He bought the fencing coach’s house. Then his son got into Harvard
Translation: “We are committed to ensuring that if any admissions places are sold that they’re sold the right way - directly through the college. Come on, people - this is what the development admit spaces are for! Let’s all just make sure the money goes to the correct bucket and it will be fine.”
I heard a recording of him blasting schools that didn’t accept his daughter. She apparently checked all the boxes in terms of grades, EC’s and test scores but she lived in the wrong zip code where “they couldn’t take too many from the same area”. He really went off and blistered BC and Holy Cross. He threw USC in too. Once he calmed down he praised Wake Forest for accepting his daughter. The entire tirade made it perfectly clear that he didn’t understand holistic admissions. I think he now knows that the holistic approach can really be a double-edged sword.
Even if she checked all the boxes with grades and stats, so did 10 other students for every seat at those colleges.
That is crazy.
It’s worse than just buying the fencing coach’s house at an inflated price. This is from the Harvard Crimson, and happened when the FIRST son was admitted:
“Zhao and Brand are also tenuously connected through a separate set of non-profit financial transactions that took place around the time his older son, who was also on the fencing team, was admitted to the College. Zhao told the Globe he donated $1 million to the National Fencing Foundation of Washington D.C. in 2013, the largest donation by far that the foundation had ever received. That same year, Brand and his wife formed a non-profit foundation in Delaware which received $100,000 from the National Fencing Foundation.”
There is a very simple way for Harvard to investigate this. Were Zhao’s two sons designated as recruits or given tips by the athletic department? If they were, then the system is corrupt.
It’s no different than the U Penn basketball player. He was a real high school basketball player – just not one good enough to be recruited. He was a decent student – just not one who had more than a tiny chance of getting in if he were part of the same pile with thousands of outstanding students whose parents don’t use the “side door” of athletics recruiting.
When an athlete is really outstanding enough to be recruited, the coach wants the athlete. The coach doesn’t want donations. I suspect that what Singer did was take this common practice of parents donating to get their good but not top tier athlete son or daughter designated a recruit to them get into very selective colleges to the next level where they didn’t even have to be athletes at all.
The only way to check this is to see if the students getting the athletic tips are really at the very top athletically when they are made recruits, or are they simply good or even excellent high school athletes but not at the level of the recruits whose parents don’t have to pay to have them recruited are? It’s amazing how similar this is to the backdoor of just donating directly to the university. The defenders can argue that Jared Kushner was a good student who met the criteria needed to be admitted. But of course, he would not have been admitted if he were in the pile of outstanding students who were more outstanding in every way except their parents’ bank accounts.
“Even if she checked all the boxes with grades and stats, so did 10 other students for every seat at those colleges.”
Holy Cross and BC are both very good schools that reject more applicants than they accept, but it’s not like trying to get into Yale or Stanford. If you check all the boxes, you get into schools like BC and Holy Cross. Also, if I was Mad Dog’s daughter, I would be mortified.
Yale just abruptly fired its fencing coach a few days ago. The coach had been at Yale for decades.
I’m sure this will continue as more top universities investigate their coaches for these types of shenanigans.
This business man did not think he did something wrong by helping out the coach, who he really liked. We don’t know if this father’s “help” tipped the scale. However, it did not look appropriate.
If this is acceptable by Harvard, any rich parents could help any coach they like out when it is close to admission time.
It will be difficult for Harvard to find this acceptable.
I have a feeling this is just the beginning. Recruited athletes are going to have to create a separate portfolio and audition similar to arts students. Even then, it is still subjective.
I’ll bet that officials at Princeton, the only remaining HYPMS member with D1 sports that has not been implicated, are feeling a little anxious right now…
@lkg4answers – I agree.
I agree too. The fact that the family of a kid from St. Alban’s with supposedly “near perfect” scores was willing to pay hundreds of thousands for the tip just goes to show the level of competition and credential-mania for admission to ultra-selective universities–and the extreme value associated with attending those schools. We’ve seen examples where the process has been hacked at both ends by the ultra-rich (Varsity Blues, Harvard fencing, etc) and the underserved (TM Landry). In between are many more forms of hypocrisy and corruption that are entirely legitimized under the umbrella of holistic admissions.
The problem here is that the coaches were engaging in privateering–quid pro quo activities that are unacceptable when performed under the table by unauthorized individuals for sums of hundreds of thousands of dollars yet somehow entirely acceptable when performed by development and admission officers for sums in the millions.
It’s quite an editorial:
They Had It Coming
The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs.
One part that is interesting to me is this claim:
^ that is a quote from a 2006 article, so YMMV.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/what-college-admissions-scandal-reveals/586468/
I hesitate to refer to the NY Post, ever, but here is a similar claim:
https://nypost.com/2018/05/02/rich-parents-are-using-doctors-notes-to-help-kids-cheat-the-sats/
We only have the word of other people that these students had “near perfect” scores and now that we know about how those scores can be gamed (and private schools can have very inflated GPAs), I wonder about such claims.
The investigation should look very closely at all athletic recruits and tips to see if they were really the best of the best or if they got the tip because their parent was very wealthy. If Yale fired its fencing coach, who knows how often teams are “subsidized” by having outstanding players who are genuine recruits and a few mediocre players whose parents made a big donation? Edit: I see that the Yale fencing coach firing could be for other reasons so I retract that example.
[Quote]
al:
They Had It Coming
The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs.
[Quote/]
@OHMomof2 - yikes I had not seen that article! So does this mean I need to tell my kids to put into their applications the achievement of “finished the SAT within the regular time constraints as dictated by the College Board”? Perhaps that should be their heading at the top of their college resume!
Its like a big smelly onion with lots of layers of cheating that these horrible (yes horrible is the nicest word I can use)parents use/figure out to get their snowflakes into college. While mine can say they have done so without the power of bribery or cheating it fries me to the core that these kids get in and schools seemingly are oblivious to it and the run of the mill, hardworking student-athlete-musician is left to odds that are stacked unfairly against them.
Top Law Firm’s Chairman to Plead Guilty in College Cheating Scandal
Gordon Caplan was accused of paying $75,000 to doctor his child’s ACT and buy her more time on the exam. He said his daughter ‘has been devastated to learn what I did.’