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Ivy League - Bribes for Admission

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    Speaking of which....here's an interesting twist to the scandal. Rich Asian dad of a top local student who is also a legacy and fencer buys the house of the Harvard fencing coach in Needham for over $300K over asking. Bribe? Legit admit?

    http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/he-...RMs?li=BBnb7Kz

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      "Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with their nastiness forever.... when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have taken it.... I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse. Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.

      I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.

      .... The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them.

      .... I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

      .... I will now add as a very truthful disclaimer that the horrible parents constituted at most 25 percent of the total, that the rest weren’t just unobjectionable, but many—perhaps most—were lovely people who were so wise about parenting that when I had children of my own, I often remembered things they had told me.

      .... During those three years before the mast, I saw no evidence of any of the criminal activity that the current scandal has delivered. But I absolutely saw the raw materials that William Rick Singer would use to create his scam. The system, even 25 years ago, was full of holes. The first was sports. Legacy admissions have often been called affirmative action for white people, but the rich-kid sports—water polo, tennis, swimming, gymnastics, volleyball, and even (God help us all) sailing and actual polo—are the true affirmative action for the rich.

      .... The second flaw in the system was an important change to the way untimed testing is reported to the colleges. When I began the job, the SAT and the ACT offered untimed testing to students with learning disabilities, provided that they had been diagnosed by a professional. However, an asterisk appeared next to untimed scores, alerting the college that the student had taken the test without a time limit. But during my time at the school, this asterisk was found to violate the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the testing companies dropped it. Suddenly it was possible for everyone with enough money to get a diagnosis that would grant their kid two full days—instead of four hours—to take the SAT, and the colleges would never know. Today, according to Slate, “in places like Greenwich, Conn., and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent.” Taking a test under normal time limits in one of these neighborhoods is a sucker’s game—you’ve voluntarily handicapped yourself.

      ... it was through these broken saloon doors—the great power conferred on coaches, untimed testing, and the ease with which an application can be crammed with false information—that Singer pushed unqualified students into colleges they wanted to attend. He told the parents to get their kids diagnosed with learning disabilities, and then arranged for them to take the test alone in a room with a fake proctor—someone who was so skilled at taking these tests that he could (either by correcting the student’s test before submitting it or by simply taking the thing himself) arrive at whatever score the client requested. (“I own two schools,” Singer told a client about the testing sites, one in West Hollywood and the other in Houston, where his fake proctors could do their work.) He allowed coaches to monetize any extra spots on their recruitment lists by selling them to his clients. And he offered a service that he called “cleaning up” the transcript, which involved, at the very least, having his employees take online courses in the kids’ name and then adding those A’s to their record.

      .... Much of the discussion of this scandal has centered on the corruption in the college-admissions process. But think about the kinds of jobs that the indicted parents held. Four of them worked in private equity, a fifth in the field of “investments,” others in real-estate development and the most senior management of huge corporations. Together, they have handled billions of dollars’ worth of assets within heavily regulated fields—yet look how easily and how eagerly they allegedly embrace a crooked scheme, as quoted in the court documents.

      .... what accounted for the intensity of emotion these parents expressed, their sense of a profound loss, of rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs? They were experiencing the same response to a changing America that ultimately brought Donald Trump to office: white displacement and a revised social contract. The collapse of manufacturing jobs has been to poor whites what the elite college-admissions crunch has been to wealthy ones: a smaller and smaller slice of pie for people who were used to having the fattest piece of all.... today, there’s a squeeze on those kids. The very strong but not spectacular white student from a good high school is now trying to gain access to an ever-shrinking pool of available spots at the top places. He’s not the inherently attractive prospect he once was. These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children..... now Exhibit A of law enforcement finally treating rich, white Americans as unsparingly as it treats poor, black ones."


      https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...eveals/586468/

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        https://media.townhall.com/Townhall/...0404094506.jpg

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          One third of this year's freshman Harvard admits are legacies. Not that my kid is Harvard material, but I gotta say that's bullsh*t. There are a lot of kids out there more qualified than many of the legacy kids I've known there


          https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harv...hoo&yptr=yahoo

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            Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
            One third of this year's freshman Harvard admits are legacies. Not that my kid is Harvard material, but I gotta say that's bullsh*t. There are a lot of kids out there more qualified than many of the legacy kids I've known there


            https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harv...hoo&yptr=yahoo
            Record-Low 4.59 Percent of Applicants Accepted to Harvard Class of 2022
            https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2...missions-2022/

            Letters of admission will go out to 1,962 comprising the Class of 2022. I can remember reading an article quite awhile back on Harvard's admittance rate. which at the time was the lowest admissions rate in the country. And believe me the folks at Harvard took great pride in that. It probably bugs them to no end that Stanford has a lower rate this year. The article pretty much stated getting into Harvard is the luck of the draw. There are literally thousands of students equal to the 1,962 students selected that have applied. So the question in the article is why, with a nearly $40 billion endowment, doesn't the college expand their admissions. And the answer was it's important that you believe these 1,962 are the cream of the crop because exclusivity buys rewards (especially for the 628 legacy students who won the lottery this year). There is no motivation to expand educating excellent students. Exclusivity is the first priority of the school.

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              It's actually pretty interesting to view the demographics of the Class of 2022.

              "In line with the trends of previous years, much of the freshman class is wealthy, white, and straight — and hails from the country’s coasts."

              https://features.thecrimson.com/2018...eup-narrative/

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                Felicity Huffman and 12 other parents plead guilty today, along with the Texas tennis coach.
                https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...=.51899209b57a

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                  Prosecutors want prison time for Felicity Huffman and other parents who pleaded guilty in college admissions scam
                  https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/08/us/fe...ons/index.html

                  Stanford kicks out first student connected to admissions scandal
                  https://nypost.com/2019/04/08/stanfo...sions-scandal/

                  Lori Loughlin, husband hit with new charges in college admissions scam
                  https://pagesix.com/2019/04/09/lori-...551.1553018055

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                    Harvard fencing coach accused of recruiting student whose dad bought his house
                    https://nypost.com/2019/04/04/harvar...ght-his-house/

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                      SNL spoofed Laughlin last night

                      https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-l...d-open/3939457

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                        http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more...s?ocid=UE07DHP

                        Singer sent part of the bribe to the club soccer team associated with the asst. coach at USC, Laura Janke. The CLUB soccer team benefited too. Horrible.

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                          Originally posted by Unregistered View Post
                          http://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/more...s?ocid=UE07DHP

                          Singer sent part of the bribe to the club soccer team associated with the asst. coach at USC, Laura Janke. The CLUB soccer team benefited too. Horrible.
                          This is why NCAA should make sure there is not overlap in college and club as far as roles. Too much temptation and too easy to hide/misdirect funds.

                          Comment


                            In College Admissions Scandal, Families From China Paid the Most
                            Families that allegedly paid $1.2 million and $6.5 million show the reach of the cheating ring

                            https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-big...trending_now_3

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                              At USC, Admissions Cheating Scandal Runs Deeper
                              More than a mere coach cashing in, FBI affidavit outlines far more systemic fraud at USC, where alleged bribes became a form of athletics fundraising

                              https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-usc-...o4BlAdDBxHI96g

                              Comment


                                L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal
                                https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/u...imes&smtyp=cur

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