Most colleges have neither the time nor the resources to investigate the 30k high schools in the US. Meaningful comparisons can only exist from some standardized basis, whether a set national curriculum (Canada) or entrance test (China). The notion that anyone will research the high schools of 50k applicants is just silly.
Not true at my daughter’s midwest HS. Most kids, including the top 5%, followed the $ and stayed instate.
Often, when someone makes a significant gift to a non-profit, they are offered a spot on the board or another honorary position, which can give them access to other wealthy donors and some excellent hobnobbing and networking. Large gifts also lead to invitations to exclusive “receptions,” galas, etc. Just look at the boards of any non-profit and you’ll that it’s comprised mostly of large donors.
So to say that charitable donations are ALWAYS given with NO expectations or acknowledgement is naive and not how the world works. Regarding college admissions, to argue that a long time donor should expect their child’s application to be lumped in the pile with the rest of the 50,000 or so applicants is ridiculous, especially when you consider that athletes, non-donating legacies, URMs, the kid from Alaska, on and on, all get an admissions tip. So its okay for all of those students to get a tip, but not the qualified child of the couple who donated a building? Silly.
My S1 got a very good “Camry” education. He graduated from an in-state, fourth-tier no-name (albeit one with an excellent program for his major) in with honors, on time and with a double major. He had scholarships and grants along with student loans within the “first-year salary” guidelines. He was hired right after graduation by the company at which he did his unpaid internship and is still there, almost 5 years and several promotions later. Oh, and he also was lucky enough to meet the love of his life, to whom he is getting married next May. Isn’t this what we as parents all want for our kids?
@coolweather my experience has been the same as @momofsenior1. Most of the middle class, top 5-10% students here will take the full ride + stipend at the state schools, or other privates, instead of paying to go to an Ivy or other “elite” university.
“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.”
That’s what anonymous donations are for. They have been made in the millions.
I don’t think people should have to give anonymously but if they are slightly concerned about perception then there are ways to avoid misunderstandings. They can wait until graduation. Give through other channels.
To me it seems laughable that someone could naively give a large gift and not realize the potential implications. These people are not stupid.
That said this again mixes the legal, relatively transparent process of legacy admissions and the fraud that was perpetrated in this cheating scandal. While it may be unfair, legacies are playing by the stated rules.
I would reply that it probably depends on the school district. In Texas, the top 6% are eligible for UT. It may count as a “selective” college, so that statistic may be borne out. But outside of the large metropolitan areas, very few kids are applying to the top 20 schools that are mentioned obsessively on CC. The" good students" in small districts and rural areas are generally staying in-state, and I imagine it’s like that in most states outside of the northeast and west coasts.
My Ds went to an “elite” private school that sends many (if not most) of its students to “elite schools.” A conversation among parents at our school sounds pretty much like the conversations here on CC. But no one else I know from my childhood, no one of our friends (mostly friends from college), no other people in our life outside of this school attempted to get their kids into these elite schools. They go to the big state Unis in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi. Some go to some of the private schools in Texas. But this CC world exists only in little pockets from my observations. Anecdotal of course.
Even considering the statistic provided above, if 5-10% of kids are applying to selective colleges, that means the VAST majority are not.
European countries generally have national school-leaving tests, not college admissions tests. The national school-leaving tests are written by the governmental education departments, manually graded by ministry-appointed exam committees, and subject-specific. The national school-leaving tests are more similar to IB tests than to the SAT or ACT. In some countries, there are oral as well as written exams.
In some cases the national school-leaving tests are supplemented by admissions tests written and administrated by the specific universities or programs. The more selective UK universities also supplement the national school-leaving test information with interviews of short-listed applicants conducted by faculty at the university.
There could certainly be opportunities for cheating, but it is virtually impossible to cheat on oral components, such as the oral exam or the in-person interview, short of corrupting the examiners. This provides some protection.
The SAT and ACT are privately written and administered tests that are now supposed to function as universal admissions tests for students coming from every type of high school and applying to every type of university. In addition, they are now also supposed to measure universal college-readiness.
So will anything really change because of this case? Of course colleges will be a little more careful for a while but will any truly meaningful and lasting changes be made in the college admissions process? Maybe at USC but that is just one school.
@Plotinus If this country tried to move to a system of national school leaving tests, and those tests were used by elite colleges as part of the admissions decision, people would immediately begin trying to game the system just as they do in other countries. You can read accounts of students in Japan being prepped from kindergarten for their one test.
Also, I doubt that such a system could ever be enacted here. Think of how much resistance there has been to common core. People generally want to retain the ability for schools to design their own curricula. Such a test would force the whole country to “teach to the test” and discourage all kinds of creative educational platforms.
There are problems with our system to be sure, but I think we need tweaks more than a complete overhaul.
“So will anything really change because of this case? Of course colleges will be a little more careful for a while but will any truly meaningful and lasting changes be made in the college admissions process? Maybe at USC but that is just one school.”
I think there will be more scrutiny of recruited athlete admissions and, to the extent that kids were getting in this “side door” through fraud, that door will be closed. I also think that ACT/SAT will adopt measures to increase testing security. All those out of state kids taking the exam at two specific testing centers with accommodations and showing dramatic improvement should have raised some red flags.
Tara Westover in her memoir “Educated” tells a story of how she grew up in a family of religious fanatics and was formally homeschooled but in fact received practically no education. She studied very hard independently and eventually took ACT, received a decent score, went to BYU and eventually got a PhD from Cambridge. She would have no chance without standardized tests. Incidentally, this shows yet another example of being successful without starting in an Ivy.
I seems as if the entire world is talking about this scandal! At dinner on Saturday night, the neighboring diners were talking about it, for what seemed to be much of their meal; yesterday, at brunch, a table of 10 (I counted) spent their entire meal talking about it; one of them appeared to be a journalist, and as much as I strained my ears (and ignored our guests!), I couldn’t quit catch all they were saying.
I think you proved my point, @Plotinus. Whether the standardized exam is called “school leaving” or A levels or Bac or Arbitur, or SAT, is irrelevant to me. Almost all countries use some type of standard assessment test in evaluating applicants for college admission when the number of applicants exceeds the slots available.
Will anything change?
I think it will feed anti-college sentiment. The celebrities who can’t hack it will take on the battle cry “college isn’t for everyone anyway, it’s just a bunch of nerds” (speaking of sour grapes). Doesn’t even matter that the scandal didn’t touch top public Us or other top privates.
In spite of the fact that I support a more reasonable way of selecting from among the top 10% of applicants, I don’t think that’s a good thing. Our country needs more brainpower, not less.
I was just answering a question about how admissions are done in other countries. I wasn’t suggesting that the US could or should go over to national school-leaving tests. In fact, IB students do already participate in a form of this system, and NYU accepts IB exams and national school-leaving tests in place of the SAT/ACT. Whatever the merits or demerits of this idea, wholesale substitution of national school-leaving tests for the SAT/ACT would require a national curriculum, so it couldn’t happen in the US.
I don’t know whether the Japanese system to which you refer includes oral examinations or interviews by professors for short-listed applicants. These are relatively effective in reducing cheating as well as moderating the benefits of excessive prepping. However, I think it is pretty useless to tell universities to significantly change their admissions systems because short of legislation compelling them, they won’t.
My opinion is that the universities have the system that they want because it is the universities that put that system in place and control it, including the nature, content, and mode of administration of the SAT/ACT. The universities just don’t want the negative PR that sometimes comes with that system. So the scandal may yield some minimal changes to improve public image, but unless there is a public outcry for legislative intervention, we won’t see any meaningful changes in the transparency of the admissions process, or in the content, use, or even cheating opportunities of the SAT/ACT. The opportunities for cheating have been discussed at length in the SAT/ACT threads, and they will remain even if there is crackdown on the cheating-for-the-0.1% in the Singer scam.
More like, those who wanted to pass inherited privilege to the next generation redeployed money to help their own kids acquire the newly emphasized measures of merit. For the SAT, that includes test preparation, and prep schools and high SES area schools embedding test preparation in course work (and occasionally, as in this scandal, paying for cheating).
I definitely don’t get the impression that the parents were taken advantage of. Wealth and privilege might be the cause and/or effect of a lot things, but I simply don’t buy that it fuels ignorance of criminal enterprise. I think this, where the parents were concerned, is simply a matter of personal ethics. Either you are or are not willing to lie, cheat, and bribe your kids way in. The parents are definitely not victims. I can buy, though, that ‘wealth and privilege’-- status, fueled a sense of entitlement (that these parents mistook for “need”) to beat the system, at any cost (literally). That’s unfortunate. But, Singer didn’t take advantage of them. He partnered with willing, and even eager, criminal compatriots.
very well said
The better solution is to add measures to make testing more secure - two proctors, video cameras, more safeguards on extended time, rather than make the academic portion of the application solely dependent on HS grades.
Almost all of the students associated with the scandal attended private HS, and believe me, the amount of nonsense that goes on at private prep schools - outright cheating, fudging of transcripts, favorable treatment of some students - is outrageous and without the standardized tests as an equalizer, will 1) make the transcript even more important 2) encourage more cheating at the HS level where it’s much easier to get away with.
Just wait for the other shoe to drop in this scandal - several of the high schools involved have been subpoenaed, and it will be very interesting to see what comes out.