It’s unclear what the student lied about. The article makes it sound like the student may have lied about living in North Dakota, maybe even their name (wording is “Dean Adam Ployd called the student Katherina Lynn”). I doubt this was exaggerating about ECs or similar. What is clear is that the student was admitted to Yale, remained at Yale for more than a month (likely until getting flagged due to roommates/dormmates complaining to admins), and removing student due to submitting falsehoods is rare enough to be newsworthy.
I agree that honesty is the safer and more virtuous choice that I’d recommend to students on the forum, but I don’t think this article proves that persons who lie/exaggerate don’t benefit. I expect the tremendously more common result is persons who lie/exaggerate come out ahead, typically with little consequence. I’d make a similar comment about academia as a whole, not just college admission, in spite of the regular news stories about university professors/presidents being penalized for falsifying research.
Presumably, it is something verifiably false, as opposed to something subject to interpretation or something true that was stated in a misleading way, so that Yale’s lawyers are confident that they will win any resulting lawsuit.
Or society as a whole, particularly in sales situations like salespeoples’ claims, job seekers’ resumes, politicians’ claims, etc..
Of course it is quite likely that literally the most common result of petty exaggerations is it doesn’t matter as the applicants would have gotten the same decision anyway. Like when 95% of the decisions are rejections anyway, there are likely quite a few applicants who exaggerated one or more things and it simply didn’t help enough to get them admitted. Conversely, if a college is largely admitting on the numbers, or at least above certain thresholds, petty exaggerations about other factors may also have been irrelevant to acceptances.
What we don’t know is how often applicants to selective holistic review colleges are suspected of dishonesty by their readers and quietly rejected without anyone outside Admissions, including the applicant, being told that was a material consideration.
I actually suspect that happens more than most realize. What I don’t know is how that would balance against the cases where some unsuspected falsehood actually is material to getting an applicant admitted.
So even holding aside ethics (which I do not actually hold aside), I would personally advise against inauthenticity in applications as a result of these uncertainties and unascertainable degrees of risk.
But I realize there are some circles in which applicants know some kids who in some way were inauthentic and got accepted to selective colleges, and they don’t know of anyone rejected where they were told inauthenticity is why they were rejected, and they interpret all that as evidence that inauthencity works.
The message I get is: Don’t LIE because eventually you’ll get “BUSTED” and you’re gone.
Given what these generations see in their media, integrity may not be a given.
I suspect the so-called student was older? I remember a while ago there was a woman who faked being a student. I think at Stanford. People will do anything to get into these elite schools and don’t seem to care that they pay the price for it.
Years ago my company fired a greatly beloved senior vice president for a beyond stupid lie on his resume (which became his official company bio, which the press office would send out before he appeared on a panel, at a conference, a fireside chat, etc.)
Wouldn’t you know it- if you claim to have graduated from Wharton, when what you actually did was attend their three day seminar on “Negotiating Strategies”, at some point, someone who attended that seminar is going to think “hmmm… something’s not right here”.
The article shows that the number of students who are “BUSTED and you’re gone” is more than zero. However, it’s naive to assume that everyone who lies will get caught and kicked out. Lying on college applications is extremely common. Some surveys find the majority of students admit to lying on their college application, yet getting kicked out for lying is extremely uncommon. The few cases I have heard of involve a really extreme lie, such as the Varsity Blues scandal (faked being a recruited athlete, had someone else take SATs for them, …). And even then, the student may not be kicked out such as the TM Landry scandal, in which students applied to colleges with transcripts listing classes they never took and inflated grades, faked ECs/awards, faked backstory/packaging; yet no admitted students were reported being kicked out of their colleges in news stories.
For example, the survey at 6 in 10 College Students Lied on Their Applications - Intelligent found 61% of surveyed students admitted to lying on their college applications – the vast majority of students . The graphs show portion of applications on which that 61% were most likely to lie (ECs and race).
Note that I am not encouraging students to lie on their application. I am instead saying lying/exaggerating is common, and getting kicked out for lying is very uncommon. As ucbalumus touched on, I think this is a reflection of a general problem in society and present in many areas beyond just college admission. The applicant who exaggerates on resume is more likely to get the job, and many do so. The proposal that includes an unrealistically positive timeline and cost is more likely win the bid, and in many industries this is almost expected. The politician who makes unrealistic campaign promises is more likely to get elected. There are numerous potential benefits and notable penalties are often rare unless lies are extreme. Perhaps this will change in future with AI and digital footprint improving low cost vetting.
Students will also lie about lying. These numbers are incompatible with the numbers that the NCES collects, which are based on applications.
According to PEW (which took the data from NCES), in 2020, 33% of all college students were Black or Hispanic, while 8% were Asian, and 55% were White. There is simply no way to fit 40% fakes into those numbers, or even 10%, and even 4% would have different results.
As for veteran status - same. According to NCES, 5.1% of all students are veterans. So how are 20% faking veteran status, but somehow only 5.1% are actually veterans based on application data?
So yes, these statistics are bogus. The students were lying, but mostly lying on the questionnaire. Either to mess with person asking the questions, because the student believes that OTHER students are lying, or to create an illusion that all students are lying.
It’s not 40% fakes – it’s 39% * 61% = 24%. You are also making assumptions about how students lie. I wouldn’t assume all of this 24% falsely claimed that they are 100% URM, and they did so in the same way on 100% of their college applications, rather than prioritizing applications where perceived benefit for misrepresenting race/ethnicity exceeds perceived risk (“reach” where the student believes they are unlikely to be admitted without help, and colleges offering special aid/scholarship for particular races).
I expect it also includes things like respondents saying they are mixed race, which is classified as “2 or more races” in NCES, because they heard they are 1/32 Cherokee. This also doesn’t necessarily mean the college will list them as “2 or more races” when filling out NCES forms. There are numerous potential contributing factors why total may not align with NCES.
What is more clear, is all other surveys I am aware of that asked about misrepresenting race/ethnicity also found a good portion of White/Asian applicants lie about race, so this result doesn’t appear to be a unique fluke. There are also many anecdotal reports, although one cannot estimate percentages well with anecdotes. It’s certainly possible that most persons who say they lie in surveys are actually lying about lying, but that wouldn’t be my default assumption.
I misread it. However, even 24% is far too much for the results for race/ethnicity, and 12.2% lying about veteran status is incompatible with 5.1% actually identifying as veterans.
When I was in grad school, a student in my class was kicked out after it was discovered her bio was fake. She had actually faked her way through Yale undergrad first, saying she was a first-gen Puerto Rican. She was married to an older lawyer, who wrote her application for her, and advised her to take all upper level seminars so he could do the work for her. That worked out and she got into an Ivy grad school where it did not work out. I was friends with her at the time and she was crying all the time, even during class. She told me that it was because her brother had been diagnosed with lymphoma. Later when it was all exposed, she admitted she had been crying because she was freaked out and depressed about being on the brink of failing her classes. She also said she had been under tremendous stress since undergrad, trying to keep a fake identity from being found out. At orientation, they put her with Puerto Ricans but she knew nothing about Puerto Rico and didn’t speak Spanish. She had said she was from a low income area in New Orleans but then someone else at Yale was from there and she knew nothing about it. A five year stressful fiasco that resulted in public humiliation and expulsion. Not sure if Yale ever found out and revoked her undergrad degree (or if that’s even possible given that she passed all her classes.)
I don’t know how many kids lie on college applications.
I also don’t know how many people lie on their resume or on an employment application but it’s a lot. And very frequent stupid lies (as in- easily verified or not). If you passed the bar- that can be verified. Taking it three times doesn’t count if you haven’t passed. If you got a degree in whatever from wherever- there is a centralized repository where most of the colleges and U’s in the US have moved their data. A very few have not so you have to check it by calling/emailing/logging on to the registrar’s office. But most degrees are verified in seconds nowadays.
And my favorite- language fluency. Don’t claim to be fluent in Dutch if you aren’t. “Cause I’m going to have someone from the Amsterdam office log in to your Zoom screening interview and ask a couple of VERY easy questions like “is it raining where you are?”.
Why people lie about this I cannot fathom. Or lie about “named most promising finance executive under 40 by Business Week”, since a two minute scan of the lists going back 20 years easily shows that someone is either on it or off it.
But getting back to college apps- there’s stuff that’s easy to verify and stuff that’s impossible to verify. Why students lie about the stuff that’s easily checked is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.
The super puzzling thing about this student at Yale is, given that she had financial aid and a pretty sweet situation that tens of thousands of high school kids will cut off their left arm to be in (that is, attend Yale), why wouldn’t she keep a lower profile and act more “normally” like other freshmen and not draw so much attention to herself??!! The BDSM, the 30 year old boyfriend, telling her suitemates she planned to bring men over for sex, not showering, etc.
It is almost like she WANTED to be caught out. Why not just simply enjoy the full “normal” Yale experience, which by wide reputation is one of the very best undergrad experiences available anywhere?
I’m still wondering what caused the college to make the leap from “this is an undesirable roommate” to “maybe we should re-investigate the details on her application”. Something is not quite adding up imo. AFAIK colleges don’t go reexamining applications because of bad roommate vibes. And we hear plenty of stories of roommates having sex with people sleeping over. Maybe this is all just background noise to the real reason they looked imo it again?
I always wondered about “activities” and claimed roles. As a Yale interviewer, we do not get the list or role listed in the app. I, and most interviewers, will ask about EC’s, and I dig pretty hard to get details of the candidate’s level of participation, but who knows if the kid claimed something fantastical in their app.
I did on an occasion get contacted by a parent who told me that an applicant not his kid was claiming a bunch of bogus accomplishments. Did not interview that kid and in any event that kid did not get in.
If the Yale AO is going to enhance EC scrutiny, I wonder if they are going to push that down to interviewers by including the app list.
