TPG is private equity, not hedge funds.
@hebegebe - Sorry dummy person here don’t understand the difference between both terms 
True, but I don’t think that for the purpose of this thread, and the purpose of the investigation, it really matters.
The stats about high numbers of test accommodations from certain kinds of well-resourced schools does not, imho, indicate that there’s very much cheating or aggressive diagnosing just to get more SAT time.
If you looked into it, I bet you would find that most of those fancy school kids who get extra time on the SAT as HS juniors have a “thick file” on their LD going back many many years. But because they have the thick file going back years, they get the accommodations granted when junior year rolls around. Correlation is not causation.
Look at the lawyer Caplan in NYC. He tried and tried but could not get an ACT accommodation for his kid. Because he hadn’t started on the thick file years before. ACT denied and denied him. The accommodations only were granted when the FBI told ACT to do that as part of the sting.
LDs like dyslexia and ADD are quite under-diagnosed and under-treated in the general population. But in a suburban doctor/lawyer type family (with some financial resources and focus on education), odds are high that something will be done when a kid starts struggling in 5th grade. Since the family lives in a good neighborhood with good schools (or maybe send their kids to a private or a charter), the school will notice too and will be helpful in working with the family. And so the kid’s thick file starts to be created many years in advance of SATs and college apps.
Appropriately, what ACT/SAT want to see about a kid is the “thick file.” Testing, treatment records, doctor reports, school reports, 504 plan documents, etc. going back many years – often starting in middle school or earlier. All the pieces of the thick file tend to corroborate that there is a legit learning issue and that the kid is not simply trying to boost his ACT score.
The thick file takes time, attention and money to build. So (surprise!!!) the student population at a fancy private school will have much higher numbers of kids with thick files. It isn’t because craven heli mom/dad started cheating the system when Buffy was in fourth grade so she could do better on the SAT in 11th grade. It is because Buffy was struggling in 4th grade and the family was in a position to act on that. So again lots of correlation, not so much causation.
Last, recognize that an LD is not something you can diagnose with a blood test or a scan. So there’s many shades of gray and judgment calls when it comes to dealing with LDs. Lots of trial and error and differences in how different families and different kids deal with them.
The take away – there’s WAY WAY more kids who deserve the extra time but don’t get it. Which should make SAT/ACT wonder about whether a time pressured test is really necessary in order to measure what they are trying to measure. Some studies show that the time really isn’t all that important. I suspect you could boost everyone’s time from 4 to 6 hours and it wouldn’t make much diff.
Cheating is cheating of course. But imho it really isn’t the case that many fams are getting their kids LD diagnosed, treated and medicated just so they can get more time on a dumb test.
I was also blocked by LA Times. Google “Sage Hill” and you will find an OC Register article as well as a KTLA segment on it.
Janvas’ [accused of cheating to get her kids into Georgetown and USC] daughters must be really proud of their mom right now:
"When it came to her younger daughter, court records suggest Janavs was more cautious.
“[My younger daughter] is not like [my older daughter].… She’s not stupid,” Janavs said, according to a transcript of a recorded conversation included in the charging documents. “How do you do this without telling the kids what you’re doing?”
That’s from the LA Times article linked above. I’m finding more and more humor in this whole scandal/
Philanthropist David Sidoo accused of paying $200K to help sons pass U.S. college entrance exams
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/david-sidoo-charged-bribery-us-1.5053194
He must have BS about helping poor but he is the one threw poor under the bus!
Not 50K. It was 500K to get two daughters into USC as crew team members.
@katliamom I caught that too. What a horrible thing to say about your own child, let alone while being wiretapped. This will forever change the trajectory for these families. I’ve always preached to my kids that character counts and they are now seeing firsthand that this is absolutely true.
Thought this article was interesting for the artist’s opinion on Huffman and Loughlin (as well as Macy):
She’s witnessed a lot of trials and says she draws them as she sees them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/admissions-cheating-scandal-consultants.html
Inside the Pricey, Totally Legal World of College Consultants
My wife and I were discussing this scandal last night and I asked her about an old manager of hers and how he would respond. My wife, a number of years ago, worked at a Fortune 50 company and most at her level were Ivy grads and there was a distinct lean towards hiring from highly selective schools. Her manager was a European transplant whose family is one of the wealthiest in Europe, major land owners, and is essentially treated as just below a Royal family.
Her manager tasked each person to come up with one or two people they would like to sit down with to learn from, explore how they got to where they were. He said with the corporate and family connections he could make any meeting happen. More on this later.
I asked my wife, if his daughter had come to him and said I only want to go to “school X” and she did not come close to qualifying, what would happen? Her answer was “he would make it happen, he would not disappoint his princess”. He would have first assumed his family name and connections would get her in and if this did not work there is no doubt in my wife’s mind he would have found Singer and done whatever it would have taken to not break his daughter’s heart. I wonder if this was many of these people’s motivation, they have always been able to give their children anything they wanted/needed and couldn’t let college be the first time they couldn’t. Essentially vanity of the parents but not so much outward vanity, family dynamic vanity.
The end of the story, my wife asked to meet with George Lucas and he couldn’t make it happen. This was when the curtain was pulled back for my wife around how much she could trust and believe her manager as well as connections can only get you so far. She left the position shortly thereafter.
I’m not sure why people think the parents of these students were conned by Singer. The parents are just as culpable. Singer waved a criminal act in front of their faces and their greed, arrogance, moral ambivalence or what have you, had them jump right into it. They weren’t innocent grandparents conned out of their life savings. They were parents willing to do anything to get their kids into the schools they deemed they deserved and damn all the other kids who were out there working their butts off to get into those same schools.
I don’t understand the lawsuits – how can someone prove that their child was denied admission because someone else was accepted? Isn’t that what you have to prove – that there was a direct link between the two? I get that this scandal undermined the faith a student would have in the process being fair but how is there a direct impact to your child?
https://ocweekly.com/loaded-parents-implicate-themselves-and-college-admissions-scammers-over-phone/
So it sounds like the older daughter knew.
Couple of points. To help clarify.
Private Equity raises money from individuals and institutions to identify opportunities to purchase privately-held companies and real estate. Either majority or minority stakes. Use their expertise to help grow the business and sell or take public for better than market level type returns. They may also buy publicly traded companies. Take them private, improve and resell for the same goal. There are many other variations on the theme but that’s the basics.
Hedge fund operate under a similar structure. The general partner accepts funds from individuals and institutions as limited partners. Or a type of shareholder with rights to profits and losses but not day to day operational oversight. Hedge funds unlike private equity use existing markets and exchanges to buy and sell all sorts of things. Stocks bonds and commodities for example. In USA or overseas. They look to identify imperfections and opportunities in markets to generate returns.
They also, unlike your typical mutual fund, may take both a positive view (buying long) or negative view (selling a stock or bond you don’t own already called “shorting”) hoping the price declines. They will do both of these techniques simultaneously. Therefore hedging the portfolio. Contrary to popular belief they are not generally trying to make maximum gain for the client. More usefully, is their ability to create positive and more consistent results - in both up and down markets.
TPG is a very sad case. They invested in impact opportunities.
Socially focused investments to drive a positive benefit. An example would be an impact bond tied to help ex inmates find work.
Out of work people cost the taxpayers a lot. If the program created by the impact bond can show they helped a certain number of people back to work, the government perhaps as the bond issuer, would pay the bond holders a return for investing for that desired impact and outcome.
The cost to the government is lower than paying the costs for benefits and reincarnation. The bond holders make a market interest rate, the government didn’t have to use taxpayer money upfront for the program and everyone wins.
The founder implicated in this is considered a real force in liberal causes and the area of social responsibility. It’s really bad form on a lot of levels.
Lawyers looking for a payday and hoping those charged will settle to make this embarrassment go away…
I can’t even begin to keep up with this thread, only on page 93, but I’ve been thinking that if every student had to go through some type of audition process such as music students do that would be a lot harder to fake. I know it’s not practical so just wishful thinking.
In response to #1930 - it was actually Penn, but that doesn’t alter your point…
@Classof2015 I agree. I think the lawsuits might be a dead end but perhaps it will prompt some soul searching by the schools. I’m still stumped why these wealthy people didn’t spend the money on legit private counselors that would help craft their child’s high school experience into a narrative that top schools would love. I often wonder if admissions committees can spot the kid who has amazing accomplishments due to lots of hidden help from adults vs. the kid who may have less impressive accomplishments but did it on their own.