My son approached me on Saturday about how one of his Senior classmates created a Charity(in her name) dedicated to deaf people pursuing STEM careers. She registered it, made a website, logo, the works, but hasn’t done ANYTHING with it.
All the projects listed on the website are completely fake, as are the list of clients, sponsors, and donations(one show being as high as $50,000). Short story, she put it on her list of Extracurriculars and got accepted into Stanford this year.
Firstly, I don’t know if I should tell anyone about this. I don’t want to harm this girl’s future but at the same time it’s unfair to the other students. Secondly, how was it able to slip through Stanford, do they normally check these type of things? Remember, the organization itself is real, but none of the projects or big donations are.
If any of you have experience with how colleges, or more helpfully, Stanford in particular deals with ECs like this I’d really appreciate your comment.
Ultimately, colleges have only themselves to blame for turning college admissions into a circus. In the past, a student just had to be a good student and not have had any felony convictions. Now, all competitive candidates are expected to have solved world hunger in the free time between winning national swimming titles.
This doesn’t absolve your son’s classmate from fraud, if that is really what occurred. Normally I’d advise just ignoring it- Karma catches up with bad people… But this case seems particularly egregious.
I suggest you investigate the charity first, before making accusations.
The girl admitted it to my son herself. She argues that if she had rich parents with influential contacts, “like everyone else”, she would have been able to do it in reality. I’m not sure if I should sympathize, because she had to do a great deal of work in making something this elaborate.
You should make sure that her site and projects are actually fake first (kids exaggerate all the time, maybe she was just joking around or trying to sound impressive to your son). I wouldn’t sympathize with anyone intentionally lying on an application to gain college admittance.
Stanford takes honor code and fundamental standard violations very seriously for those in school. I imagine the same is true of falsifying applications. Intentionally lying on an application is something that they would want to be made aware of.
The OP did not say her son applied to Stanford. This has nothing to do with the OP’s son’s college applications. Its about lying. There is a special place for liars and cheats.
I agree: there’s no place for falsifying applications, and these people should be turned in. It rigs the field for all of the other honest, hard-working students. I can’t imagine how some of the above posters are saying to mind your own business. Slightly exaggerating is one thing (that most people probably do and is not really all that harmful), but lying is completely different.
Before you take any action, you need to get more proof or have a school administrator/Stanford look into this. What makes this case more difficult––I would imagine––is that the organization itself exists; it’s the numbers and claims that are false. One conversation in which the girl said “all of these donations are fake” isn’t probably enough evidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if the girl took down or modified the website, making this even more complicated.
My opinion you should let it go. Everyone from time to time has lied or exaggerated especially on applications. Will it honestly make you feel better to have her thrown out? My hunch no…it’ll make you feel worse. Maybe one day your son will need a pass…you never know.
There seems something criminal about this. Harvard in the past has pushed prosecution in cases like this for obtaining financial aid under false pretenses, amounting to fraud. I can’t remember the case, but they not only took away his degree, but pursued him for the financial aid.
If the OP investigates and thinks it is a hoax, I would definitely report it not only to Stanford but to the IRS for two reasons:
1 - Fake charities are a major issue that hurts the entire industry. Here is a story of a $187,000,000 fraud done in the name of helping cancer patients. Stopping any fake charity preserves the integrity of the industry and helps the good charities out there.
2 - At a previous job, I uncovered a co-worker who was highly unethical, but did not push things aggressively with management as they took the point of view of @study222. This employees lack of ethics ended up in a lawsuit that cost the company over $1,000,000 in legal fees, and caused major hassles for me many years later. Getting rid of bad, unethical people is a good thing.
If the OP posts the name of the charity, I am sure the detectives on CC can help determine if it is fake or not.
@study222 I am amazed that you consider a lie of this magnitude akin to an exaggeration and that maybe someone own kid will need a “pass” one day for fabricating such lies. This is not adding extra volunteer hours or claiming to be president of a nonexistent club. The actions of the student in question involve deception, manufactured falsehoods, and carefully constructed and elaborate websites to carry out the lie. Hardly the same level as an exaggeration.
I am a bit confused. A student confides in your son about something unethical she did. Then your son breaks that confidentiality by telling you her pecadillo… Hmmm… I see two ethical “breaks” right there… FWIW, I do believe in Karma…
Somehow it hard to believe. They don’t check on every kid who claims to be a club president because it doesn’t have any weight on admission decision, but larger accomplishments are very easy to verify.
I’m not usually in favor of ratting on applicants but I might make an exception in this case. What she’s doing is out and out fraud.
I head a nonprofit working with populations in rural Mexico. We don’t pay anyone on the board a cent-the only paid personnel are local labor and every dollar goes into our programs, but we’ve had to content with donors who don’t know whether they can trust us with their money. Despite the fact that our website shows evidence of what we do it often takes a physical trip out to a school we’ve built to convince them we’re not scamming for their money. People like the Stanford applicant make it harder for organizations such as ours to raise money.
I’ve always marveled at how easy it would be to create a fake charity. Register with your state and the IRS, take a few pictures, make a website and Facebook page, get an email address and plant a few Twitter posts and fake stories in blogs and for a few hundred bucks you’re off to the races. Most smaller charities don’t get investigated by organizations like Charity Navigator or Guidestar. I would expect that unless Stanford had reason to suspect a student they wouldn’t have the time and resources to dig into ta student’s EC’s beyond looking briefly for a web presence. This would be particularly true if the student has snowed the GC into including the “charity” in the school’s recommendation.
The penalty for doing something so stupid are harsh, so I hope students reading this don’t take it as a suggestion that faking a charity is a good idea. Some students do get caught and they’re likely to have any acceptances they’ve received rescinded as well as to be in serious hot water with their GC and possibly face prosecution.