The SI article says that none of the students whose parents bought their admissions to the various schools have been expelled. Why not?
There is no way that the author of a SI article could know that.
In fact this is the finding of the study for most students. Middle class and up students who were accepted to (or even applied to) elite schools but didn’t attend them did just as well no matter where they went.
Unless they were black, hispanic, low income and/or first gen (or female, but reasons were different). In those cases, there was a meaningful difference in outcome (namely, salary over decades after graduation).
It was a pretty thorough series of studies.
More on that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/18/private-colleges-are-a-waste-of-money-for-white-middle-class-kids/
Articles about the Dale/Kreuger research and others that have followed have come up a lot since the scandal, because the research there shows that what those parents were doing was really a waste for their kids. There isn’t any benefit to those kids getting into an elite school.
There were some news reports that indicated that Singer protected some of his clients and if those are true – and I don’t know if they are – then I can’t imagine why the DOJ would allow that. If there is any kind of monetary or paper trail of them making large donations to a foundation or a coach or anyone else and seeing what the outcome was for their kid when applying to college (especially if that kid was a designated recruit), that would seem to be pretty clear.
Unless we are entering a world that seems very similar to what happens in big revenue sports college recruiting, where sure a kid is driving a brand new car and his parents got a brand new house or a relative is suddenly very rich but the NCAA looks the other way because they don’t actually have a videotape of the coach offering to pay the student for signing to play basketball or football for their college and handing over cash. And if that is what is going to be allowed, then why even bother to prosecute these parents? It’s like the NCAA ruining kids’ lives because they sold their championship rings to get a free tattoo while the NCAA says there isn’t enough evidence to know whether there is any wrongdoing when families of the very top recruits suddenly seem to have extraordinarily expensive things they did not have earlier.
^ the last report I saw on that, mentioned in an LA times article linked here, said that Singer had tried to warn some clients, then the fbi slapped an obstruction charge on him and he gave them up. Did also say more charges to come. Probably safe to say there will be people who manage to avoid being charged though.
Some of the colleges not yet linked to charges but that got donations are looking into the paper trail too to try work back - NYU as an example.
While Hanna is clearly correct in that the author would have no way of knowing. Plus, its too early. Until a parent officially enters a plea, there’s that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ thingy.
But more importantly, there are plenty of educators/college administrators – as well as parents on cc – that say, ‘let the kid stay if they were not knowledgeable about the fraud and are making appropriate academic progress.’
(Personally, I think that is a horrible practice – I’d rescind past degrees for those found guilty – but I don’t get a vote.)
I still can’t wrap my head around Harvard not already firing their fencing coach and releasing a statement implying they need to train their employees better in conflict of interest issues. Talk about a double standard. The coach accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from a father of a recruit who clearly overpaid for his property. And it appears that a number of years earlier the coach and his wife set up a new non-profit that received $100,000 from a national fencing foundation shortly after this very same dad gave $1 million to that very same foundation. It doesn’t matter whether the fencer was just as good as the basketball player at U Penn where the coach also benefited from making him a recruit, or if the fencer was a pretty good fencer. It doesn’t matter if those fencers had the academic credentials where they might possibly have the same 5% chance to be admitted from the larger pile as thousands of students who got rejected. You can’t take money or rewards if you are in a position of giving someone a leg up in admissions.
It’s no different than if the director of admissions had the dad of a recently admitted student or a student who was just applying buy his house for hundreds of thousands of dollars above the asking price. There is no possible way Harvard would say that is okay. There is no possible way that Harvard would say “well the kid meets basic standards for admissions, so I guess we’ll just have to educate our director of admissions that he or she should not be having a happy parent pay hundreds of thousands of dollars above the market rate for their home.” It is absurd that they are even presenting a scenario where this is not completely wrong.
Stanford has expelled a student whose sailing credentials were fabricated, even though she was not recruited as an athlete. False info on the application was grounds enough for expulsion.
Oh, my goodness. I feel a little deflated after reading that. Just awful. “Fabricated credentials.”
That has got to be tough on a young soul. All of them.
From the Stanford Daily: “Though she was accepted through the standard process and not as a recruited athlete, her admission was followed by a $500,000 contribution to Stanford’s sailing program paid through former head coach John Vandemoer”
It seems very odd that she falsified sailing credentials, was supposedly accepted “through the standard process and not as a recruited athlete”, and yet the the sailing program got a $500,000 contribution. Presumably that was not a coincidence and the source of that contribution was connected to the student admitted. Is this just a matter of semantics where a “tip” is given instead of being a “recruit”? If she went to the trouble to include falsified sailing credentials in her application and supposedly they had nothing to do with why she was admitted, why would she even falsify them at all?
It’s probably not a sport where they have free rides for their athletes. The coach probably had one recruitable slot and the rest where big thumbs on the scale for a few more. Just like d3. Used that heavy thumb for her. Not technically a recruited athlete. But why can’t a school just come clean and not corporate speak us - like we can’t handle the truth.
And when I heard they vacated her grades, I was like ouch. She earned those and paid for them like it or not. Then I thought maybe they were being merciful.
@Hanna do the vacated grades let her apply as though she never attended college? Was a gesture to her as maybe a really nice kid or something? Negotiated settlement ?
And if not, could I sue for those credits with any reasonable hope in this environment. Could you select a bench trial vs jury because of publicity?
In the end, I would try go to u Wyoming or u Montana or South Dakota etc. somewhere really good but out in the middle of nowhere with very high admissions. And probably some pretty non judgemental kids. Total speculation of the students on my part. It would be something like that and get on with my life.
Maybe legally change my last name to something close but different.
I would also forgive my parents, eventually.
Great job, Stanford.
@observer12. My observation of Harvard is they always were about things other than academics.
I call Harvard the school for heads of state. Harvard is about training for the very upper escelons of governance. See Pakistani head of state , Malia Obama, and a huge list of political admits. I think those admits came with big price tags too, of course. Harvard is a big money collector and has been since the 1600s. Its a very old “old boy system”, so I don’t see why any sort of house buying and money laundering by one silly coach would be seen as unusual for Harvard. Its just the way the school works from the very beginning. I hope its tarnished by this, I really do.
Harvard will not fire any coach. why should they? They are Harvard! I just hope that students take a whiff and run the other way to MIT! MIT students now can read, I hear!
OTOH, one could say that she kinda earned them, but since she was a fraudulent app, she really didn’t. Just like rescinding a whole degree after someone graduated. In such cases, do they ‘vacate’ every class, or just the BS/BA diploma itself?
Hanna?
@ucbalumnus: “https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-morrie-tobin-college-admissions-scandal-20190331-story.html is an article about how the admissions cheating was discovered through the securities investigation.”
I don’t understand how a family with three children who have already attended Yale, one graduated and two enrolled at the time of the negotiations between Tobin and Meredith, would think he needed any means beyond the tools with which he had (apparently) already equipped his children for seeking and gaining admission to that university.
As he did intend to secure such means, and through such measures, however, makes me highly suspicious of what
behind-the-scenes role he may have played in the acceptance of his older kids to Yale.
Good for Stanford. They did what they should do.
Analogy
Dad steals car, gives to daughter. Cops come to take car away. Does daughter argue “but I drove it really well, I should keep it”?
Could it be that they just changed all grades to “GNR” in the student’s records, while otherwise retaining the record of attendance?
https://registrar.stanford.edu/students/definition-grades
Probably because the shame for both the family and the sibling who didn’t get into Yale would be too much for the family to bear.
If the feds really wanted to clean this up, they would ask a lot more questions.
For instance, how did Tobin find Meredith in the first place? How did people find out about Singer? And how long has this been going on? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years? Did Singer start with the kind of graft we saw at Harvard – just giving nice “gifts” to coaches or their “foundations” or athletic departments to thank them for designating real student athletes as recruits who were decent enough athletes but were not good enough to be a recruit on talent alone, and then take it to the next level because it had become so easy to get good – but not top level - student-athletes designated as recruits if convenient “donations” were made?
In other words, did Singer start with so-called “legal” donations that are similar to how extremely wealthy donors’ kids are put on the list? The students whose families donate a building don’t have to be truly outstanding academically, they just have to be “good enough” which would almost never get them admitted if their application was in a pile of a thousand similar and often far superior academically students. Seems like at Harvard, the fencing coach was recruiting those fencers who were “good enough” because of a donation. “Good enough” plus big donation = athletic recruit and “good enough” + building = regular admissions.
There may be the equivalent of a “Dean’s Interest List” in designating athletic recruits, where “good enough” + donation gets you a recruit slot or a tip and for all we know this is not unusual at all. Obviously the majority of recruits will be stellar athletes just like the majority of students admitted will be stellar. But money can change a student who is “good enough who would never be recruited or admitted” into a recruit or regular admit. The Harvard fencer’s dad was not doing anything very different from what Jared Kushner’s dad did, until he overpaid for the property. But given that wasn’t caught for years, who knows how often that stuff happens as well?