” between a “name” education and a less branded but equally good one: These parents in the scandal obviously bought into the perception/misperception. It seems to me wrong-headed to suggest that the solution is to eliminate factors of wealth and privilege/class in college admissions. (No special admissions for donors, etc.) Colleges are part of the free marketplace. Let the tiers – both vertical and horizontal – rise and fall as the market demands.
Capitalism often solves its own problems, with help from the public, and free enterprise is a wonderful thing – not only in college choice but in alternative enterprises to the mainstream and in company practices. Thus, enterprises such as Uber arose as a way around unaffordable taxi service and a way for the industrious to earn some legitimate money in a wider transportation market.
There are CC users with companies of their own. You can show in your own hiring practices, if you have employees, that you value substance over brand. I once worked in an industry that had a habit of hiring only graduates from a prestigious business school, until I came along. The company decided that I showed greater analytical ability and writing proficiency than their supposedly prestigious business school grads. After that realization, they changed their policies and recruitment priorities. I mention this because a commenter to Ross Douthat’s article this weekend in the NYT – about the scandal – said essentially the same thing – that once employers see that a particular education is not necessarily superior to another, they will hire accordingly. That is the best way to change perceptions.
@unicollege
" Again, supporting your children is a good thing, but when you’re protecting them from having to work to earn things, you’re only hurting them. "
hear hear!
this article in todays WSJ says the same thing as you just did.
“Remember, It’s Their College Years, Not Yours
The admissions scandal hitting schools is an extreme example, but during application season many parents could use a healthy reminder to ease up on their teen”
Most parents cringe at the college-admissions scandal rocking elite schools like Yale and Stanford. We can all rest assured that we’d never do something as craven and harmful as what’s alleged in that case, right?
But there are plenty of other, less damaging ways the college-admissions frenzy causes even conscientious parents to mess up by getting too involved in their child’s application process.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/remember-its-their-college-years-not-yours-11552741200?mod=hp_listb_pos2
Somebody may have mentioned this already, but I didn’t read the thread–
How soul crushing it must have been for the kids to have their parents decide that they ‘needed’ cheating. I’m trying to imagine a scenario where a) I’d be willing, or even have the capacity, to dream up such a plot or entertain one suggested by someone else, b) be willing to part with that kind of money (more, in some cases, that the sum total of tuition and fees for 4 years) to cheat my kid’s way in, and c) have the time, energy, or attention span to see said onerous plot through. And, if I could imagine myself into such a scenario (I have a great imagination, but not that good…), what would it do to my child, to have my complete lack of faith in his ability to get along and thrive in the real world, exposed so publicly.
These parents went well out of their way, and put an extraordinary amount of effort into basically telling their kids that they they (the parents) had absolutely no confidence in their ability to thrive as young adults or have normal human coping skills. How cruel.
Thread is seriously going in circles when we have to keep repeating ourselves. “You seem to be implying that donors would not donate if their kids were just in the pile with everyone else.” No, I haven’t broached that. I said they are vetted.
And that there is no assurance of quid pro quo. But some still focus on defining charitable donations as QPQ or not truly charitable at all. These mega rich folks give the large sums they committed to, save for when they go bankrupt or somesuch.
I do think some should take a breath and think about their assumptions.
Most of us have been around CC long enough to know that threads that go nowhere get closd.
Again, I don’t understand how people can both argue that we need to put large donors’ donation in a special pile and argue that it is a charitable donation.
When I give money to the Red Cross, it is charitable because that donation is not contingent on my getting a special privilege. And if the Red Cross did give me a special privilege in exchange, the cost of that is supposed to be deducted from the receipt they give you.
As far as I understand (and please correct me if I am wrong), if a charity receives a donation of 10 tickets to Hamilton and then announces “we will give each person who donates $5000 to us one of these tickets”, the receipt that is given is the $5000 donated minus the face value of the ticket. It is not the full $5000 so that the purchaser can claim the full amount on their taxes.
The other option is that the charity can just sell the ticket at face value and the purchaser didn’t make a charitable donation (but the charity still gets the income).
The question, of course, it what is the face value of being in that special pool of applicants. From the Washington Post: “Parents allegedly wrote huge checks to make it happen — in one case, $1.2 million for a ticket to Yale for a women’s soccer recruit who didn’t play competitive soccer.”
Parents of academically “qualified” students will pay a lot of money to make sure that their kid goes into a special pile. If a donation isn’t purchasing that value, then why the need to ever put the kid in any pile other than the general admissions pile?
Or don’t make the donation fully tax deductible and auction one seat each year to see how much in return the donor is getting and how much is really a donation.
Thinking a bit more… The stratosphere of the rich and famous must also come with some sort of “teen insulation”, because I am seriously wondering how such a plot could be hatched, right under the noses of teenagers. I can’t even go to the grocery store without getting the third degree about my intentions. I can’t imagine flying my kid to a different state for an SAT/ACT, filling out applications without his knowledge, but “SURPRISE! You were accepted…,” or doing any of the outrageously ‘extra’ things that these parents did, without so much as a thorough grilling from my kid about the whys, whats, and whos, and accusations about why I didn’t trust him, what I must think of him, why so-and-so’s parents would never, how he can do it on his own, etc… I mean, this plot would have unraveled well before it could have taken off if I had that kind of money, and lacked my kind of morals, clearly had a devious imagination, and with my teenager basically having a pulse.
Huh… the teens of the rich and famous must ask a lot less questions than the regular ones.
@observer12 Here’s some of the many examples of what I’m talking about:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Insight-How-affirmative-action-helps-rich-people-13689137.php
https://www.theroot.com/separate-and-unequal-the-real-education-scandal-is-ame-1833273732
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/17/1842056/-Affirmative-action-and-the-myth-of-structural-reverse-racism?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/03/13/affirmative-action-rich-how-elites-legally-game-system/3148618002/
https://abovethelaw.com/2019/03/can-we-now-address-legacy-admissions-or-will-we-keep-focusing-on-affirmative-action-in-a-silo/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/03/15/america-real-affirmative-action-program/avSeUZ8XEMZj5c1oOaaueI/story.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/college-bribery-scam-affirmative-action_n_5c896a88e4b0450ddae6f19c
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/college-admissions-race.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/harvard-affirmative-action-case-pits-asian-americans-against-each-other-everyone-else/
You can probably find an example of it in every major newspaper.
@lookingforward “I said they are vetted.”
A college would not have to spend effort “vetting” any donor if they simply made sure that all donors children’ applications were in the same pile as students whose parents didn’t donate.
The big question is why the special pile at all. Many donors’ children will have applications that stand out in the regular application pile based on their own merits, and if they don’t, then who cares? Certainly not the donors who we all agree absolutely do this for purely charitable purposes and would be very offended to know their child was being considered on the merits of her parents’ bank account instead of her own merits.
“Neither of these two schools offers legacy preferences or development cases. And they manage to be just as generous with their financial aid. They also manage to offer totally unrestricted EA.”
But doing that is good business for MIT and CalTech. It isn’t munificence. The brand that CalTech and MIT sell to their prospective students is revenge of the nerds. “We are the biggest, geekiest, most pulsating, big brains anywhere and we are damn proud of it!”
Just like it wouldn’t be “on brand” for Navy Seal Team Six to accept applicants on any basis other than being the baddest dudes there are. So to avoid diluting the brand and the appeal of the school, MIT and CalTech wouldn’t want to admit kids because they are legacies or sports stars or the offspring of famous politicians/celebrities.
The brands of other top schools are less pure unadulterated merit. So they admit kids on the basis of things other than being the biggest brain.
Cal Berkeley and UCLA don’t do legacy admissions because that’s inconsistent with their heritage and brand in California as egalitarian public institutions of social progress. UVA and UNC (both also state schools) do legacy admissions since the look/feel of those schools seems a lot more old school private-ish.
If you know anything about the culture of Notre Dame, it is no surprise that they have double the legacy enrollment of any top 20 school – because ND is a family.
It is all about business and brand. MIT does it the way they do because it makes good business sense for them. It is no better or worse than how ND does what makes sense for ND.
The offspring of the rich & famous may very well have a lot less direct contact with their parents – they may have been raised mostly by servants, and well used to having just about everything around them done or accomplished by the hired help.
So yes, they probably do ask fewer questions, given the sum total of their life experiences. .
FAFSA4caster indicates that Pell Grant eligibility extends up to about the median household income in the US. Do you mean to say that half of the households in the US now have “very low income”?
I’d like to see the percentage of legacies at MIT, both admits and attendees. My guess is that the percentages are substantially higher than the rates from the general population. Of course this could be because children of MIT grads are more likely to develop the talents which qualify them for MIT, but then this would probably apply to legacies at other schools as well. Anyway, I briefly tried to find the numbers, but only found a statement by an admissions officer from the school who claimed he wouldn’t know how to calculate the percentages, even though MIT asks specific legacy questions on their application.
Imagine that. MIT, of all places, cannot figure out how to calculate simple percentages relating to legacy admissions. Maybe “meritocracies” aren’t all they are cracked up to be.
The donations to colleges are not “fully tax deductible.” There are limits.
“Vetted” refers to the same holistic process all applicants go through. For now, I won’t explain any differences, because I think some are confused by how admissions at an elite works, what they do look for, what the actual quality of apps is- or isn’t- what overall “meriting” an admit entails, and how $ development works.
Again, this is a very small number of applicants and their admit is not assured when the family gives huge sums. I think the notion of how to review the development kids belongs on another thread. It has zip to do with this scandal.
And no one should rely on the media for “facts” about a process the writers are not involved with. And not any article headed as an opinion piece. Opinion is getting this thread in enough mess.
Plus, I know a number of posters here have been through the admissions process; some are quite thoughtful about it. But I don’t know if others have been yet. Or even have kids.
There’s a lot to absorb. Yep. But it does help to do it in some logical order.
What’s MIT or Caltech or legacy got to do with this scandal, anyway? Or major donations?
So off track.
Just a note on Pell grants – not all Pell grant eligible students are receiving full grants. My daughter qualified for Pell 2 out of the 4 years she was in college – but definitely didn’t qualify for the full grant. So if a FAFSA EFC is, say, $4000, then that student will be listed on the stats as qualifying – but the income may be middle class, especially if FAFSA EFC is being reduced by multiple siblings in college at the same time. So NOT “very low income” for all students.
Also, my daughter’s college took the Pell grant money based on our FAFSA EFC, but limited its own grant funds based on CSS Profile EFC. In our case that included home equity and NCP financials. Roughly $10-$15K over and above the FAFSA EFC. There’s a dual system of calculating “need” in place.
But I agree that Pell is the best metric available to get a sense of which students are on the lower end of the financial spectrum. I just agree with @ucbalumnus that a significant number may be middle class families, not necessarily low income. (But obviously not wealthy either).
@calmom, I hadn’t considered that. But, you’re right, and it just occurred to me that even if there are no servants involved, the extreme ends of socieconomics may very well influence how, when, or even IF certain things are questioned. I think we saw something similar with that one school in (Louisiana?)… some sort of charter school that was faking dire circumstances, ECs, and (if I recall correctly) some academic credentials to gain acceptance to elite universities. I think that a good number of those kids, as well (mostly very poor) didn’t know, and didn’t question (or even have a hint that there was something that should be questioned) what was going on.
But that just takes me back to one of my other points… How did these parents even have the energy, the ‘drive’, the wherewithal to see a plot like this to fruition? Even if my scruples (and pocketbook) were a lot less… scrupulous, I’d have heard the plot, and thought, “OR, let’s go make a pan of brownies, put on Netflix, and take a nap! We can cheat…ummm… ‘LATER’!”
Or, at the very least, this sort of thing would require, if I had the sort of money to buy-- “Yeah, but… I’m too delicate for jail, so… I’m going to need to also buy a fall guy. Let me see your catalog of alibis, fake credit cards, disposable phones, costumes, voice changers, and crazy folks who want their 15 minutes of fame so badly, that they’re will to claim that they did this all on their own, are wholly unconnected to us, faked like my kid’s parents and did this all for their personal amusement, completely unbeknownst to my family. Implausible deniability, and all that.”
Well, I think the parents were also taken advantage of by Singer’s con man tactics. This isn’t an excuse for them – they still obviously knew that what they were doing was illegal – but he used scare tactics to convince them that his “side door” was both necessary & customary for his clients. So the parents might also have succumbed to a sot of dumb rich person mindset of letting other people handle their problems for them and not having the first clue as how to research and manage things independently. And as to “deniability” – one thing that comes along with a sense of privilege is a feeling that one is above the law-- it never really occurs to people like that that they might get caught, because getting caught isn’t in their realm of day-to-day experience. They start to see themselves as invincible. They are used to getting their way-- someone comes along and tells them that X is the path to what they want … and yeah, they sign right up.
In other words, in my view, a big part of it is plain stupidity. There are a lot of life lessons that people miss out on if they don’t have the day to day experience of personally managing real-world problems.
@calmom " I think the parents were also taken advantage of by Singer’s con man tactics…"
So interesting to read your post because I thought the same thing. It does not excuse the parents at all, but it does seem - at least for some of them - that they weren’t originally looking to do something illegal but just to hire the college admissions guy that all these other wealthy people were saying was the best and highly recommended and got their kid into a great college. And then they hired this guy who everyone else used who convinces them that what he is doing for them is what he has done for hundreds and hundreds of other parents (making it seem more okay).
In other words, if these parents had not hired Singer, but instead had hired a different college admissions guy who all their friends said was the best, and that guy had been legit and helped their kid package themselves in the best legally acceptable way for the reaches while also providing a list of schools very friendly to full-pay parents who make a big donation to the school (legitimately), then I suspect most of those parents would have said “ok” and not said “oh this guy isn’t going to help us illegally get our kid into college using a bribe so let’s find a different college admissions guy who will do illegal things to help us.” But I could be wrong and those parents intended to do something illegal from the beginning and only wanted to find a guy who would be the middleman for their crime.
(I exclude all the parents who had someone else take the exam for their kids or change answers on the SAT since I doubt they really believed all their friends’ did that for their kids)
*Edit: I wanted to add that it felt as if Singer wanted to get out of the trouble he was in with the feds, and so he had to do the hard sell on some parents so he had evidence of more criminals and his own sentence would be less.