This is not surprising nor shocking:
Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are among dozens of parents, elite college coaches and college prep executives accused of carrying out a national conspiracy to get students into prestigious colleges, according to a massive federal indictment.
Federal prosecutors said the scheme had two major pieces. In the first part, parents allegedly paid a college prep organization to take the test on behalf of students or correct their answers. Secondly, the organization allegedly bribed college coaches to help admit the students into college as recruited athletes, regardless of their actual ability, prosecutors said.
The documents also allege that some defendants created fake athletic profiles for students to make them appear to be successful athletes.
In all, 50 people were charged in the criminal investigation that went by the name “Operation Varsity Blues.” Those arrested include two SAT/ACT administrators, one exam proctor, nine coaches at elite schools, one college administrator and 33 parents, according to Andrew Lelling, the US attorney for Massachusetts.
I feel bad for the kids who did not know anything about this. I don’t know how they ever trust their parents again or deal with the humiliation they will experience from their peers.
germy
How could they not know someone else had taken the test on behalf of them?
germy
Before he expresses an opinion on this.
trollhattan
Can’t wait to peel my 11th-grader off the ceiling tonight upon hearing about this.
College-bound high-schoolers are under phenomenal pressure to get perfect grades, perfect SAT/ACT scores, be perfect at sportsball, do the perfect community service because universities have never been more competitive. It’s one thing to “know” the Kushners of the world have a leg up getting into good schools, it’s quite another to learn of a fucking rich-people’s college entrance Mafia.
(One more year….)
Amir Khalid
So what happens to the kids who got university places because of these deceptions?
Nicole
See, this was because these well-off folk were seeking a bargain. They could have simply offered up a couple million direct to the colleges and gotten in without having to resort to subterfuge. You get what you pay for. And in this case, that means an indictment.
(also, Felicity, why? WHHHHHYYYYYYYY? That goes for you too, Mr. William H Macy)
mrmoshpotato
Operation Rich Cheating Assholes
schrodingers_cat
@Nicole: Felicity Huffman is unrecognizable did she do something to her face?
germy
Gin & Tonic
Is there something wrong with me if I don’t know who Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin are?
Jerzy
Jared and Donnie seem to sleep well at night. *Their* poster-boy unearned admissions were scams from a *much* older, well-oiled mechanism.
Gretchen
@germy: At least one kid took a test and was told it was the real one, so he wouldn’t know that the scammers substituted another one. He thought he really took the test and got that score.
Kraux Pas
@Gin & Tonic: Lori Loughlin is “Becky” from Full House and Fuller House.
biff murphy
This has been going on for years… You think tRump got into college on his academics or his 16 count manual arms training at NYMA
Luthe
@trollhattan: It depends on the school. Some places want unique and not perfect. Your kid is better off focusing on one or two clubs and making waves there than trying to do everything. Same for community service. Sportsball only really matters if you want your kid to make a team.
Of course, I went to a small liberal arts women’s college where sports weren’t a thing, so take this advice with a grain of salt (or a shaker).
germy
I wonder how many qualified kids got rejected so that there’d be room for the failsons and daughters of wealthy idiots?
Kay
I’m on a public school committee and the school is 50% low income.
This will kill the kids we call “strivers”- they are wholly believing they can get there on merit.
Jesus. I just think of all these kids working their asses off, assuming there’s a “meritocracy”. That they can take the tests and jump thru the hoops and do all the work and get where they want to go, despite the fact that they start way back. It will destroy them.
The problem with all this fucking SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION in ALL of our institutions is what does it say to people who play by the rules? Here’s what it says- it says “you, rule-follower, are a SUCKER”.
Gin & Tonic
@Kraux Pas: Not really helping.
rikyrah
UH HUH
jonas
@Kraux Pas: And Felicity Huffmann is perhaps best known for her role on “Desperate Housewives” in the early aughts. She’s also married to William H. Macy. Disappointing to think he was in on this too — I’ve always been a huge fan.
Nicole
@Gin & Tonic:
No. I think celebrity illiteracy is a sign of someone who probably has better things to do. ;) But I did really like FH on Sports Night.
sdhays
@rikyrah: Yes, let’s talk about that. I didn’t know that anyone was getting arrested for enrolling their kids in public elementary schools. That’s crazy.
Kay
We need a national discussion about how incredibly corrupt our elites are. Then we need to hire more investigators and prosecutors. Put them all on white collar fraud. A fucking ARMY of law enforcers. I want to see raids and perp walks and people handcuffed. Send a message to stem this crime wave.
We can REASSIGN all the tens of thousands who are now cracking shoplifting cases. Take them off the “blue collar” crime beat.
VeniceRiley
@trollhattan: No coincidence the firm is in Newport. Epicenter of the Rich Assholes of Orange County, CA. I feel for your kid. I’m pretty ticked off. My nieces and nephew live there, but aren’t rich. (Though they do have a step grandpa that is a community colleges trustee or whatever to go to for help when the time comes.)
Nicole
@rikyrah: Excellent point.
rp
These are really the small fish. The semi-wealthy. The truly wealthy can buy a spot legally by donating a few million to the school.
Jeffro
Notice, nowhere is anyone trying to offer a little perspective…not saying this is a-ok, but
1) We’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all college kids’ parents here (it’s even a fraction of a fraction of rich parents)
2) Many, many more bribe schools via “donations”, “scholarships”, and “gifts” with a wink and a nod
3) VASTLY many, many more get their kids in just by being ‘legacy’ students – alumni members’ kids. But we never bang on that kind of ‘affirmative action’ in America, at least not too often.
4) As usual, this only matters because a couple of celebrities are involved. I swear, you could take the most boring subject in this or any other timeline, add a celebrity or two and voila, instant day-long news cycle grabber.
Oh and 5) naturally everyone is waiting for Mr. Executive Time to weigh in on this. What. Ever.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Outside the United States, you need a fucking passport as an id to take many of these entrance exams due to concerns about cheating.
Gin & Tonic
@Nicole:
Yeah, that’;s not helping either.
J.
And the article doesn’t touch on all the parents who hide or lie about their incomes to get their kids scholarships and grant money, which is also rampant.
david
Rich people buy their kids’ way into college. Film at 11. *yawn*
If anything, I applaud Aunt Becky. Some parents spend millions of dollars buying naming rights to buildings
or creating foundations, in order to guarantee their kids’ admission. She did the same thing for only $15K.
Kraux Pas
@Gin & Tonic: Here is her full filmography.
It has pictures. Beyond that, not sure there is much I can do to help you. If you don’t know an actor, you don’t know ’em.
BobS
@Nicole: She was outstanding in Transamerica.
And I think most of the kids knew exactly what was going on.
Anonymous At Work
@trollhattan: Even worse since Kushners did their bribery openly and legally. This was an illegal scheme since the payments were directed to officials at the school, not the school’s endowment.
And the kids’ self-esteem is nothing that a few new cars can’t restore
dnfree
@sdhays: This is usually a situation where parents are enrolling children in public schools and they don’t live within the attendance area for that school. (Quite likely they couldn’t afford to buy or rent in the more affluent area with the better public school system.) They might use someone else’s address or they might even send their kids to live with someone in that district. It’s completely understandable and yet completely illegal. School districts are supported by property taxes and if everyone who wanted to go to the affluent district but didn’t live there did this, it would cost the district a lot of money to hire the additional teachers, build the additional buildings, etc.
cliosfanboy
And then the kids will be in totally over their heads when they actually start their college classes
TS (the original)
@Kay:
Starts at the top and people who could, refuse to do anything about the president*.
Jeffg166
Buying a spot in a school isn’t especially new. When the kid starts to fail the parents will write another check to keep them in school.
JPL
@Anonymous At Work: Why didn’t they buy their way in legally like Jared and most likely George W. ?
rikyrah
andi zeisler (@andizeisler) Tweeted:
Perhaps this is a good time to talk about all the perfectly legal ways the wealthy are both allowed and expected to manipulate college-admissions systems while teaching their children to disparage “affirmative action” https://t.co/VSoOwIiKp7 https://twitter.com/andizeisler/status/1105497549127860226?s=17
rikyrah
A Texas prison official used incarcerated people to provide labor for landscaping work at his local church. Paid just 49 cents an hour, the prisoners’ work on the church came just months before the National Prison Strike demanded an end to prison slavery.https://t.co/cTcoKqGOAe
— The Appeal (@theappeal) March 12, 2019
kindness
How did the kids not know? Yea that line is complete bullshit. Non-athletic kids know they aren’t athletic.
Jeffg166
@Jeffro: Spot on.
rikyrah
Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) Tweeted:
The very idea of our society, higher-ed or otherwise, being a “meritocracy” is something that was made up to justify & reify existing social hierarchies. It’s not real. What’s real is how wealth & race combine to give ppl things that they tell themselves they inherently deserve. https://twitter.com/ClintSmithIII/status/1105502435886407682?s=17
Gretchen
@sdhays: It happens when someone enrolls their kid in a public school in a different neighborhood than they live in. It’s a result of our method of funding public schools with property taxes, so rich suburbs have more money to spend/better schools than poorer areas. And poor parents correctly realize that the best way for their kids to avoid poverty is to go to school in a better district. And of course when anyone suggests a fairer way of funding public schools, the rich districts fight it tooth and nail.
rikyrah
Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) Tweeted:
Some ppl don’t fully appreciate the psychological toll it takes on a student to navigate a school environment that both implicitly & explicitly tells you that you only got in because of an undeserving hand-out, meanwhile somebody’s parents donate a building & no one bats an eye. https://twitter.com/ClintSmithIII/status/1105498904014008320?s=17
geg6
@J.:
I can only guess that you are talking about people doing this with private schools. As a financial aid officer at a public school that only requires a FAFSA to apply for aid from us, I can uncategorically state that this is impossible to do here.
Roger Moore
@Luthe:
This sounds right to me. An important part of this is that if a student does exceptionally well at one or two things, it’s probably because they’ve already made up their mind about their interests and are going to try to pursue those things in college. They may have more trouble getting into a school that tries to be all things to all people, but they’ll do well at trying to get into a school that specializes in whatever they care about- which is probably better for them anyway.
Mike in NC
I have two nieces who recently graduated from college. Cannot imagine what kind of debt they’re carrying. I went to UMass-Boston in the 70s (lived at home and rode the subway) and it was dirt cheap compared to what college costs today.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Well, we’ll see what happens. There was a cheating scandal in Atlanta Public Schools where people went to prison. They were mostly black teachers, so, you know, the 60k a year crowd. Let’s see if cheating is taken as seriously in elite circles.
Columbus Ohio public school administrators cooked the books on attendance numbers and state law enforcement went in with guns drawn. People went to jail for that one.
So we have lots of comparisons.
Anonymous At Work
@TS (the original): Already being taken care of: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/ael9v3/ocasiocortez_and_her_leftist_followers_real/
rikyrah
Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) Tweeted:
Thinking about all the black, brown, & low-income students who arrive at college & who are made to feel as if they don’t deserve to be there, while so many wealthy students have their parents essentially buy their way into these schools & rarely experience the same skepticism. https://twitter.com/ClintSmithIII/status/1105496141951655937?s=17
geg6
@Mike in NC:
The average debt of graduates at my school is $36,000 or so.
It’s a lot, but not nearly what it is for private colleges and universities. Another reason to steer your kids clear of private schools. Unless, apparently, you are Lori Laughlin.
Brachiator
A lot of the time, the kids know. Their peers are also doing the same thing, or wish they could.
A friend’s kids attended a very upscale school in Southern California. Parents, often with the connivance of their kids, regularly tried to bully teachers into treating the kids favorably. From the outside, the school is always presented as representing the cream of the crop.
VeniceRiley
@Kay:
All I can say, Kay, is that you are aces. I hope you can communicate to them what good news this is, that the wealthy and influential and even famous are not exempt from prosecution, and that society cares about this. Your kids are doing it right and should be proud of their accomplishments. (And I don’t want to go to the doc or lawyer that was too rich and dumb to get into school on the legit track.)
Ohio Mom
@Kay: There is still a place for your strivers. There are many colleges, looking for different profiles, offering different programs, enticements and supports.
Gin & Tonic
@JPL: Because they didn’t have enough money to do that.
WaterGirl
Who the hell is Norman Kelley, and why is he writing this crap at the Washington Monthly?
Do We Really Need a Black James Bond?
Gretchen
@Mike in NC: My daughter went to grad school at Columbia and now has over $100,000 in student loan debt. That affects her choices of where to work and live and when to marry and have children.
One gatekeeper to the upper class is the ability to work at unpaid internships in entertainment, journalism or politics, while my daughter has to get paid to support herself.
Pogonip
Cole, I think the kids’ reaction will be “Your mom got you in for $15.000? Wow! Mine paid $25!” and “Yeah? So?”
I have rich relatives (not close ones, unfortunately). The rich, like the poor, learn reality very, very early. It’s the middle classes that cling to the beliefs that fairness and merit are still factors in American society.
cmorenc
My younger daughter got into a very good, but not elite university by way of being recruited as an invited walk-on to the schools’ varsity cross-country team. She may possibly have been able to get into this school on her academic credentials alone, but the school is somewhat more competitive to get into because of it’s location in a seacoast town (Wilmington, NC) aka “UNC at the Beach” – but because the timing of her acceptance letter was: a) not long after her recruiting visit; b) significantly after “early admissions” acceptances went out and significantly before the mass of regular acceptances went out – we’re pretty sure her acceptance was greased by the Athletic Dept of the University. After her first season, she earned a small scholarship based on athletic performance on the team.
Getting recruited / making it onto varsity college teams in non-revenue sports can be a tremendous benefit toward successful freshman academic performance and quickly belonging to a socially healthier peer group in college – you have mandated study halls (but also tutors if needed for the core courses), you get jumped to the head of the line for class registration, again with knowledgeable advisors steering you away from courses and profs known to be needlessly hazardous to student’s academic health (e.g. course sections where the D & F rate is significantly above average) – and it’s easier to avoid being room-mated with party animal goof-offs of the sort who are disruptive to being able to adequately focus on academics. Not that the XC team didn’t party, but the work ethos was there too.
trollhattan
@Luthe:
You’re right of course, she’s placed absurdly high standards on herself (it’s not the parents, promise!) even rejecting schools with too-high acceptance rates (USC ironically included). Now having observed first-hand several years of kids on the HS college track I’m gobsmacked at what a grinder it has become. My kid hasn’t gotten a B since grade school and still isn’t “the top of my class” because other kids have more efficiently leveraged the AP courses. The cost of stressing over every test/quiz/exam/paper is borne through sleepless nights and bursting into tears during exams when the physics teacher hasn’t bothered to lecture on what’s in the test.
Does anybody wonder why so many teens are on meds?
Kay
@TS (the original):
I didn’t used to believe that but I do now. Thirty years of not holding powerful/wealthy people accountable does real, systemic damage.
The one and only cure is to to start holding them accountable, no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient that might be.
Because this never ends. There’s no bottom. It’s literally a slippery slope from Jared Kushner buys his way in to “take my kids SAT for them”.
It was never about punishing them. It was ABOUT a level playing field for people who DO play by the rules. Those are the people who get hurt by this- the honest people.
Thaddeu
College admissions in this country are a scam.
-Every teacher is a petty emperor in grading. No standards even in the same school when 2 teachers teach the same subject ,forget teachers across schools
-Recommendations play a big part
Forget these kind of over-the-top corruption. What goes on as regular accepted practice for college admissions in this country is incredibly corrupt.
The closest thing to a fair playing field is the SAT score and AP/SAT subject tests
Roger Moore
@dnfree:
The obvious solution is to stop supporting schools based on local property taxes. It’s a key way of perpetuating inequality, since it guarantees that poor kids can’t get the kind of education that would lift them out of poverty. We need to have more equitable funding so those poor kids don’t have to go to a rich district to get a decent education.
gwangung
@Thaddeu: What total bullshit.
Take it and cram it.
Barbara
It makes me understand why so many schools have decided to drop the requirement for standardized testing. Objectively, I think the following is even worse, because it affects students in New York City’s public school system where admission to a high school is supposed to be based on merit as determined by a test. Wouldn’t you know, admission coaches are providing students with the answers to questions on the test, for a fee: Source
VeniceRiley
@WaterGirl: I volunteer as tribute to tell Norman about Captain Marvel.
Darrin Ziliak
@Gin & Tonic:
If there is, the same thing’s wrong with me as well.
Amir Khalid
I haven’t seen my question #4 answered, so I’ll ask it again: what happens to the students who used fraudulent applications to get into desirable colleges?
Ohio Mom
Years and years ago, a friend was working on a PhD in English at the University of Cincinnati and ended up being assigned to teach what is delicately called Developmental English. That’s a remedial, non-credit class for students who got in by the skin of their teeth that has to be passed before taking Comp 101.
As she told the story, she went to the first class, sure it would be filled with minority and Appalachian students, the first in their families to go to college, that it would be her job to make up for the subpar education these otherwise bright students needed to overcome.
“They were all blond Greeks!” was her punchline.
lamh36
@Jeffro: I’ll make the same distinction as the Atty guy..”we’re not talking bout donating a building here…we’r talking fraud”.
In other words…yes rich folk been donating shit to the university in exchange for Legacy admits and such.
In this case, these parents didn’t go through the university directly…the Atty guy said so far in the investigation, none of the University have been DIRECTLY involved, as the case WOULD be with a school donation.
Instead…the guy who snitched and others pocketed the money and the schools didn’t know anything bout it.
I think THAT’S a pretty big distinction…a donation while it pisses me off ISN’T illegal/fraud.
Pogonip
@Amir Khalid: Nothing. They’re rich.
geg6
@Thaddeu:
I wish all you people saying this would make sure to make clear that, in general, this does not happen at public universities (though I guess USC and UCLA are publics, but I don’t know anyone from this part of the country who applied or got in, so I’m not very familiar with their methods).
We don’t have an essay. We weight high schools’ grading systems so as to make it fair among poor, middle class and wealthy school districts and to take into account grade inflation. We don’t take into account alumni connections. We don’t look at activities/service. We don’t use recommendations. We only look at high school GPA and SAT/ACT scores. That’s it. Doesn’t matter who the hell you are.
Anonymous At Work
@JPL: Not clear but I suspect that the people weren’t really-rich and just only rich, so they couldn’t give the 6+ figures to the endowment to matter or their best bribes weren’t enough to put their kids over the top, or the schools had ways to prevent non-legacies from buying in. Or the parents didn’t want to pay the FULL price and just wanted the bribe-the-night-watchman level discount.
Gozer
@geg6: USC is private. UCLA is public (part of the Univ. of CA system).
Gin & Tonic
Just read a great comment on Twitter about USC: it’s the aspirational school for people with lots of money and no books in their house.
Nicole
On top of it all, other than bragging rights, why even bother? These kids, the children of people with money, are going to be FINE. They’ll inherit seven figures (maybe low sevens, most successful TV actors are rich but not THAT rich, but still, a decent legacy). They don’t need an Ivy League. Hell, they don’t “need” college. They’ll be FINE. I’m not saying that they should plan on living off their inheritance (though plenty will do that anyway), but holy cow, how about just shrugging and figuring the kid will go to a school that suits their interests and abilities?
There was a good piece here in NYC a few weeks back about the ongoing struggle to diversify the “elite” NYC public high schools (currently admission is via a test, which parents of means will spend $$$$ prepping their kids for). And the thrust of the article was, who decided that only this select group of schools was the “only” option for NYC kids? What would happen in parents, rather than trying to shape their kids into what this school wants, would look at what their kids actually want or need from a school?
gvg
@geg6: As another financial aid officer at a public school, I don’t know why you think it’s impossible. It’s been shown by detailed audits, that it doesn’t happen as often as mythology claims and the more reasonably priced schools don’t have much fraud going on, but the higher priced schools do have a cheating problem. current FAFSA’s verify against actual tax returns filed with the IRS, but the IRS is woefully underfunded and undermanned. If people lie to them, we won’t catch it and some types of income are easier to cover up than others. In addition I don’t think the FAFSA is much good at determining real assets. The various reforms to “simplify” the FAFSA in my 20 plus years always seem to result in less info on assets. I honestly think we were better on that 20 years ago.
However our various detailed audits show our parents aren’t trying to commit fraud. Our costs are still viewed as reasonable, comparitively. Elite schools have a big problem per reports.
I don’t think this is a significant scandal. the numbers are too small.
lamh36
paying to change test scores and faking pics and shit…when oh IDK maybe using that money to pay for tutors for they dumb azz kids…ya things many poor folks can’t afford to do…smh…oh but that damn affirmative action…
not for nothing though, how often do we have a news story, that touches on so many areas of media coverage. We got Hollywood, Law Enforcemen, College Sports, Social Injustice, Business Fraud, Classism
Like all media outlines have a stake in covering this story
https://i.imgur.com/JNhU5Tt.gif
glory b
@germy: Too late Don Jr. has already stepped in that.
Austin
“I feel bad for the kids who did not know anything about this. I don’t know how they ever trust their parents again or deal with the humiliation they will experience from their peers.”
Sorry, but I doubt if these entitled kids will feel any guilt or humiliation because their parents bribed their way into elite universities. I suspect these kids all went to private or high end public schools (where rich kids are surrounded by rich kids). They all benefited from a wealth of AP courses, grade inflation, private tutors, etc… And, still their parents needed to bribe their way into these universities. Do you think they didn’t know?
I want it now!
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: It’s far, far harder than you might think to flunk out of a top-tier university in the US.
Thaddeu
@gwangung:
Are you a teacher? Your response, with no rationale, seems exactly like from one who has unaccountable authority.
Any system that permits personal discretion, will be abused by those in power. And it is. Unlike many here, I believe (and has experienced) that teachers are human beings..corruptible, biased, and vindictive, just as normal human beings. They are not Gods.
Kay
@Ohio Mom:
We’ve gotten a little better at it. Not as concerned with the “name” of the school or the perceived value of the name. We try to get them a good deal. Bang for their limited buck. Some schools seem to seek them out, which is wonderful. University of Cincinnati and University of Findlay pay attention to the fact that they HAVE to get out in 4 years. They can’t be lollygagging around. They need a free ride and then they to be out and earning. I like when they combine an undergrad degree with some advanced licensing. That to me means they’re paying attention to the cost, both in time lost while not earning and actual cost. Sometimes they don’t want to go so far from home, which is understandable when they’re first generation. They seem to do better a little closer.
lamh36
@Gin & Tonic: Well too bad, cause you are missing the BEST snark twitter has to offer
Nicole
@Thaddeu:
If you’re white, anyway.
Ladyraxterinok
@Luthe: In 80s some parents urged their kids to go to a near-by state college, work hard and then apply to ‘good’ grad school.
For several kids this worked very well.
The economics of higher education is so different now I have no idea if this is still financially feasible.
In the 90s in a different state kids were going to community college for 2 yrs then 2yrs at a state university. Saved a lot of money.
Pogonip
@Kay: Yes, I recall the Columbus Public Schools book-cooking. Not sure what school administrators are paid, but we know it wasn’t enough to walk on those charges! ?
On the other hand, there was also a school principal—in Atlanta, I think—who left her baby in a hot car and claimed she forgot he was in there. She did this 3 or 4 times, finally managing to dispose of him the last time—he must have been quite a bit more work than she had originally anticipated—and she DID walk. So maybe it’s not only all about the Benjamins, but also all about the whims of the prosecutor.
Nicole
@lamh36:
A friend of mine just posted on FB: “I am OUTRAGED that anyone would call Lori Loughlin an actress!”
Gin & Tonic
@gvg: This was long ago and I’ve mostly put it out of my mind, but I had kids who applied to top-tier private universities which required a financial disclosure *far* more intrusive and extensive than FAFSA. I’ve forgotten the name, as I prefer to have forgotten about the whole process.
dmbeaster
Must be time for another presidential pardon.
Kayla Rudbek
@geg6: University of Spoiled Children is private, but UCLA is part of the California system (counterpart of Cal Berkeley).
Pogonip
@Nicole: How does the computer grading the test know the race of the taker? Does the test-taker have to turn in a photo ID along with the answer sheet? It wouldn’t surprise me. My doctor’s been with me for 5 years and is still required to look at my driver’s license to write a “controlled substance” prescription.
lamh36
@Kay: hell…let’s not forget when this happned!
oh…the Black girl…couldn’t have raised her score on her on…but these rich which kids paying 15k to increase their kids scores without even SITTING FOR THE TEST!
lamh36
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Maybe so, but I’m asking about the consequences for getting a college admission by fraud. As other commenters have noted, the fraudulent application couldn’t have been submitted without the student’s collusion.
Kay
@Ladyraxterinok:
It takes really elaborate planning now. They can take college courses in high school free in Ohio and they do- in droves. They can get a 2 year degree along with a high school degree if they bust ass. Essentially it’s preK-14 instead of K-12, which is what it should be. This is a natural progression. First there was no public education, then it was until 8th grade, then they added high school, now they need to add two years of college or training.
Steve in the ATL
@Pogonip: my kids had to send scans of their drivers licenses when they registered for the tests, and that scan was checked against the photo ID presented at the testing facility
gvg
@Amir Khalid: It depends. It’s up to the colleges and there isn’t a standard answer for US Universities. I suspect they may not even have school policies for this situation, and I also suspect they will want to wait till trials happen and more info comes out. Law enforcement isn’t the same as the academic institutions. By the time they think they have the facts, the students may have been attending awhile and the school may want to also take into account how the student has been doing. If they really aren’t up to standard, they may have already flunked out.
On the other side, the schools may make a point of admitting a few more who almost made it than they had planned to.
The details of what each student knew and did will probably vary so the schools may not treat all of them the same.
rikyrah
???
The Volatile Mermaid (@OhNoSheTwitnt) Tweeted:
Aunt Becky using her rich white privilege to bribe her rich white kids’ way into USC might be the Beckyest thing to ever Becky.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Pepperdine?
Though it could be USC. Sadly, there’s a lot wrong at my undergrad alma mater right now.
BroD
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, you are defective. Me too, btw.
Peale
@germy: Or that they never played LaCrosse yet somehow got a full ride to play LaCrosse?
Kay
@lamh36:
Ugh. I had a community college physics teacher accuse me of cheating for a perfect score. I worked so hard and I’m actually a very good at memorizing! If it’s something that requires blunt force memorization I am there.
gvg
@Gin & Tonic: yes, but that only controls the schools own money awards, not the Federal aid. We don’t bother, but other schools do. I private form cannot legally change the Federal rules for award.
rikyrah
Donut Seductress (@VeeCeeMurphy76) Tweeted:
Everyone who is freaking out about the “not worth it” comment: what’s your plan for after Trump gets acquitted in the Senate? You realize that will likely cost us the House and make any chance of reclaiming the Senate more remote. Imagine THAT scenario. https://twitter.com/VeeCeeMurphy76/status/1105223983316766723?s=17
WaterGirl
@lamh36: I’m afraid I don’t get the reference. I only know her from the Garage Sale mysteries.
Steve in the ATL
@Amir Khalid:
They are given jobs with the Trump 2020 campaign
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: If they graduate there are no consequences. They’ve graduated.
WaterGirl
@lamh36:
Wow, that would have to hurt.
Great dad you’ve got there, maybe it’s good for you to find out now.
Nicole
@Pogonip:
Ha! It’s the test itself, not the grading. Bias in the SAT and the ACT questions is geared towards people who grew up white and middle class and up. It’s a really fascinating thing, because it’s not that the test writers are trying to bias the tests; it’s that white bias is that pervasive in our lives. There’s an assumption that the student will have a certain (white) knowledge base to bring to the questions that influences how they’re phrased, even. Again, it’s not intentional; it’s the effect of most of these things being created by whites.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
No. I was referring to a private elementary/secondary school.
But yeah, I’ve heard about rich parents of USC students trying to apply pressure to teachers and administrators.
For some reason, I remember years ago running into a guy whose job was to take tests for the student athletes at Notre Dame. Education is a racket.
lamh36
rikyrah
Uh huh ?
Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) Tweeted:
When I asked Trump’s OMB Director *how* they would reduce prescription drug costs to lower Medicare spending by nearly $845 billion, the Director was unable to point to a single bill that would do so. See his bobbing and weaving here: https://t.co/F0I4Ql4eaK https://twitter.com/RepRoKhanna/status/1105490669454454785?s=17
Dan B
@WaterGirl: It’s mind boggling that someone who is supposedly intelligent can’t see his own prejudice and describe it clearly. I can totally see an Idris Elba, and dozens of other black or brown actors, as James Bond.
It seems what this clueless genius (/s) finds sexy about Bond is his class. Sir Numbskull can’t imagine a black or brown man as upperclass. What I found hot about Bond was his cheekiness, his over the top physicality and cool fearlessness. These had nothing to do with class or skin color. In fact the snobbery was something Bond saw but it had little appeal to him. We need a black or briwn Bond to shake the classist and racists to their core and expose their beliefs to a bright light.
HeleninEire
I went to college in 1981. When girls (and actually not too many boys) in my social class did not go to college. And at the time that was OKish. There were so many good paying union jobs that college wasn’t a factor. The boys got union jobs. The girls became secretarys until they married the boys with union jobs. (Not OKish)
I was sure I didn’t want to get married. So I went to college. BLACK SHEEP.
My college (Pace University) cost $114 a credit. OH my God I thought. I cannot afford that.
I graduated with $10,000 in debt in 1985 with a job that paid $17,000 a year and I was THRILLED to have that job. My student loan payments were $126 a month. So funny that I remember the exact payment. It took me 8 years to pay it off.
So my point? I am probably one of the last generations where you can truly lift yourself up if you work hard. How hard you work now has nothing to do with what you get.
J R in WV
@rikyrah:
From the tweet you quoted:
OMG — it is to laugh!!!! We’re supposed to bleed from our eyes for the poor twisted kids who got in over their heads in prep school or college because they never studied ??? Yeah, right. Not !
PPCLI
@WaterGirl: What an idiotic question. The universe demands that the next James Bond be Idris Elba. Apart from perhaps Tom Hardy, there is no-one on the planet who could be as compelling in the role.
He happens to be black, so yes, we need a black James Bond.
lamh36
@WaterGirl: as I said to the previous commenter…then you are missing out.
It’s a Full House reference
ixnay
@geg6: when older ixnay spawn was transferring ( pro tip: do not expect financial aid if transferring) to a Boston college known for performance arts, the non-FAFSA application was so incredibly intrusive that I gave up. E.g. “Did you go on vacation last year, and what did you spend? “
rikyrah
Because, of course ? ?
Ivanka and Jared Kushner were reportedly rejected multiple times from flying on Air Force planes, so they apparently found a workaround by inviting Cabinet officials to trips. How many travel scandals can this administration possibly have??https://t.co/Tmcb1Otawg
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) March 12, 2019
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Oh, you meant Harvard/Westlake. ?
ETA: I’m not actually trying to force you to dish, just making jokes for the locals.
zzyzx
@J R in WV: I thought that was referencing minority students who get accused of being affirmative action acceptances.
Gin & Tonic
@HeleninEire: Cost is a huge, huge factor. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, it was possible to more or less pay for even a good private university by some combination of working 10-15 hours a week on or near campus and then spending the summer doing something seasonal/physical like housepainting or landscaping. That’s long since been impossible even for the in-state cost of a public university.
lamh36
@Pogonip: the computer grades the test…but their are STILL human gatekeepers who exam and release final scores.
An so..you get racist shit like this:
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Well…
geg6
@Gozer:
Ah, thanks. Did not know that. Thought they were both publics.
I wonder what UCLA’s application is like. Surprised they would be using all that useless criteria, like essays and recommendations. Grades and test scores are the only useful criteria.
lamh36
@J R in WV: actually I believe they were talking about students who are told they didn’t get into the school on their merits…i.e. affirmative action admits
lamh36
Def true…this also involved a good many college sports coaches accepting the bribes from the scammer guy when they know the students ARE NOT athletes
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
I’ve known people who work there and heard things, so that was the one that sprang to mind.
J R in WV
@Pogonip:
It doesn’t. But statistical studies have, for a very long time now, shown that the questions on the SAT are so culturally biased that white kids make better scores because they share the cultural biases of the test writers, while black kids do not so much.
Look it up, the data is there.
This society is blind to the unconscious racial bias installed everywhere, even if they weren’t carefully hidden. Pretty sad…
Mnemosyne
@geg6:
I barely scraped into college on the basis of my ACT score and my essays because I had undiagnosed learning disabilities that I didn’t find out about until I was 40. So, hey, thanks for gatekeeping against the kids with ADHD and dyscalculia whose families think they’re just lazy!
bemused
Loughlin, 2016. She was raised Catholic and works hard to maintain her faith in an industry that can sometimes test the morals of her religion. As an actress she said she’s always made sure to hand pick roles that were family-oriented or exuded good morals. “When I had children…I always thought, I don’t want to do anything that one day might rear it’s ugly head and my children have to pay the price for that.” (CBN interview)
Dan B
@Ohio Mom: I went to the University of Cincinnati so this story of a roomful of the cream of Aryan breeding is especially amusing. Will we hear about high IQ “geniuses” being taught remedial ethics? (Sorry, not as amusing…)
I dud read room full of blonde geeks, then blonde Greek Gods ( jocks) then realized it meant frat boys. Duh..
Robert Bowsher
@geg6: *raises hand* yep. That thing is a PITA, and normal folks like us go to jail for lying on US Government forms.
ruemara
@Ohio Mom: Not exactly. There’s a level in many industries where your matriculation determines if you get in. If I had gone to Stanford or Yale or USC, I’d have had a much better outcome in employment over the last 20 years. In many ways, excelling isn’t a bad thing, but the shine you get from these institutions can be incalculably valuable. Like right now I’m quite upset about this scandal.
geg6
@gvg:
There’s only so much you can hide on the FAFSA. And we do the verifications, not the feds. Real people look over the info. We won’t release student aid funds until we are sure that a student is entitled to them. I can’t speak for your school, but I talk to people all the time who want to try to hide money. Turns out, they can’t if their student is coming here. I have students who try to claim independent status. I have students who try to hide the income of their live-in boyfriends/girlfriends or who have a child while living with parents who provide most of the financial support for the grandchild. They don’t get away with it because we don’t give them many opportunities to do so. The application process is a level playing field and our verification process is extremely strict. I have often felt it was unnecessarily so, but it is probably a good thing.
My school is the second highest cost of any public university in the US. So, although we are lower cost than all the privates, we are considered a high cost institution for our category.
germy
The Most Bizarre Details From the College Cheating Scandal
J R in WV
@zzyzx:
Could be, in which case I apologize for my hot take… the original post was about poorly qualified students whose parents cheated to get them into schools they weren’t really qualified to attend, so I shot without looking behind the twit R posted. My bad. Thanks for pointing out the differences I didn’t see.
J R in WV
@lamh36:
Yes, my bad, see my reply to the first person who pointed this out. I leaped to a conclusion based upon the students whose parents were cheating on their behalf in the OP. Sorry! Thanks for correcting me!
germy
Here’s Jared’s college experiene:
Thaddeu
@geg6:
The better half works in admissions in one of the top public universities in the country. It is better, but still biased. All that GPA weighting, as you say, is one more knob, for abuse.
High school GPA’s are the most bogus qualification ever. When my kid went to school few years ago, her teacher boasted. “Its hard to get an A in my class, because I wont dumb down the standards like the other teacher (in the same school)” This, knowing that kids in both classes look the same on HS transcripts, and performed more or less same on standardised subject tests. If you got placed in her class, you essentially got screwed I cant imagine the number of college scholarships she ruined, based on dragging down the GPA, by the sheer bad luck of being in her class instead of the other teachers.
And that’s one of the better examples. There are more horrible stories.
@Nicole: .
Third world country does examinations for world’s top college admissions. Extremely poor kids get in.
https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/these-24-poor-kids-cracked-iit-jee-with-1-thing-in-common–this-bihar-mathematician-as-their-guru-233787.html
Standardised tests are a problem only for the teachers, for what it will expose about teaching.
Martin
I have thoughts on this. (big surprise, eh)
The main problem with higher ed is the utter lack of transparency or predictability in the process. When a system feels like it has no rules, people behave as if it has no rules. This is my concern about promises of a free college education. It’s going to take the current system and turbocharge it. It will feel increasingly arbitrary and punitive because it doesn’t address the supply problem. Taxpayer money to expand the number of seats at universities has not kept pace with demand. Universities respond as any economy would when demand exceeds supply, we raise prices so we can build out and provide more supply. So now we’re stuck – we don’t want to pay higher tuition., we don’t want to pay taxes, but we want to send increasing numbers of students to college. That leaves us having to get ever more creative with admissions. A public university shouldn’t be turning down 4.2 students. No part of the application process was designed to filter out students like that, but that’s where we are.
What these folks did is wrong, but there’s a lot of wrong baked into the system already, and nobody is talking about it. Free tuition is an easy wand to wave, but I’m out of classrooms and instructors and students qualified to be TAs and money to hire them. What am I supposed to do with 50% more students?
lamh36
@germy: Loughlin’s daughter actually took pictures on rowing equipment to supplament that fake athletic claims.
The Atty did say that some students knew about the cheating and some didn’t. It appears Loughlin’s daughter was one who did
mrmoshpotato
@germy: Mr. Creosote, the 18-year-old female gymnast.
germy
@mrmoshpotato: Just one more wafer.
Marrtin
@Thaddeu:
HS GPA within the context of the high school – we don’t really compare GPAs between schools is still the best predictor of success by far. I assure you it’s easier to boost your SAT scores by 20% with the application of a thousand dollars or so than it is to boost your GPA by 20% within a high school.
jonas
@Roger Moore: This is precisely how Prop 13 was sold in California in the late 70’s: get rid of property taxes and have the state fund public education. You pay way lower taxes and we get rid of the inequity in local school funding bases. Sounds great, right? Problem was, then the state never really stepped up to fully fill in the gap left by lost property tax revenue and so everything went to hell. State politicians love to lower property taxes, but don’t have the guts to raise sales taxes or income taxes to make up the difference when it comes to school funding.
lamh36
Again reading the indictments..this is about more than just run of the meal donating to a school to get shit.
WaterGirl
@Dan B: Thank you for writing that. I was so appalled that I couldn’t really find words to express how offensive that was.
Nicole
@Thaddeu: that article you linked to, was it about this guy?
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/iit-guwahati-students-pil-anand-kumar-super-30-fraud-1346427-2018-09-22
Martin
@Thaddeu: Let’s not pretend that India or China or anyone else has better results here.
Standardized testing is not about improving the effectiveness of the system, just the efficiency. Double the number of seats at public universities and almost all of these problems will go away.
PaulWartenberg
And just remember: THESE ARE THE ONES GETTING CAUGHT.
It can’t just be this one ring committing these acts. I guarantee you other SAT prep providers and college admissions folk are running their own enrollment scams for those rich enough to pay them.
To any Fox Not-News commentator crowing about your vaunted college degree from some Ivy League preppy hellhole who also complains about poor minorities “cheating” their way through affirmative action, in the immortal words of my 8th grade bus driver: SIDDOWN AND SHADDUP.
WaterGirl
@PPCLI: Absolutely!
If someone wants to remake the old TV show The Avengers, they had damn well better have the feel of Emma Peel and John Steed. I wouldn’t care if they were black, white or blue, as long as the characters have the essence of what makes Emma Peel Emma Peel, and John Steed, John Steed.
Idris Elba has that James Bond feel.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@geg6: UCLA is owned by and for the People of California, U$C is a private institution.
PaulWartenberg
@Roger Moore:
thing is, at the state and county level – where are schools operate – property taxes are one of the best ways of making sure everyone is paying into the state/county. Income tax? Not every state uses it, and some have huge loopholes for corporations in order to keep them there employing people (in theory).
where it goes wrong – and I’m seeing it in my state and in my home county of Pinellas, goddamn them – is the failure to adequately disperse the funds to improve all schools and ensure poor and rich get decent access to solid educations. Poor communities (which are, guess what, minority-filled) are still stuck with poor schools, which causes high teacher turnover and terrible learning environments. Counties use a school choice system where kids can qualify/enroll in gifted programs, but such schools are too few and with long waiting lists (gee, wonder why) and as a result smart kids in poor schools suffer (bullying is a horrifying norm). Resources are unequal, funding is unequal, and there’s nothing happening at the county level to fix the problems. The state is no better: even with DeSantis crowing about increasing school funding for this year’s budget, wages are still terrible to keep good teachers and there’s no sign that we’re going to spend more on poor communities with aging buildings to upgrade to the 21st century.
Pogonip
@Nicole: What kind of questions are on the tests? I never took either one.
I was given an an IQ test once, when the school was trying to decide whether to allow me to jump from 1st to 2nd grade, and managed to catch a glimpse of my final score, 140-something. My parents noted it down but the school would not tell them if 140 was good or bad, whch was annoying. Years later I looked it up. So I’m in sympathy with victims of test-taking shenanigans.
The school decided I was not mature enough to skip a grade & were probably right. My problem wasn’t intelligence, it was boredom; I had taught myself to read at 3 and was trapped in a class full of Dick-and-Jane victims who were slowly—oh, so slowly—and painfully trying to guess whatever word the teacher pointed at. Meanwhile the other girl who could read was climbing the walls with boredom, as was I. So they brought in a box of those SRA essay folders, the ones divided into different color groups, and divided the class into “reading groups” named after colors. I forget what color the other girl and I were, but while the whole-word victims were trying to guess words, she and I could read SRA in peace.
“Whole-word” is where you learn to read by memorizing the shape of the whole word. It works great with kanji, but applying it to English is an idea so fatuous it could only have originated with, and been championed by, educated American fools. Harrumph.
Thaddeu
@Nicole:
Yes. But its about him, not the results. That he took money to teach, while claiming it was free. It does not take away from the fact that extremely poor students prepare and do well in those exams.
One of the guys who work for me is the son of poor roadside pottery vendor. She gave birth to him on the side of the road. She was selling wares till the last minute, and could not walk home in time when labor began. Slumdog Millionaire? Many such stories exist
Standardized tests level the playing field in a far more transparent manner than all the so-called interventions for leveling that is done today. All those interventions are nothing but everyone trying to pull the lever to their benefit, which is one more lever for abuse, and legitimizes bad means for good outcomes.
@Martin:
Sure. Those are what would be the equivalent of school GPAs here. Those are the reasons there are standardised test scores are required for entering any decent institution in those countries. Local grading in some places are as corrupt and incoherent there, as in this country.
Unethical systems cannot produce ethical outcomes. College admissions teach kids here to become unethical and cynical from a young age.
Brachiator
@jonas:
Not quite.
The California Supreme Court rulings that affected school funding formulas preceded Prop 13. A Wiki summary is useful.
By letting inflation increase property taxes, the state government tried to get around dealing with tax and revenue problems. The Prop 13 crowd nailed it when they appealed to homeowners who were afraid of losing their homes to rising property taxes. But they went overboard in granting huge breaks to commercial property owners.
gvg
@geg6: Difficult and unlikely do not mean impossible. I think you are just too confident for my comfort. I am pretty sure our school is not going to catch a real crook who does sophisticated money laundering. on the other hand we definitely do correct a lot of dumb mistakes. I wouldn’t even call most of it fraud, it’s just people don’t read instructions and make a lot of assumptions. The claiming independent isn’t even a real option. They meet the Federal criteria or they talk to us about petitioning. Once we explain about what qualifies for an independence override ( child abuse or other real extreme situations) they find out their tough life isn’t so tough after all. Lots of people are just not exposed to enough. But not much is impossible. Unlikely yes. I guess I am not comfortable using that strong a word.
zzyzx
@J R in WV: No need to apologize; it would be easy to make that mistake. The context completely changes the argument though.
Luthe
@trollhattan: I would suggest she apply to my beloved Bryn Mawr, where everyone is an academic overachiever, but I fear the acceptance rate is probably too high for her (it’s in the double digits *gasp*).
StringOnAStick
@Gin & Tonic: That’s an interesting quote about USC. I had a patient last year who was extremely proud she was going to school there, she struck me as much more mouth than brain. Bragged to a ridiculous degree but the main thing she was proud of? The food in the dorms. Her running brag bordered on demented, it was truly bizarre. The “home with no books” comment fits her to a T.
Pogonip
@Thaddeu: Being unethical and cynical are good traits to pick up early in a society where viewed as virtuous.
cwmoss
@Gin & Tonic: I done it, and it is hard to do!
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
I suspect it would vary from school to school. At my alma mater, using a fraudulent application to get admitted would undoubtedly be an honor code violation and would most likely get the student expelled. Many other schools would do the same thing. Some schools might look at a student’s record since admission and see if they were justified in staying.
louc
Whether you think the SATs are valid, it is a truth that the richest kids scoring in the lowest quartile of the SAT is more likely to go to and complete college than the poorest kids scoring in the top quartile. Think about that.
Then read this book, based on a Pulitzed-winning article called the other affirmative action. Jared Kushner is a prominent character.
smintheus
This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the undue influence that the wealthy have in elite school admissions and athletics. I have a story that’s nearly the inverse of this, but all about influence, from my freshman year at Brown in the ’70s.
I was pretty good at soccer and contemplating making a career of it for a few years so as to be able to afford live abroad, but in the US the pro leagues were collapsing. I needed to use a college career as a springboard, but even though I ran circles around everybody else trying out for the Brown team the coach pretended I wasn’t even there and wouldn’t give me a place on the team. Other students told me the score: the coach reserved every one of the spots on the team for prep school students, whom he got admission for, all worked out well in advance with the prep school coaches he was friendly with. Everyone knew that a lot of these preppies were plodders, so he just created a plodding style of team play and guaranteed 4 years to them if they matriculated.
It was so blatantly open that the fix was in for the prep schoolers that after the first day of tryouts, the team captain took me aside to ask me to stop running so fast. “You’re going to make us look like we’re out of shape [they were], and we don’t want the coach to get angry and make us do road work.”
Another public school freshman was so angry on my behalf that he went and confronted the coach. He told me the coach pretended he didn’t even know who I was and had never seen me do anything [I was the only person scoring any goals during the tryouts, thus this other kid’s anger].
What really pissed me off was that my mom worked for the Dean of the College, who knew me well, which ought to have given me some influence. But it was clear even to 18 y/o me that the influence of rich kids was so much greater that it would be explosive for my mother if I even tried to challenge this rigged system.
trollhattan
@Luthe:
Heh, “Bryn Mawr, safety school” really plays oddly in my head. :-)
I want her to fall in love with some school, foremost. There’s still time! And if she gets to play D2 or D3 sportsball, great. Otherwise, learn how to get some sleep and join a rec league (she’s happiest after ninety minutes of muscling up some defenders on the pitch).
Nicole
@Pogonip: I was an early reader, too, and school wanted to skip me a grade, but my parents said no. In retrospect, I think it was the right call; while I see lots and lots of intellectually precocious children at my kid’s school I seldom see emotionally precocious ones. I think we all develop our emotions on a pretty regular schedule. My brother is brilliant in math (PhD in Statistics from UPenn), and it was very apparent by high school, but I think would have struggled socially and emotionally if they’d skipped him up a grade. Instead he stayed with his cohort and still has a close bond with friends from high school.
Here’s a pretty basic article, but it gives some bits about racial bias on the SATs. Page 3, in particular, about the easier vs the harder words in questions I thought was very interesting.
https://atlantablackstar.com/2014/12/04/4-ways-the-sat-is-culturally-biased-against-black-students/
smintheus
@louc: I once, thankfully briefly, worked at a college (Muhlenberg) whose entire business model had become to cater to rich kids whose parents had aspirations to place them in ‘prestigious’ schools though the kids were academically weak, difficult, or otherwise bad fits for college. They got into charging an arm and a leg for the appearance of ‘prestige’ and seemingly did quite well for themselves. A lot of the students were nightmares to deal with however.
Nicole
@Thaddeu:
Actually the article says he’s likely lying about how the students are performing in the exam, too. He’s claiming results, but not naming names, and passing off other students as being from his program.
Kay
Okay, so we don’t have good sports teams at our public school- they’re bad at sports, our youths- but if an ordinary public high school coach did this he or she would be IN the county jail pending payment of bail or (more likely) OR release. They have 10 million rules about what they can and can’t do.
I will be watching! I expect equitable treatment of these people. VERY important. I want them shuffling thru the system like every other perp.
Kay
@Nicole:
I’ve had to have huge yelling fights with my youngest because he wants to take College Credit Plus courses instead of high school courses. He’s not ready to leave high school. I don’t want him to skip high school classes, and the college courses have turned into another social sorting device, where the “smart” kids all take them. His girlfriend took them so he wants to.
We compromised. I’ll let him take one instead of three. “Three” is basically “I am no longer in high school”. Academics aren’t all of it. I want him to get a chance to grow up.
smintheus
@Kay: As I implied in my comment just above, when I was at Brown some of the players who were put on the team were barely capable of playing at all, and nearly all of whom were less skilled than the non-rich students I played pickup soccer with; as non-preppies, neither they nor I could win a spot on the team as walk ons. During tryouts I had to do a one-on-one against a returning varsity player who was so hapless that his own team-mates starting mocking him. I felt like I was playing against a ten y/o…a guy who was guaranteed 4 years on the varsity team who couldn’t do a single thing right.
Nicole
@Mnemosyne:
My brother’s undergrad alma mater, Hampshire, agrees with you- they stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2014, citing, among other reasons (including the racial bias of the tests), that some kids are just bad test-takers. Speaking as an excellent test-taker throughout my school career, that particular skill has been of absolutely no benefit to my actual adult life.
For Hampshire, it’s increased the diversity of their student population in just one year:
https://www.hampshire.edu/news/2015/09/21/results-of-removing-standardized-test-scores-from-college-admissions
sukabi
To late to talk about meritocracy?
Nicole
@Kay: You’re doing him a good service, and he’ll thank you for it down the road. I leapt to take the AP classes and the AP tests, scored 5s on the ones I took, and smugly thought, there’s 8 credits I get towards college! Which… my college only applied towards electives, so I lost out on 2 classes worth of “fun” courses. And I was stressed and anxious all through high school because I was so busy jamming my schedule full of the “smart kid” classes I didn’t give myself permission to take any of the ones that would have been fun. You know, like Drama, or Creative Writing, or gads, anything pleasurable to learn. You’re right to give your son time to grow up. We have so much time to be a grownup, and so little to be a child or a teenager.
Austin
@Brachiator: One of the most insidious aspects of Prop13 was the supermajority requirement it mandated at both the state and local government levels. A supermajority was required to pass the state budget or any statewide tax increase and a supermajority was required to pass any local bond issue that would raise local property taxes. The impact on the state budget process resulted in annual arguments, late budget passage and a lot of creative accounting to meet states balanced budget requirements. Locally, a minority of voters routinely block bond local bond issues for school, road and other infrastructure improvements.
Brachiator
@Austin:
What? In California, a number of bond issues have passed fairly easily.
But I take your point on Prop 13 and supermajority requirements.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Alternatively, they knew exactly what they were doing and used rising residential property taxes as an excuse for a massive tax break for commercial property. Given what I know about Howard Jarvis, I’d guess the latter had a lot to do with it.
VeniceRiley
I asked in @JuddLegum twitter post if any coaches had been fired yet, and some nice rando from Hawaii tweeted me back saying USC Water Polo Coach got arrested by FBI at a Hawaii U tourney – and he hopes to post video soon. @RickiAdoroIV
because sometimes a rando will just up and break news just like that in a twitter reply!
RobNYNY
@germy:
It is possible that they took the test, and then someone retook the test without their knowledge. Or that they took the ACT, but an SAT they did not take was submitted.
Roger Moore
@Nicole:
As someone who took college courses while still in high school, I think there are real pluses and minuses to doing it. I had exhausted what my school could offer me in math and science by the time I was a senior, so I wound up taking classes at the (relatively) nearby state university. I had a real passion for the science class I took (Organic Chemistry), did very well, and benefited from having taken it when I got to college, even if I wound up having to take it again when I matriculated. I don’t think I got nearly as much from taking Calculus, and I might have been better off taking one more fun class in High School instead. I think that’s a fair take on how taking very high level classes in High School ought to work: they’re great if you have a real passion for the subject and want something more challenging, but they aren’t worth it if you’re just taking them to pad your transcript.
RobNYNY
@Thaddeu:
I would say that standardized tests lower the barrier for smart middle class kids. A smart middle class kid needs to be only about 30% better (I know, arbitrary, and measured by fractions) on a standardized test to be eligible for admission to an elite university. All Ivy grads have gone to college with rich kids who would not get into the top state campus of their home state.
Brachiator
@RobNYNY:
Fair point.
Citizen Alan
@Dan B:
I don’t know about that. Several of the Bonds came off as snobbish to me. Goldfinger is probably my favorite Bond flick, but I still roll my eyes over that incredibly pretentious scene where Sean Connery starts expounding on the poor quality of claret he’s been offered by the Chancellor of the Exchequer (to M’s embarrassment and chagrin). I don’t have a problem with a black MI6 agent with a license to kill. It’s when you add on stuff about how he’s half-Scottish and half-Swiss, and he was orphaned at 11 when his parents died mountain-climbing, and he got kicked out of Eton at 13 after getting caught canoodling with one of the maids, and stuff like that. And then there’s the fact that Bond as depicted in the books is a racist, sexist, homophobic thug who is a hardened killer and a serial racist. One wonders why it’s considered a positive moment in race relations to cast a black man in the role.
Not that I won’t watch it, of course. I’d watch Idris Elba if they cast him to play Mary Poppins.
Citizen Alan
@lamh36:
And yet William H. Macy has not been brought up yet. Funny that.
BQuimby
This has been going on FOREVER – not right, but not new. Ask Geo W, tRUMP, Kushner among others…
Citizen Alan
@WaterGirl:
You just gave me a PTSD flashback to the Uma Thurman/Ralph Fiennes Avengers disaster. As a long time fan of the show from the time I was nine, that film was soul-crushing. It was also the moment I realized that Sean Connery couldn’t actually act – he could only play himself in different costumes.
Van Buren
@Thaddeu: Tell that to the kid in East New York who can’t afford a prep class.
Ohio Mom
@Kay: The University of Cincinnati is very large and can be a heartless place, at least until you are a recognized member of a specific department. Then you could have a professor or two looking after you.
I am not surprised that small-town, first-in-their-family might do better somewhere closer and smaller. But huge kudos to any who can make UC work for them.
Signed,
An alum
Nicole
@Roger Moore: And that’s fine, but what Kay and I were talking about is taking the higher level classes because it becomes “what the smart kids do”- there can be a fair amount of pressure to prove you can keep up and in with your peer group, and even if you can, you end up taking classes that don’t interest you, when you could be having fun in school learning something else. If it’s because it interests you, then it’s a perfectly peachy thing to take college classes.
Uncle Omar
Headline to a Campos post at LGM…”Isn’t Bribing Somebody To Get Your Kid Into USC Like Bribing The Maitre’D At Olive Garden?”
Roger Moore
@Nicole:
That’s the point I was trying to make. Take the classes if it’s a question of passion, but don’t if it’s just because that’s what’s expected of you.
Ohio Mom
@ruemara: I agree, where you went to college can be very important for *some* fields. Big banks will hire humanities majors IF they are from the Ivies, a family friend’s son got his job at Pixar mainly because he went to Brown and it turns out that a lot of Pixar staff are alums, the list goes on.
But I imagine that the students that Kay is mentoring are pursuing degrees in subjects like engineering,
accounting, teaching and nursing — the degrees where it is obvious what kind of job you’ll be looking for when you get out, and fields you can get started in without a graduate degree (that’s why nursing instead of medically school).
That’s more typical of the first-in-family-to-go-to-college cohort. They need a college where they will feel comfortable, not a big name.
rekoob
Then there are the Colleges That Change Lives:
Full disclosure — I attended one of them nearly 40 years ago, have served on its Board as a Trustee and now active in the Alumni Association. It gave me a great start and allowed me to attend one of the best graduate schools on the planet. I have many close friends from those days, most of whom also got advanced degrees at schools around the world. Our admissions are not highly selective, but the unique Liberal Arts curriculum demands much of our students, with the result that they are often well-prepared for the rough and tumble of higher education. We’re trying our best to make it affordable for as many people as we can, but we’ll never have more than about 900 undergraduates. We’d be delighted to have as many hard-working, thoughtful students as possible.
sgrAstar
@Kay: calm down for a sec, Kay. Are some of our honored institutions of higher learning (limiting my comments to this domain) corrupt? YES. Can you buy your way into Harvard and Stanford? YES*. Is that true of all American universities? NO. Berkeley, my own alma mater and an institution I know quite a bit about, does not admit legacies. You can not buy your way into Berkeley. Period. Berkeley has more Pell Grant recipients than Stanford has undergrads. Ohio State is another great school which didn’t appear on this list. There are still superb universities that have clean admissions processes. Perfect? Maybe not, but they are doing a pretty good job. Last point- the FBI charging doc shows that bribery worked on a small subset of uni employees who had influence over some admissions (coaches, for example). I think it’s tough for our gigantic public unis to police for these kinds of violations, yet practically all of the implicated schools- UCLA, UGH- were private. So, yay for public universities, and may we continue to support them in all their shabby, dingy, democracy-supporting glory. Rant over.
*I understand that the going rate is ~$10m, a pretty substantial hunk of change
chopper
i like how the hollywood types get named but the big-time college coaches get to stay anonymous.
Wilson Heath
No FHBA: Los Angeles jokes yet? Disappointed, jackals. Catch up on the wonder that is Bojack Horseman already.
Mnemosyne
@ruemara:
It’s also way more regional than most people realize. NYU is great if you stay on the East Coast, not so impressive on the West Coast. An engineering student can get a great job in California with a degree from Cal Poly SLO, but blank looks in the rest of the country.
PaulWartenberg
@Uncle Omar:
USC is still a big-name school. It ain’t Ivy League, but it ain’t Western Colorado State Polytech either.
You may not think of U of Florida a top-tier school, but its admissions standards went way up in the 1990s – both to get it more cachet and to force students who wanted UF/FSU to enroll in the second-tier schools like USF, UCF and FAU instead – and so there’s a lot more pressure to get into Gainesville than ever before, and getting that UF/FSU/UM degree weighs more than getting a degree at Rollins College (which is pretty well ranked as a business school but doesn’t carry the name recognition: I only know it because my dad’s an alum).