We know that 6 USC applications were found linked to Singer. How about at other schools?
@thumper1 You are absolutely correct. To all of the things in your post. It is interesting, they will flag most point gains on the SAT that are that substantial, but lots of reasons why the previous test may have been low. (Funny story - when I took the SAT, I and many others of my peers taking it that day were infected with Chicken Pox. I felt terrible and couldn’t figure out why. One of my classmates and I discovered midway through the test during the snack/bathroom break that we had the blisters. Let’s just say that test was not a true reflection of my test taking abilities.)
I worked in college advising for several years. Never got rich, never wrote an essay, never advised a student to falsify anything. Worked with many kids each year pro bono. I know for a fact that on this thread alone, there is at least one other in that industry. A long time poster.
Also the parent of a recruited athlete. While I knew all the girls on her team, injuries do happen. What I find mind blowing is that there are so many steps to being an athlete on a Div 1 team. There is an NCAA Clearinghouse, there are forms to sign. But if a spot is promised and pushed through, maybe it never gets the way of the NCAA Compliance people on campus. It would be easy to promise a spot, push through admissions and then just keep recruiting or with your regular roster. Sports like water polo have a roster that can be 20-30 kids. There are injuries that happen, and only 6 in the water at a time. Some kids won’t get much playing time, others are maybe dependent on how deep your bench is stacked.
Also, yes, the SAT is too much. Not every kid will shine on that test. I much prefer the ACT and it was a test that my students often chose to concentrate on, as it was more like the subjects they were learning in school.
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Singer may have been such a counselor in the past, or to current customers to whom he did not offer cheating services. (That does not necessarily mean that he was that good, since college admissions at the most selective colleges are opaque enough that it is not obvious to the customer whether the consultant’s services helped.)
Some admission readers and interviewers have written about applicants who appeared too polished and packaged – obviously, whatever college admission counselor they used was not good enough to make the applicant look “genuine”. Obviously, the better college admission counselors would be the ones who can package the applicant well for the target schools without making it look obvious. But, because of the opacity of the college admissions process at the typical target schools, there is no way for the parents and students to really know if a given college admission counselor is good.
@ShanFerg3 You are dead on accurate. I have followed this thread and thought a similar thought. We all focus on the things that are important to us.
@TheBigChef This is what my daughter said on the day the scandal broke. It is going to make it that much harder for hardworking, honest kids to get in as recruited athletes. In her sport, nearly every kid on her team was academically achieving in high school and once there if they slipped up, they were put on probation, taken off of active practices and games and they would look at their academics and decide if they could stay.
Re TPG. The person implicated in this fraud founded the TPG growth fund. The flagship TPG organization was founded 27 years earlier. It is a fine institution and does great work. The individual involved was the problem.
My point in the prior post was to explain for some earlier posters how hedge funds and private equity differ.
Also the normal framing of rich and greedy does not fully explain this situation. The densitry professor at USC and some other more mainstream families are involved as well.
This is just the beginning of the AdmitMe scandal accidentally discovered by the FBI.
I think there will be widespread investigations later.
I feel there should be one thread discussing sports in admissions, similar to the race thread. After this year’s admissions results I have some strong opinions on that matter but I don’t want to clutter this thread.
Very good analysis
For those trying to defend a private school having almost 50% of students with accommodations, come on. And then to try and spin it and say all those sad public school kids don’t come anywhere close to those numbers because the schools lack the resources? Newsflash - that’s not the reason why.
There’s a lot to say here. Just a few observations.
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The class action is not claiming that the students who are suing should have been admitted. It is claiming that the students paid an application fee in return for a fair admissions procedure, but the admissions procedure they were given was unfair. The implication is that the students want their application fees refunded.
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I think it is likely that many more people at various stages of the application procedure knew about parts or all of this scheme.
a) What about the guidance counselors? Did they lie on the counselor form claiming that non-athletes were athletes? Did they notice the large standardized test score increases, or the incongruence between the SAT/ACT/Subject test scores and the students’ course grades? What did the guidance counselors know about the fraudulent claims of learning disabilities?
b) What about the people in development at the universities? Some large donations were coming into team budgets, sometimes yearly, from a single non-profit involved with underprivileged children. University development officials keep very close track of their donors, especially their major donors. No one asked any questions about these donations?
c) What about the people in budgeting at the universities? Some of the bribe money was paid directly to the teams or athletic programs. This means significant money was going into and out of university accounts. Someone in the budget office was managing these accounts. Hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot magically appear in university accounts without financial officers wondering where these funds are coming from and why.
d) What about the people in admissions? Typically admissions officers do some follow-up on the results of their admissions decisions as a check on whether they are making good admissions decisions. They find out how the people they decided to admit are doing academically and, in the case of athletes, athletically. Therefore they would have found out that certain kinds of people never played on certain teams on a very regular basis.
In fact, it looks like this is what happened at Georgetown: people noticed that students recruited to play tennis were not really playing tennis, and this led to an internal investigation and suspension of the tennis coach.
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What about College Board and ACT Corp? A part of the scheme was getting the tests administered at two test centers controlled by Singer, and this required that the student get two-day extended time. My anecdotal evidence is that it is very, very difficult to get two-day extended time. Two-day extended time is not nearly as common as standard 50% extra time. This suggests that Singer was working with a specific psychologist or set of psychologists who knew how to and were willing to falsify the paperwork for two-day extended time. The fact that all these two-day extended time administrations were taking place at two specific test centers and had paperwork from the same small set of psychologists, and that the students actually had to request transfers from their home schools to go to these test centers, should certainly have raised eyebrows, if not red-flags, at CB and ACT Corp.
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According to Singer’s guilty plea, he had a very thriving business. This means he was well-known in certain circles, so plenty of people knew what he was doing.
In all my years of working with students who I usually started seeing in sophomore or junior years, I never had a family ask or push for testing accommodations if their kid was not already documented to have a need for more time.
Here is how testing works - if you take the SAT, you probably took the PSAT in sophomore year (optional) or junior year. If you were smart and took the SAT in your junior year so you could have scores in by senior year for EA, there just isn’t that much time to request. It takes 2-3 months to even hear back from the College Board if they approved your request. Even if you took the SAT your senior year in the first go round, you still have to get the accommodation request approved by spring of junior year.
Most of the kids I worked with took the PSAT as early as they could. For the super smart kids, they wanted to try for National Merit consideration. Sophomore year wouldn’t count but could give them feedback about an area to spend more time working on. For the kids who were going to test prep on their own or with a class, knowing their weak spots would give them an idea if they wanted to stay with the SAT or go and take the ACT. I usually recommended the kids try both exams.
But then, most of the kids I worked with were middle class kids who were going to need help with college funding, so they wanted to maximize their ability to get good merit scholarships. The few super wealthy kids I worked with didn’t care because their parents were going to pay, either way.
It would be interesting if the Feds offered a break to people who turn themselves in to see what would shake loose.
@hs2020kid I would love to say that this scandal will improve college admissions.
But like all the banking reforms that went into place a decade ago, when I spent so much time here at CC…there are still some of the same shenanigans happening again. It may be tightened. But improved? Maybe not as much as we might all hope.
“3) What about College Board and ACT Corp? A part of the scheme was getting the tests administered at two test centers controlled by Singer, and this required that the student get two-day extended time. My anecdotal evidence is that it is very, very difficult to get two-day extended time. Two-day extended time is not nearly as common as standard 50% extra time. This suggests that Singer was working with a specific psychologist or set of psychologists who knew how to and were willing to falsify the paperwork for two-day extended time. The fact that all these two-day extended time administrations were taking place at two specific test centers and had paperwork from the same small set of psychologists, and that the students actually had to request transfers from their home schools to go to these test centers, should certainly have raised eyebrows, if not red-flags, at CB and ACT Corp.”
Yep, I thought the same thing. Somebody in those organizations had to have known.
@threebeans - Singer already plead guilty in September last year and spill the beans and wore the wire … Fed knows every kid that got helped this application season … Now Fed is going back (750 families) and indicting one at a time . .it will take sometime of course.
@northwesty For every rich kid that goes to USC, there are plenty more that are on financial aid. I was a transfer student from a less well known state university in CA when I transferred. I drove a beat up Honda, commuted to school and did not join Greek life.
I think we need some breathing room to see what else is revealed. Then, digest and process. Imo, some here are confused about the basics of admissions, counselor advice, scores…and then how recruiting can work.
I do want to add that I’ve seen this deference to the coaches’ wants. In writing. Kids who weren’t ahead of the pack otherwise. Of course it’s a big boost. Whether a kid ever intends to play or go to practice or is a bench warmer. Or ditches out before the season.
It would be, but it appears that the movers and shakers (Singer and Riddell) have already played Let’s Make a Deal with the Feds. They were apparently arrested last spring and were working as CI’s from my understanding. I bet that there are still people sweating it out. These people alone don’t seem to add up to $25M. Huffman only paid $15K!
@Leigh22 “For those trying to defend a private school having almost 50% of students with accommodations, come on.”
Source for this private school please? I went back and can’t find a legitimate source. So not trying to defend a mythical schools practices but instead challenging its very existence.
Beyond rumor earlier in thread that Greenwich HS had 50%, any real proof that this school exists?