The fun is just starting. Note the “800 other families” in para 2.
"When Mr. Singer explained the scheme last June to Gordon R. Caplan, co-chairman of the global law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher, Mr. Caplan laughed and said, “And it works?” according to a transcript of a recorded phone conversation between the two men captured in a court-authorized wiretap.
During the phone call, Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan that nearly 800 other families had used what he called “side doors” to get their children into college. “What we do is we help the wealthiest families in the U.S. get their kids into school,” Mr. Singer said. “They want guarantees, they want this thing done.”
“There is a front door which means you get in on your own,” Mr. Singer told Mr. Caplan. “The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in.”
Hamurtle wrote:
Unfortunately money does talk and not in a good way. The whole college admissions process has become convoluted. Fair or unfair, the German process of identifying students (vocational vs. university track/Abitur. ) and putting them on the various educational tracks might be the least evil system to higher education.
@ucbalumnus wrote:
However, that involves tracking at middle school age… seems like parents with money can purchase quite a bit of influence at that stage, with less scrutiny than during the college admissions process.
It’s elementary school age, with a cut off at the B- level, and in most states these days subject to parental override, so no comparison to elite school admissions at all - if all the legitimate resources your status affords you doesn’t get your kid across a hurdle that between 40 and 50 % of the age cohort manage, no need to bother; parents of means will head straight to private schools who specialise in that clientele. In the few states (it may be just one these days) where parental override is not possible, you can certainly shout at the teacher or the principal or hire a lawyer to do it for you, and they may roll their eyes and help your kid to that coveted B-, knowing that rigour ratchets up so quickly in college prep track that within 2 or 3 years, usually by the time they have to add a second foreign language or a second science, they’re out.
Surely the high schools these kids attended were suspicious,as well as the applicants. Students who had top scores of 22 on the ACT suddenly got scores of 32. In one case a student’s SAT score improved by over 400 points in less than a month.
According to reports, none of the applicants they are talking about ended up sailing for Stanford. I didn’t think it could be a widespread practice because a non-sailor or even recreational sailor wouldn’t last one practice at a serious program. Racing sailboats, rigging and rules are so technical–it’s like a foreign language. Also, you could literally die or kill someone if you didn’t know what you were doing. So, the scammers would have had to tell the kids not to go at all. And then, with only 3-4 new freshman women and the same for men, wouldn’t it be a big deal if your recruits don’t show? Surely the assistant coaches, managers, and even other athletes would ask questions. Not that I’m a criminal mastermind, but it just doesn’t seem like a very practical scheme.
It’s about working mothers and Jennifer Lopez is doing most of the talking, but it’s still amusing to see Huffman say “guilty” this and “guilty” that. At the end of the interview, it’s easy to imagine that she is blaming her husband for her predicament.
Basketball was bribing the good, talented players to go to a certain school, wear certain athletic gear, give money to their parents and youth coaches. Sort of the opposite of paying your way into a school.
I’d like to know why these parents thought it was so imperative that their kids attended these particular schools. What did they think would happen if their kids went somewhere else?
It’s a lot harder to get from North Dakota State than USC for movie and TV auditions in LA.
There is no doubt that some kids knew and others didn’t.
From the recordings of a cooperating witness, who appears to be a former Harvard tennis player, who was hired as a proctor, and actually sat with students who were granted extra time, giving them answers,
It is difficult to get extra time, but it has also been shown that most students would not in fact benefit from extra time. Those that do run out of time because of their learning disabilities - particularly slow processing speed. The reason they requested extra time as the accommodation was to allow for a different testing room, and time for the proctor to change the answers.
And ACT didn’t flag these huge jumps in scores?? I’m feeling very frustrated for parents whose kids are wrongly accused with much less significant jumps in scores
My point about this tying into the division 1 basketball scandal is that when investigators began to dig into that, they also found an entirely different coaching scandal. Which is the one that came out today.
I was just about to say that @Happy4u - especially in the cases where the answers were changed after the kid left the room. I thought unusual erasures were supposed to be flagged? Especially when accompanying an abnormal score increase… I guess we’ll never know the ways of the Collegeboard!
I don’t understand how William Macy says he didn’t know, there are phone recordings in the complaint where he is discussing it with Singer and Huffman but he is listed as “spouse”. Maybe they only have him on the record in regards to daughter #2 where they didn’t go through with it?
Yet another argument for test optional admissions.! One needs a student’s “big picture,” and not not a point in time snapshot . The least they could do to level the playing field is leave money to the University to assist students with financial need.