Feds uncover admissions test cheating plot

Applying to College
4081

At some schools, it really is enough to have the coach’s okay. At Duke, Coach K pretty much gets to have the basketball players he wants, even if they are just above the NCAA minimums. If the swim coach at Cal offers an Olympic swimmer a scholarship, that’s pretty much a done deal if they are minimally qualified, even though Cal does have a separate athletic admissions committee. ND isn’t turning away the 2.5 gpa quarterback because most at the school have 3.5 or above.

The Ivies are different but the coaches know they are different so don’t even present recruits who don’t meet the minimums. Before they even go after sophomores in high school, they ask them their grades and test scores.

4082

Loughlin didn’t make a donation to the foundation. She made a payment to the foundation as a bribe. The foundation falsely asserted that “no goods or services were exchanged” when in fact the bribe was paid to get the girls into college, a service. The money laundering was asserting a bribe was actually a charitable donation. Money laundering is a crime.

You may think this is a technicality but I doubt the judge will agree.

4083

As @twoinanddone said, the Ivies are different, but they have the Academic Index for athletic recruiting, which IIRC allows for the athletic recruits’ stats to be no more than one standard deviation away from the non-recruits’ stats., so the academic requirements do differ. Athletes’ apps are sent over to admissions for a pre-read so that the coach knows he will not be attempting to recruit an athlete who would not be approved by admissions.

Before Naviance was changed, it was very easy to see who the recruited athletes were on the scattergrams.

4084

From one description:
“The Athletic AI for all athletes in all sports must be within one standard deviation of the Campus AI. This allows each college some flexibility by allowing a few key revenue sports to have a Team AI lower than one standard deviation but be collectively offset by others with a Team AI less than one standard deviation away from the Campus AI (fencing, golf, squash, tennis, for example). But the aggregate Athletic AI, to repeat, cannot be more than one standard deviation lower than the Campus AI. Every athlete admitted with a low Individual AI must be offset with another with a higher
Individual AI.”

It goes on, but see how it doesn’t exactly hold an individual athlete to the same bar?

4085

Question for a statistics challenged person: what does the bell curve look like for the determination of the AI? Is the center point, ie the 50th percentile the average AI of the Campus? Or how is it determined? What does the standard deviation mean in real terms?

4086

@“Cardinal Fang” “Loughlin didn’t make a donation to the foundation. She made a payment to the foundation as a bribe. The foundation falsely asserted that “no goods or services were exchanged” when in fact the bribe was paid to get the girls into college, a service. The money laundering was asserting a bribe was actually a charitable donation. Money laundering is a crime.”

You have just assumed a lot of facts not in evidence. She paid Singer separately for his services. She also gave a donation to a charitable foundation that she (presumably) knew was going to a university athletic department which is another charitable donation. Loughlin clearly assumed that donation would help her child get into college just like Jared Kushner’s dad thought his donation would help his kid get into college. But we all agree that a donation isn’t a bribe unless admission is guaranteed and no one could “guarantee” admission except the admissions committee. All that donation could do was provide an incredibly big boost to a kid’s admissions chances. And we all agree that giving an incredibly big boost to a kid’s admissions chances still doesn’t mean a donation isn’t a donation.

By the way, if a big donation results in a child’s application being put in a separate pile, then you could argue that means that “goods and services were exchanged” for that donation. Otherwise, that application would be in the same pile with students whose families did not donate tens of millions.

What Loughlin did was unethical and lying in an application is grounds for expulsion. But the question is about the crime and if the money was paid to a foundation that sent it to the athletic department, it was a real donation. That’s what happened at UCLA. Did you read the correspondence? No one in the athletic department thought that something illegal had occurred even if they believed it was unethical.

4087

And, I guess, my wider question: what is keeping the Ivies, as a league, from determining that athletes need to meet the Campus AI, full stop, no deviations? After all, it’s the classroom experience that’s central, with everything else happening on campus running second, even it’s a very close second.

Or better yet, have an athletics firewall in place just as there is a financial need firewall in place. Have adcoms decide on a long list of kids they can all agree they want on campus - in their classrooms and labs first and foremost, then dorms, theatres, gyms, boats, orchestras…
Then all the stakeholders get dibs. Faculty first, but also the music director, athletic director, residential life director, whoever there is, all create a ranked shortlist. Then it goes back to adcoms who balance out the class before they send out admissions.

It appears that recruited athletes don’t have to play well, or at all, to keep their place at the school. They can just stop playing at any point because they are injured, need more time to study, or simply because they’ve lost interest (probably happens rarely but could, a kid might just be burned out). Just as they can stop playing their instrument, or take part in anything extracurricular at any point.

But they ALL have to go to class.

Hey, why doesn’t anyone ever ask me? :wink:

Edited to add that I have never seen a college admit to a category of “most strongly considered: size of expected family donation/level of parents celebrity/athletic prowess, but exclusively in the sports that we happen to field teams due to either historical reasons or federal law”. If you do it, own it…

4088

Athletes absolutely do NOT have to play well to keep they academic spot, but the coaches can dismiss them from the team. They have the right to appeal (through the NCAA) if they lose their scholarship. At the Ivies or other schools that don’t give athletic scholarships, there is nothing keeping them on the team. I know kids who were recruited and use the boost to get in, but never played. Some stayed at the schools, some left, but that’s their choice.

My daughter started with 9 freshmen on her team. Two left the team after a year but stayed at the school. The other 7 played all 4 years.

4089

Tigerle, it is what it is. The intention is to form strong teams, even if some kids drop off. But the Varsity Blues lawsuit isn’t concerned with that.

Observer. you’re not thinking like the attorneys who brought the suit. We don’t “all agree” on your points, no matter how often you say we do. And you give to the U through development. Not some random coach putting you down for a sport you don’t play. Lol.

4090

@lookingforward

“you give to the U through development. Not some random coach putting you down for a sport you don’t play. Lol.”

You are thinking like a billionaire donor who knows his kid will be put in a special pile in exchange for his donation. But it is a fact that people donate to athletic departments.

This is from the LA Times article about UCLA:

“The confidential report, reviewed by The Times, shows that years before the current college admissions scandal, UCLA knew of allegations that parents were pledging donations to its athletic program in exchange for their children being admitted to the university.
The investigation determined that the timing of the pledge by the parents “together with the revelation that she was intended to be only a manager, in violation of the department recruitment and admission policy, removes any reasonable doubt that the contribution from the parents was obtained quid pro quo for the daughter’s admission.” William Cormier, then the director of UCLA’s administrative policies and compliance office, wrote the report. It is unclear who received it.”

There was no suggestion that a crime had been committed by those parents. Are you suggesting that all those parents committed a crime that UCLA covered up?

My point is that Loughlin hasn’t been convicted yet and people are saying she is guilty, which means that these parents also committed crimes and UCLA covered them up. Do you have some inside evidence that Loughlin did not assume that Singer’s donation went to the athletic department just like the donations he made to UCLA that UCLA knew about.

4091

I don’t think everyone agrees to this at all. The prosecutors certainly don’t seem to either. Intent matters. These families weren’t donating money to colleges. They were paying Singer for services rendered through an organization created to hide the purpose of the payments. I believe federal prosecutors call that money laundering.

4092

Doubtful. But AFAIK, no school has released its mean AI for athletic recruits.

“the Ivy League segments all A.I.s above 171 into four “bands.” something like A, B, C, D, with A being the highest band. Using this system, an Ivy League school like Harvard, with a high Academic Index of 220 and a standard deviation of 14 would have its bands defined as follows: High: 197-210, Med: 183-196, Low: 176-182, Low-Low: 171-175.”
https://www.ivyleagueguru.com/calculate-index

4093

Arguing the specifics is impossible because honestly we don’t have all of the information and every case is different. What I can say is that I don’t think that a jury will be kind to these people if it goes to trial.

4094

Apparently, one of LL’s daughters is now under criminal probe to determine what she knew, and how much she knew, of her parents attempt to game the admissions system

4095

@lbf "Arguing the specifics is impossible because honestly we don’t have all of the information and every case is different. "

This has never stopped the CC community before! As 4000 comments on this thread alone attest :slight_smile:

4096

I am finding myself agreeing with @observer12. As outrageous as this case is when looking at it coldly the criminality aspects are kind of murky, especially when compared to the common practice of doing the same thing legally. Where Singer screwed up royally is when he started boasting that he was offering guarantees. Just look at the leaked Sony CEO (a Harvard alumni) emails to and from Brown posted a few pages back, they were careful not to step on the line but it is crystal clear what their intention was which is no different than that of these parents. On another email you can see him saying to someone else that was obsessed with getting their kid into Harvard to open their checkbook… Everyone here is aware of this and I am just playing lawyer here (not being a lawyer makes it more fun, LOL), where I am getting at is that it is smart for them to play victim and say that even though they found their way into money and fame they are not sophisticated, powerful or even college graduates! themselves, that they decided to use their money to hire a consultant with powerful references to show them the legal way to do this and that Singer screwed things up for them.

4097

LL copied her husband and daughter on the email. The “little friend” at her high school is the counselor who suspected that something wasn’t Kosher. Was OJ was copied on Singer’s reply that directed an employee to submit applications (plural) on her behalf?

4098

No guarantee but since Harvard’s business is all public now with the lawsuit from SFFA, we know that the college has a sub-5% accept rate overall but an 83% accept rate for recruited athletes.

Those athletes are screened by coaches, academically, there is a bar, but it’s not the same bar as for non-athletes. There can’t be too many that are super low AIs as that average has to be kept to, but there can be some.

4099

The leaked email was to the President of Brown. Not the development teams or the normal process.

And it sounded like the student might have been excellent to begin with and no one here knows either.

However, access to people the like the president of brown and to get a response has less to to with a current pledge and more about the social currency the ceo of Sony wields.

They may know each other or have sat on panels. Or Sony recruits students or donated equipment.

There’s always more to these stories. But the access is real.

4100

@privatebanker I completely agree. Just trying to say that their legal strategy is not as preposterous as it looks at first glance… I don’t know what I’m talking about but have a feeling that there are two aspects to this. One being whether the money was a bribery or a legal donation, it is crystal clear what it was but legally proving it was a bribery may not be as easy as it sounds especially where there is a widespread and legal way to do it. The other one is lying they were athletes on the application which is obviously grounds for expulsion and a civil legal case but I’m not sure being a charlatan counts as a crime provided you are not pretending to be a doctor and operate on someone or something along that line…

Edit:. I am basically using all the cynisism I have at my disposal to try and figure out what it is they are doing, basically playing devil’s advocate…