I personally know many students who have been accepted to elite colleges who “started” nonprofit organizations that raised substantial funds, but in reality their charitable organizations were created by wealthy grandparents and parents, and the donors to the nonprofits were largely family friends. (I’ve been asked countless times by fellow parents to donate to their students’ nonprofits, coincidentally just before their students start applying to colleges.) Sometimes, these same parents use their connections to make sure their students are prominently featured in local news for their “achievements” and to promote the organizations to a broader community. Additionally, what about students whose winning science projects just happen to precisely coincide with their parents’ professional backgrounds and/or research? Do AOs ever fact check whether top science projects or philanthropic fundraisers might actually be the work of overzealous, well-connected parents? This isn’t a bitter rant or judgment on those families with connections, I’m actually sincerely curious whether this type of fact checking is done by AOs at elite universities.
The impression I get is that AOs are more likely just to not give that stuff much weight when the kid is clearly privileged, as opposed to making any extra efforts to investigate. I mean they may be looking at this application for 5-10 minutes, they typically don’t have time for that.
If a kid is actually in committee being considered and this is critical to why, maybe then it will get more attention. I just think that happens a lot less than these kids are hoping.
As a final thought, I am not sure that sort of stuff is really seen as disqualifying. Again, just my impression, but I think these colleges understand the pressures some kids are under from parents, consultants, and so on. So while they may not give a big weight to such stuff, they may not be inclined to actively punish it either.
I think these days AO’s look pretty skeptically at anything that has a hint of pay to play. Impactful EC’s are more likely found when the kid is/has been working in the trenches. In my reports at least, I describe what it the kid actually did, what impact it had on the beneficiary or team and the impact on the candidate.
Yeah, evaluative interviews are not formal investigations, but to put it bluntly, they are putting applicants in front of a real human being who is very likely to have some sort of built-in BS detector.
Again, it may not always be fatal to have some BS activities. But if it is ALL basically BS?
I just think those kids are at much more risk of a quiet “no thanks” than they sometimes realize.
I’d like to believe that most AOs, especially at highly competitive colleges, are savvy enough to suss this stuff out, even without fact checking per se. Maybe I am naive in believing that.
I do wonder whether it’s another signal: “my family has resources, so you may be getting donations down the line”.
Too cynical?
Too obtuse. If you are trying to get your kid in as a “development case”, there is no beating around the bush.
Somewhere between development case and nothing.
That isn’t enough to move the needle for admissions, AFAIK.
Perhaps in some cases. But I’m pretty sure a lot of made-up or greatly exaggerated accomplishments and activities don’t get flagged. Otherwise, private college consultants charging five-figure fees wouldn’t be getting their clients’ kids into elite schools with such a high rate of success.
But, back to this story…
That’s what I’ve been wondering too. We’re clearly missing some key facts, because there’s a big leap between “she’s stinky and promiscuous” and “let’s go back and carefully reexamine her application.”
I don’t know. This is just speculation on my part, but between the gossipy instagram post, the roommate woes, and the linked newspaper article, it strikes me that there were a lot of signs that something might have been really off with this girl beyond “stinky and promiscuous.” My first thought was mental illness and/or estrangement from family (arrived with a single suitcase). Perhaps she had some sort of breakdown or her behavior on campus was raising serious red flags amongst her professors or the residential staff (does Yale housing have faculty or graduate students who look out for freshmen/undergraduates?). Assuming she is over 18, I don’t think Yale could reach out to her parents, but maybe a roommate or friend tried and the story unraveled from there once family was contacted. Or maybe someone on campus or from her precollege life (friend or someone she alienated) realized she was not who she claimed to be and contacted the college administration with enough evidence that they decided to look into it. Like the Rachel Dolezal case when the family were surprised to read in the newspaper that she was claiming a false identity. This story made me sad –obviously expulsion was appropriate because she lied and faked her application, but something still seems wrong and I hope the expulsion results in her seeking help (elsewhere) or at least taking a hard look at her poor choices.
Yale freshmen have assigned freshmen counselors who are seniors that live in the same freshmen dormitories. The pods are relatively small (about 15 frosh). S was the head froco for his college senior year and they spend a lot of time with their students the first semester. They are there to help ease the freshmen into campus life, both academically and socially. They are also the first line to resolve any roommate conflict issues, so I imagine the dismissed students’ roommates went to one or several of the froco’s first, which then likely got escalated to the Dean and/or Head of Davenport College.
This again raises the question of how somebody with obvious mental health problems was still able to create an applications that fooled Yale AOs.
To successfully create a fake profile from scratch requires knowledge of the system, a good amount of talent, and planning ability. Alternatively, it requires a good amount of money. This woman did not seem to have any of those things. So either a bunch of AOs were really bad at their jobs, and they all looked at an application with more red flags than a May Day Parade and said “we want this person”, or somebody was helping her.
Apparently there was another high profile case of a removal in 2019 during the college admissions scandal:
In 2019, Yale rescinded the application of a student whose parents paid $1.2 million to fabricate the student’s athletic admissions profile, including to secure a fraudulent endorsement from the university’s women’s soccer coach, as part of an orchestrated college admissions scandal across multiple universities known as “Varsity Blues.” Shortly after, then-Yale University President Peter Salovey announced new guidelines for the recruitment of student athletes, such as “second, higher-level verification of the athletic credentials of recruited student-athletes before that information is shared with the admissions office.”
Anyone remember this one a few years ago?
or this one??
I know if I were one of the roommates, this unwashed person saying she was going to bring a 30+year old home for sex would get me to report it, at least to the RA and maybe higher.
Of course I have never gotten over the Sarah Lawrence incidence where the girl had her father move in and the school said nothing they could do. Maybe one of the roommate’s parents is like me and warned their child to stop this type of behavior immediately.
My first thought was actually almost the exact opposite - that it was a kind of social experiment. That someone decided to see how far they could push the envelope and to see what kind of reactions they would get by staging different provocative scenarios 
I realize that’s highly unlikely to be the case, but that was the first thing that popped into my head when I read about it.
It did kind of sound like that, given the things that were reported, but not sure what the point of going to so much trouble to do it would be.
Just wait until the documentary film of the experience premiers at Sundance 