“Like him or not, it riles me that educated posters here on cc put it out there as a statement of fact that he was unqualified.”
Well like the parents in the current scandal, it was dad who thought he was unqualified, otherwise why jump through all the hoops to get him into Harvard? It wasn’t the money that got him in, of course that helped. It was Kushner sr. contacting his senator (NJ dem Lautenberg) to contact Ted Kennedy and have Kennedy put a word in. The Kennedy’s are royalty at Harvard, so when Ted called the admissions director, Fitzsimmons, with some words for Jared, admissions was guaranteed. Kushner the elder is as shrewd a businessman as you’re going to find. He knew his son couldn’t get in straight up, and let’s say he was proud that he could get his son in, according to him, it’s easy to get a genius into Harvard, but not someone like Jared.
“Do you mind sharing the names Golden quoted as having an opinion on Jared? Because I’m not seeing them in the article and not going to buy the book.”
Here’s one:
"Margot Krebs, who was director of Frisch’s college preparatory program at the time, said, “Jared was certainly not anywhere near the top of his class. He had some very strong personal qualities. He’s a very charming young man with a great deal of poise, the sort of kid you would look at him and say, ‘This is a future politician.’ It was an unusual choice for Harvard to make.”
“And realize Golden didn’t write as a public service.”
Of course he wrote it for selling books, but it’s not like adcoms are public servants, they’re also motivated by money and have biases. Golden was a WSJ investigative reporter at the time, I’d believe him before adcoms.
Lol, TM. I don’t doubt Krebs, but we know being at or near top of class is not the sole “it.” And personal qualities do matter. But she’s not an adcom. I’m not going to convince those who use him as the poster boy for proof it’s all slanted.
Go ahead and believe a reporter, if you wish. But selling books doesn’t make him authoritative. Can you see his spin? He admited he had only a partial view of admissions.
Have we exhausted the focusof this thread? A lawsuit alleging Illegal actions.
Colleges have fund drives to actively seek out donations from alumni and anyone else who’d like to contribute. Donations alone don’t get a kid through the door. Maybe the kids of top or long time donors get a second look, but I don’t believe the children of large donors are given an automatic entry through the admissions gate.
If I’m going to concern myself with money giving people a boost, it’s not going to be over a few spots which may or may not be given to wealthy donors. I’m more concerned with the money being spent by upper income Americans and wealthy school districts that is widening the gap between their educational outcomes and those of most lower income students.
The expectation on some of the threads on CC is that parents invested a lot of time and money in their kid’s education so they expect a spot at selective colleges, and parents can get very resentful and angry if they don’t get the outcomes they think their investments deserve. That’s an unfair, and much more common, monetary advantage. Low income families have zero control over how much funding their districts get, and if you’ve ever been involved in the budgeting process at that level you know how difficult it is to squeeze a few more dollars out of those who control the funds.
The parents in the VB case already had an advantage. The parents who can afford the expensive test prep that’s driving up the numbers of perfect test scores have an advantage too, as does every family who can afford the more expensive, higher performing school districts. I wish people would put as much energy into demanding better quality education for our lowest income families as they do railing against the injustices (real or perceived) being heaped upon upper income families.
@austinmshauri “Colleges have fund drives to actively seek out donations from alumni and anyone else who’d like to contribute. Donations alone don’t get a kid through the door. Maybe the kids of top or long time donors get a second look, but I don’t believe the children of large donors are given an automatic entry through the admissions gate.”
A couple of days ago I could have written ^^ this myself, I also still fully agree with the rest of your post. Thanks to others here I finally picked up, dusted off and opened my unread copy of “The price of admission”. My perspective on the statement above is being revised as I read it. The whole apparatus (admissions for the rich and well connected) is much more “clubish” than I previously thought and I was naive to think that a “second look” is all they get. Yes, the “right” way to do it is surely legal but reading about it feels just as wrong as reading about some of these VB cases, maybe more so as the people involved in the “clubish” schemes are fully aware while some of these VB people look like plain imbeciles taking a nasty fall for not even bothering to read what could be considered a how to book on the subject: “the price of admission”…
I’m not sure why this discussion keeps sidetracking into Jared, Malia etc. None of them had false test scores or resumes, did they? Isn’t the point that adcoms knew what they were getting there and made the decision on that? Isn’t that also the point of the Stanford stance - that whether or not the kids would have got in anyway, they got expelled if there was false info on the resume. The simplistic bottom line is that cheating is not ok. You may not like the system (I certainly don’t), but the game still has rules.
@notigering For decades a lot of us have thought there must be something special, noble, & honest about higher education…
especially at the older & more digified institutions. Occasionally some would get caught gaming their SAT scores or their USNews rankings, but those were dismissed as anomolies. On cc I once saw someone ask that perhaps with all the concern for “yield,” some of these claims that a school doesn’t consider an applicant’s demonstrated interest might be public relations B.S. And that question was quickly denounced as cynical nonsense–how dare somebody question the integrity of admissions departments!?!
Now the whole thing is under suspicion. They are all people. And people like money. It appears we can update & re-purpose James Carville’s famous comment about dragging a $100 bill thru a certain kind of neighborhood…it appears you can gain considerable leverage by dragging a $50,000 check thru some pretty swanky quads.
There isn’t much more to say, imo, til more facts or charges emerge or a trial starts. There is almost no late-to-the-party media opinion that offers new detail.
It may be off topic, but I’d like to express my appreciation to the mods for allowing this thread to continue while keep it from straying too far from its intended purpose. I’m sure it would have been much easier to close it instead of diligently attending to it. Thanks to their efforts - they’ve clearly earned their stripes.
@moooop “Now the whole thing is under suspicion. They are all people. And people like money. It appears we can update & re-purpose James Carville’s famous comment about dragging a $100 bill thru a certain kind of neighborhood…it appears you can gain considerable leverage by dragging a $50,000 check thru some pretty swanky quads.”
LOL. Yes, but reading the book it looks as if schools are complicit to a level that is hard to phantom. The chapter on Duke is particularly revealing… It shows how Joel Fleishman, right hand man of Sanford (Duke’s president at the time) on these matters facilitated admissions for the rich and famous and ended up sitting in the boards (Ralph Lauren and Boston Scientific among others…) of their (admitted) children with a rather nice pile of stock options… I am sure it is done carefully as not to be ilegal but reading about it feels outrageous.
^^ And following up on that thought all of these clubs <---- scratch that —> schools are basically in a fierce battle to win or maintain (in the case of Harvard) endowment supremacy. At some schools (HYPS) it is gotten past the point where meeting their generous FA is even an issue although it works as a great and very ingenious selling point (how else can you convince ANYONE that an ultra-rich organization by any possible measure is a charity? lol). It is quid pro quo at its best, the schools/clubs get richer and more out-of-reach/prestigious for all except those rich/connected enough to use it as the strangest imaginable charity that in turn “educates” their children and keeps their high status rolling for at least one more generation though possibly more.The feds are doing them a huge favor here.
Because of this, I think many kids of famous or wealthy parents that got admitted to elite colleges may be feeling some anxiety now (do people think I am a fraud, did my parents pay my way in or was their celebrity or money the reason I was admitted?). Self doubt, depression could creep in for some folks because of all of this. Some kids may feel they have to defend themselves as to why they got in. I’m not wealthy but I do feel for the position some kids and young adults have been put in with these revelations.
The wealthy, privileged have always gotten privileges that the rest of us just don’t get. I don’t begrudge it, but this Varsity Blues business is exposing just how deep this seems to go and the lengths some families are willing to go with elite admissions.
However, the most selective private universities do not necessarily have missions to educate the masses, as opposed to providing a pipeline to upper class jobs (since successful alumni bring prestige to the school), into which mostly scions of the upper class are given preferential entry (development and legacy preference, as well as other criteria that correlate to advantaged upbringing), with a small number of the most personally meritous kids from the lower and middle class being allowed in.
The mission of educating the masses is one that public schools are supposed to take more seriously (how seriously they actually do depends on the state and the school).
According to someone who was in the same class with Yusi Zhao girl, she was a really nice and humble person — anything but a billionaire’s daughter. Sad thing is she possibly could have gotten in regularly. I am convinced she did not know.
The article says “In the 90-minute video, made when she was 17, Zhao offered viewers advice on getting into prestigious American universities while admitting that her “natural IQ isn’t particularly high”.
The video also says she was “awarded a full grant scholarship to Stanford“. This is interesting? Was that a merit award based on her faked resume?