on some of the soccer forms there’s wonder about what’s going to happen with UCLAs womens soccer. Perennial top 4 team; admitted someone who was never going to play and dropped off the roster but was on it first year; so coach had to know. UCLA literally gets their players from the national teams, and yet they put someone who was a recreation league level player as a recruit. Think UCLA is just hoping no one cares about women’s soccer so maybe it will just pass.
https://news.yahoo.com/tennis-player-never-played-dad-175225581.html
Here is a parent who paid $400000 to get his kid into Georgetown with fake tennis credentials, similar to what Loughlin and her husband are accused of doing. Same charges, minus the money laundering (maybe it was dropped in the plea deal)?
"The Justice Department has recommended Semprevivo receive a prison sentence of 18 months, substantially lower than the maximum penalty of 20 years as a result of the guilty plea. They’ve also recommended a fine of $95,000, one year of supervision after his release and that he pay an undetermined amount of restitution and forfeiture. "
I wonder if this is similar to the deal offered to the Gianullis that they turned down for trial?
“Whoa there. Are you hinting that colleges are taking underqualified Vietnamese-Americans to fill some kind of quota? There are plenty of academically qualified Vietnamese-American kids. Around here, when I glance at the paper for the top students in this or that school, when I look at math contest results, or the big spelling bee, there are always plenty of Vietnamese names, even thought we don’t have an enormous Vietnamese population. Vietnamese-American kids at least around here are over-represented among the top academic kids, and I believe that is true all across the country.”
This particular student just happens to be Vietnamese and first generation. Good for her, but she got a free (I think free, but not 100% sure) Penn education and is whining like crazy about not being able find a job when others work until 3AM some days to gain the type of merit that schools like this might call for and get rejected. It’s flat-out disgusting. The everyone-gets-a-medal entitlement is completely out of control and I’m glad that we’re now not part of it. In looking back I don’t even know what we were thinking. Much better off with the school that rolled out the red carpet; literally, for our son and others like him. You can have it.
@“Cardinal Fang” “The indictment reported that in one of the cases, the parents gave money to Singer to bribe the Stanford sailing coach, but the student then deferred admission, and enrolled in a different school the next year.”
Can a student really defer admissions to one school, and then spend that year applying to other schools he or she prefers and go to one of those instead if admitted, but to the deferred school if not admitted?
I just don’t buy that the Stanford sailing team needed outside fundraising to buy boats and shirts for the poor kids on the team. Stanford ? Sailing? Underfunded?
Maybe he used boat and gear purchases to cleverly cover his tracks and got kick backs from the vendor.
Sorry. But that’s laughable. They don’t need donations for sailing. A boat maker would use it as publicity to sponsor the team with uniforms etc.
I can’t read through all the replies of the last 5 days, since I last posted, but I’ve read many. The impression that I have received over the weeks this thread has been going is that the news story has satisfied a huge hunger for confirmation bias in many people (especially parents). While I do agree that there are probably many other parents and coaches, administrators, test takers who have been guilty of collusion but not been prosecuted, “many” has not the same meaning as “majority,” but several posters are writing as if the two words are synonyms.
Of the several CC myths that @lookingforward laments, perhaps the one that was previously latent and is now “out” is that colleges and unis really only care about The Bottom Line – that the term “non-profit” is merely a technical category and does not apply to the elites.
Think about what you’re saying…or thinking. It would mean that these supposedly stellar institutions with their envied rankings are willing to routinely trade talent for cash. Are you kidding? While donations are essential-- in fact critical – to all non-profit institutions and companies, the top 15-20 colleges in this country have no intention of wholesale disposal of talent, IQ, and potential “just” for money – certainly not on a massive or dominant scale. If you think that, you have, bluntly, no idea what you’re talking about. You have not witnessed the barely contained viciousness of the Ivies, toward one another, when one non-donor, even impoverished, academic star gets accepted to two elites in the Early Round and is visiting both, trying to negotiate travel plans for both, with both institutions. Good luck with that.
I could give lots more examples, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that the elites spend more energy being jealous predators for talent than predators for money. Brains are considered a commodity to them even more valuable than cash. Brains along with talent, character, and internal motivation. Those factors – not cash – will keep those Elites on the map and sustain the institution’s reputation, which are business considerations. I don’t think there’s a ranking for “cash,” but someone can point me to which USNWR ranking that is.
How does one applicant get into two Ivy League schools in the early round? All of them have either ED or restricted EA, so that applicants are not supposed to apply to more than one of them in the early round.
I mean when the same applicant was accepted to both schools, such as one Early, one Regular. In addition, MIT is EA, @ucbalumnus , not SCEA. So is CalTech.
Neither MIT nor Caltech is in the Ivy League.
@ucbalumnus you said Ivy. Epiphany said “elite”
@ucbalumnus
MIT is definitely considered an Elite school by the public at large.
@epiphany said:
In any case, this is about the Macro here, not the micro. 
Speaking solely about general patterns, not specific schools or cases, the consequence of revocation of admission is almost exclusively used in admissions fraud matters, and it is the standard consequence in admissions fraud matters. Any other consequence is a departure from the default.
Sins of any other kind, no matter how severe, usually lead to expulsion or the cancellation of a diploma, not to revocation of admission.
Here is the sentence that I was responding to:
I.e. @epiphany was referring to “the barely contained viciousness of the Ivies, toward one another”.
I’m curious about the “viciousness” you refer to. I haven’t seen it. Please give us some examples.
If that were true, there wouldn’t be athletic, legacy or development preference. Given that those three preferences are present in over 50% of the admitted students in the Harvard lawsuit data, the facts don’t support this particular assertion.
@milee30 That is because they poach for brains for a specific “bucket”. They have the spaces that they put aside for the people who financially support Ivies in the manner to which the have become accustomed. They have the spaces to justify their claims of social responsibility, and then they have the spaces for the kids who provide the justification for their claims of academic excellence. The better that group is (about 50%-60% of the students), the higher the average and mid range SAT/ACT score are, and the less they need to focus on the stats of their rich students.
One of the reasons that the Ivies generally only choose one or two students from a high school, is that the majority of their rich kid category are all from a small set of schools, meaning that many kids from these schools are not even in the top 10%. So to keep up the percent of students that are val and sal, or in the top 1%, they have to choose only these students from each high school which is not part of their regular pipeline. BTW, many (or most) of the private high schools in the Ivy Pipeline, like Andover and Exeter, do not rank students. This also allows Ivies to accept many students from these schools without it affecting their claimed percentage of legacy students who were at the top 1% of their class.
The distorted perception of the priorities of elite schools just boggles the mind here. One is the false concept of zero sum. Many of the “special” admits are also producers, even though some are not. Gone are the days when C student athletes were as routinely admitted as they once were. URM’s must also keep up. Certain celebrities are actually…well…accomplished and even brilliant (gasp!) people. Too bad that the celebrities most visible on the 'net are sometimes the airheads.
Exactly. They set aside 50% of the spaces for reasons directly related to money and continuing the interests of the college, not recruiting the best and brightest brains. If more than half their students are there for reasons other than being the best or the brightest, that’s a pretty clear indicator that brains, being the best and brightest is NOT the college’s top priority.
Stop listening to the marketing and look at the facts. The numbers are clear and unflattering. Colleges can say what they want, but if 50% of their admissions relate to $$$ and self-interest, another 20% to their claims of social responsibility and social signaling, leaving 30% or less of the class to be from the best and brightest… you have to look at what they do not what they say.
The emperor is naked. Can’t be unseen.
CC should have a subforum on bitching and moaning about elite admissions. It seems to derail just about every other thread out here 
“Those factors – not cash – will keep those Elites on the map and sustain the institution’s reputation, which are business considerations.”
I’m not sure how to break this to you but every finance class including the core class at HBS has one message - cash is king. Harvard will be really upset if they lose cash over intellect. They will never be a poor, but brilliant institution, they have the luxury to be rich and brilliant, which is what they are.
Here’s the issue for Harvard in the case, the judge has said this:
“Let’s leave it at ‘Harvard is rich,’ ” said US District Judge Allison Burroughs on Monday, earning a laugh from the gallery during a discussion about the university’s $39 billion endowment, which rivals the gross domestic product of many nations.”
When the judge knows that Harvard oozes wealth, Harvard cannot say they craft a class by looking at things like intellect and economic diversity and so their admissions policies are legal, on the up and up.
The judge did not say that Harvard was smart, she said it was rich. Not good for Harvard, they’re probably lining up appeal motions as we speak.