@privatebanker says “A bunch of coaches and shoe reps are gong to jail.”
And do you feel confident that all the people who benefitted the most from the corruption in college sports were caught? Or just the hapless ones on the bottom rung?
I can never understand how the most highly paid head coaches never see any evil.
I apologize for the digression from the subject. I think there is more to this story and it seems as if some people may have been allowed to “help” the investigation and some were set up to be targets after Singer got caught. I’m just not sure the biggest guys were.
@charpen. They did impact the three kids who were next on the list.
But more importantly, the 700 other students involved had nothing to do with athletics. It was a pure scam and cheat on the sat and act. Hundreds and hundreds of spots lost to deserving students. That’s the entire opportunity set of multiple high schools or small states for decades and decades worth. Some schools are lucky to have one ivy leaguer a decade. Some never to Stanford or Yale.
Probably more things conned as well. Ecs essays letters of reference too. etc.
Sports was the last ditch effort for those who the sat cheating wasn’t enough and they were waitlisted, denied or clearly not going to make it.
The issue with testing security/validity is costs. In the first place, many/most? high schoolers don’t have a government-issued ID. (Yeah a HS ID card is nice, but easy to fake.) In the second place, more proctors, ID checkers, etc would require a while lot more money which means much higher fees to take the test.
If the NCAA didn’t forbid it, the schools could pay athletes, give them luxury cars, fly them to Vegas for the weekend. Nothing the FBI would do about it.
@EyeVeee “the big issue is the credibility of the standardized testing. Paying off a proctor? Paying others to take the test? How many other scams are other people able to pull off related to the tests?”
That is a good point. A proper investigation would see how many of Singer’s clients since 2011 took standardized tests in one of those “very special” locations. I don’t think colleges are allowed to know whether a student qualified for special accommodations, but it certainly seems as there is no privacy issue in identifying the location where the test was administered. A real investigation of Singer would see if there was any unusual pattern to where his clients took those exams.
@menloparkmom tell me what makes one “deserving” of an admission to any school? So many of these outcries come of as people whom just feel entitled to me.
Don’t forget the Zion kid is coming back to play and win Duke a title. What a joke. I think another athlete that cared about a degree should have that spot. Colleges are losing the morality and ethics game and parents are joining right in. So sad, aren’t we supposed to educate the students, even the athletes? Duke is not helping.
@observer12@privatebanker First, the feds have said they stumbled across this case while working on a wholly unrelated case. As far as I know, they have NOT said what case they were working on. The Wall St. Journal has. Presumably, it’s right because it’s news is usually well researched, but the feds haven’t said confirmed. The WSJ also said that it recorded the Yale soccer coach soliciting a bribe–a portion of which was paid into an account controlled by the FBI.
I assume that Singer himself was caught by the time the Yale coach resigned.
As for how Singer cultivated the coaches, earlier in his career he himself was a tennis coach. His first college related business, which he sold, was helping high school athletes package themselve to get recruited by colleges. The guy who took most of the exams played tennis for Harvard , played tennis professionally for a while, and was the director of college guidance at IMG Academy, a school for wannabe athletes. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47544392 I’m sure between the two of them they knew a lot of coaches.
And if I were in an admissions office, I’d be going back over any admits from IMG Academy…
@jonri back a few pages, I outlined the timeline (in brief) as detailed in Boston papers. The case that sprung it all was fully detailed locally. The case. The town of the original cw and the way it went down to get the ball rolling. Once yale’s Coach Rudy was snared, it was game on.
@cupcakemuffins “Mine with 0.5% top academic and dreamy non academic accomplishments was accepted at some better colleges but outright rejected from USC, not even waitlisted. Everyone was surprised but we assumed it was because they don’t like to give too many National Merit Scholarships, who knew they prefer famous and incompetent frauds.”
So your theory is that all of the 8,200 students admitted last year were “incompetent frauds”?
Note the following from the USC Dean of Admissions on the class of 2022-
"More than a third of the admitted class are straight-A students, and 60 percent have standardized test scores in the 99th percentile. Grades and numbers are just a starting point,”
I suspect some other straight A kid with great scores beat yours out once both arrived at “the starting point”. I disagree with your implication that he got beat out by an “incompetent fraud”. Then again we will never know.
Not sure that it is justified to insult and diminish an entire student body of 19,000 students because a handful of people gained admittance through an illegal scheme and your kid got rejected. Seems more convenient than appropriate.
Throughout this discussion people keep suggesting a causal relationship between the cheating scandal and their own personal disappointments at rejections. Those that cheated are reprehensible and should go to jail. They did not however steal your kids spot. Nor did the URM, legacy or athlete kid that typically gets referenced. Guaranteed that at whichever school is considered there is a kid that was just like your kid who just stood out slightly more. Elite skills aren’t filled to the brim exclusively with “special” cases or cheaters. Spots do exist for “normal” exceptional kids. Undoubtedly the system is not perfect or fair but don’t use this scandal to prove sour grapes.
@jonri The Affidavit, in the footnotes of pages 6 and 7, says the Yale soccer coach started cooperating with the FBI in April 2018. Singer started mostly cooperating in late September 2018. (I say “mostly”, because he started to tell some people that he was wired up, which apparently did not make the Feds very happy.) Riddell, the proctor, started cooperating in February 2019.
There seems to be two separate corruptions here which seem to be mashed together.
Bribing a coach (or in the case of USC, an Asst. athletic director) to designate a student a "recruited athlete". Does anyone think there is any difference if a student is a decent athlete who would never be good enough to be designated a recruited athlete if it wasn't for the bribe, or if the student doesn't play that sport at all? I wonder if the first kind of corruption happens a lot more than we know. Like a sailing coach and coaches of other hardly noticed sports primarily played by the very rich could designate a student as a "recruit" and get them admitted even if they weren't particularly stellar athletes but played the sport at a mediocre level (like the U Penn basketball player).
SAT/ACT cheating, which is about corrupt high schools, psychologists, college admissions advisors, parents, paid test takers, and College Board/ACT hired proctors and the lack of oversight of their employers (but has nothing to do with colleges or any of their employees at all).
@shangfreg3
there IS no way to tell , in advance, who is “deserving” or not. That is ultimately up to the admissions committees, who have the hard task of deciding who to accept and who to reject.
At highly competitive colleges, we are repeatedly told that for every spot offered to one student, there are 10 more who were equally capable of being successful there. That ad coms spend most of their time looking for reasons to reject applicants, because there aren’t enough spots available for all the applicants who meet the “acceptable” bar for admission.
That’s the point.
Too many students are trying to get into the same schools.
@menloparkmom you are wrong. I said non revenue sport at a school like Yale. I know what I’m talking about because I just went through this process with my daughter. They require their recruits to have the same academic stats as a general admit. Some of the top fencers in the country…Olympians…were denied access to Ivy League schools. Let’s say you were correct however, and these admits could have slightly lower stats. Do you know what it takes to compete at a level to be considered for recruitment? My daughter attended one of the most challenging prep schools in the country and had to compete for class ranking and maintain her academic standing as every other student. Everyday after school she practiced from 5-10PM, 5 days a week and for 8hrs on Saturday. When she arrived home she had to do her course work, papers, and study for exams. She caught sleep whenever she could, often times waking up 3 or 4 AM to finish work. She competed twice a month nationally and internationally, against incredible athletes that trained just as much as she did in a sport where there could be only one winner. To compete in these tournaments she was forced to miss days of school every month, thus having to make up missed work. I saw the toll this took on her and just admired her determination, while simultaneously feeling sorry for her. Now you tell me compared to a top student whom focuses soley on academics and general EC’s like the debate team, how do you think this student would be perceived by the adcom?
@ShanFerg3 I’m afraid the evidence says otherwise. In the Ivy league, athletes have significantly lower academic scores than non-athletes, although this is not true of all sports. The study by Shulman and Bowen showed that golf, crew, and fencing team members scored about as well as the average SAT score. But in other sports, especially in football and hockey, this was not true.
But your daughter seems like a very accomplished person with high academic qualifications.
I had to wait in line at the DMV behind a bunch of 10 year olds that were there to get state issued ID so they could register to play select football so don’t give us the story that people can’t get them to take the SAT/ACT. Every college is going to require one too.
“Deserving”…I don’t know about that word. It makes it seem like God himself is deciding who to admit. Yikes.
There are many hard working, honest, bright kids who would do tremendously well if accepted to top schools but who are shut out. Parents are disappointed. The kids are disappointed. Then you move forward with your life because life is full of disappointments.
We want the system to be fair and it really burns people when it turns out that you can buy an SAT score. I hate this because my kid worked really hard in school. And as someone just pointed out, we may learn in the coming months that SAT/ACT cheating is more pervasive than anyone believed.