Yale May Ramp Up Fact Checking After Removing First-Year Student

Applying to College College Headlines
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I’d take these kind of claims with a grain of salt. I’ve been involved in several college roommate disputes, including ones involving myself as well as a girl I was dating. One thing all disputes I am familiar with have in common is the roommates present the information in one-sided way, with events taken out of context and often exaggerated. The claims become increasingly exaggerated and repeated by other persons in the dorm to the point where it becomes hard to distinguish fact from fiction. There is usually an element of truth, but you need to hear both persons reacting the claim and full context to discern the details.

I’d be very surprised if she didn’t ever shower prior to the event with the purse ID. However, it does sound like she had wet clothes in the room at some point, which led to a mildew smell.

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That’s a whole other hornet’s nest.

Another question: don’t schools ask for SSNs? How did she fake that? (Is it in the article?) says something about Yale’s processes too?

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I don’t think Bashker will be viewed as a hero and might have trouble finding future roommates. Really, going thru her purse to look for an ID. Even looking at a luggage tag which I have to assume was attached to luggage which by that time (4 weeks into the semester) should have been in a closet or under a bed.

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I suspect her parents were complicit. No way she could have faked the financial aid documents which require parent and student tax returns as well as completed CSS and FAFSA. The parents had to cut the full pay fall semester check. Were they so clueless or head in the sand that they did not see her acceptance packet?

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If falsifying stuff like that is against the law and the now-former Yale student is an international student, she should probably expect to be deported at some point.

And good luck ever getting employed anywhere because this stupidity will come back to haunt her from here on out.

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Agree the parents were likely complicit. Having read the article now she refused to answer that question. If they were full pay they might not have submitted any fafsa or css forms - which may have possibly thrown up red flags if they had?

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I don’t know. You have a roommate who is behaving in very sketchy ways (we are obviously only getting the tiniest bit here, this person was living with her 24/7, and we are definitely not getting any more color from this writer), you seemingly have reason to believe something strange is going on with this person’s identity, they’re talking about putting a cage in your room, nobody else is doing anything about it, and you’re a Gen Z’er who’s already used to sharing your location with every friend and living in a quasi-surveillance state anyway? I imagine she’ll be fine.

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Her false identity might have included pretending to be an emancipated minor? In which case she might have had full financial aid? It sounds like she faked a lot of documents which might have included court documents. The article linked above says,

“I had to learn how to use Adobe from scratch” in order to forge transcripts and financial documents, Lynn says. She wrote her own letters of recommendation and “came up with ways around [colleges’] security measures.”

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I’m pretty sure that someone who faked everything she did on her application could make sure her parents didn’t see the first name listed on a piece of paper or the common app acceptance letter. Also, she’s in a dom-sub relationship with a 30-something - possible that her parents are not completely in the loop with everything that’s happening in her life.

I do agree that closer review of a FinAid package would have caught this, but there is no mention of aid in the article, and nobody is going to check an ACH transfer’s family lineage.

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My comment about “no wonder she didn’t shower” was tongue-in cheek, but if the full article (which I just accessed and read) posted by pa94306 in post 70 above is true, she had every reason to, as the article says, not “let her guard down”. Apparently she had spent several years creating this false identity, including legally changing her name, learning to falsify transcripts, financial documents, forge LOR’s etc. “Lynn had spent the past three years making sure every single aspect of her made-up identity was fully accounted for. Now she was coming to the realization that not everything was in her control.”

She apparently graduated from HS in CA in 2024 (though did not attend her graduation) per the article. “She missed her Bay Area high-school graduation, in 2024, and begged the school not to read her name during the ceremony, but to no avail: a recording of the principal reading Lynn’s given name is available online, though no one walked up to receive the diploma. And she legally changed her name.

The fall before she graduated, Lynn had applied to another Ivy League university with some fabricated application components, including her made-up name, though she kept her California address. As she expected, she was rejected, solidifying her plan to pretend to be from North Dakota the next time around.

In the fall of 2024, a few months into her post-high-school life studying resources such as Ivy League–admissions podcasts while living at her parents’ house, she applied to Yale as Katherina Lynn from Tioga, North Dakota.”

So yes, she had every reason to continue to be on her guard. Apparently “The door to the suite was decorated with signs featuring the students’ names and hometowns. Hers read, “Katherina Lynn: Tioga, North Dakota.”

When Lynn saw the sign, her stomach dropped. Her plan had been to return to saying that she was from the Bay Area once she got to campus, so that it would be easier to keep her story straight in case she ever let her guard down.“

And as for the luggage tag, it sounds like she was careless. “On Tuesday, September 16, Bashker says she noticed a luggage tag on Lynn’s desk that listed a name she didn’t recognize. “I took a photo and sent it to my [freshman counselor],” she says.” That led her to snoop in the girl’s wallet, which was wrong for sure, but did confirm the suspicion.

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I’ll follow on to this comment with this quote from the article:

She would not comment on how her fall tuition was paid; Yale spokesperson Paul McKinley also declined to comment.

This also makes me wonder if she was there on full financial aid, in which case Yale would have been even more motivated to quickly kick her out. (Yeah, I know that’s a cynical comment…)

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I kind of doubt she was on financial aid. She’d have to fake tax returns and W2’s for her parents and herself. Purposefully lying on the FAFSA is subject to penalties of perjury and is considered fraud. The likelihood of getting caught I would think goes up several factors when money is involved. Much easier to avoid that scrutiny and go full pay.

The documentation requirements are a bit looser for internationals, but I thought her big hook was coming from nowhere North Dakota. That would be an interesting essay to be a foreign national living in North Dakota and having no money (her family and her). Possible I guess, but that is a very tortured lie to keep up and fake the paperwork on top of the application lies and fake paperwork.

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Paywall.

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I assumed Chinese referred to ethnicity rather than nationality.

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As I wrote above - there is absolutely no way that she could have faked her residency without some serious help.

I’ll repeat - forget about FAFSA or CSS, she needed transcripts and LoRs from a school with a North Dakota address, they need to look official. It wasn’t enough to do that, since it would have to be a real high school in ND, the LoR would have to be with official school headings, and the transcript would have to look like an official high school transcript. That transcript would also have needed to be sent from an email address belonging to the school.

All of this is possible, but it takes a lot of know-how and time. The girl does not sound like the sort of person who has the required skills.

Unless the AOs were entirely incompetent, I don’t believe that she could have taught herself to create passable LoRs and transcripts. That takes more than forging LoRs, that requires recreating an entire set of school logos, it requires a very good familiarity with how letters are formatted, and how they are supposed to sound. It requires spoofing North Dakota email addresses. It requires being able to respond to any email inquiries that Yale would have sent about the student.

Also, what “colleges’ security measures” did she need to get around? She just needed to open an account as a teacher or a counselor, and submit the info. There is absolutely no need for her to go around Yale’s security in order to run this scam. The applicant invites the LoR writer to submit the LoR, and the LoR writer can do so. For the transcript, the counselor uses their Common App account or another service. This claim is one more thing that make me skeptical that she was the person who was behind the scam. It sounds as though she is providing the answer that she was told to provide.

However, let us actually assume that hacking into Yale’s system was required. If a high school student who seems to have had little or no prior experience with things like hacking can breach Yale’s security, it is 100% certain that there would have been multiple breaches by the many people who actually know how to do this.

I am willing to bet that the supposed “boyfriend” is the person who orchestrated the entire thing, and that the purpose of the exercise is either a “social experiment”, and @worriedmomucb proposed, or something else.

A person who wanted to get into Yale and had all of the skills that were required to pull something like this off, would have been immersing themselves in life as a student, and using those skills to scam themselves some good grades, etc. They would NOT have been bringing attention to themselves in so many negative ways.

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These are good points about the extent of falsification required to make this work. I’m wondering if this is the new varsity blues scandal…

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Once again, we think alike!

That was my thought too when I read @MWolf’s post - that there might be an organized group helping to create fake identities and doing everything else necessary to get students into elite schools under false pretenses.

Unless the boyfriend has personal experience as both a college counselor and a hacker/forger, he’d also have a hard time faking everything convincingly.

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I actually knew someone like this once. It is a crazy store but basically she had faked being a med school graduate and medical resident (in fact she was never admitted to med school), and was trying to get an actual medical professional to marry her, the plan apparently being that once she was married she would quickly get pregnant, “take leave”, and then just never “go back”.

Anyway, in her case her parents were totally in on it. I’m not necessarily saying it is impossible they weren’t in this case, but it certainly made everything easier for the con artist I know about.

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This article explains a lot of things not mentioned elsewhere. Basically she tried gaming the system by pretending she lived in a small town.

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How did she get the fat acceptance envelope at her CA home if she used an ND address to apply?

how did she fake her SAT/ACT?

so many q’s!