defend the indefensible: THE IVY LEAGUE

I think I'd want a higher score for $15,000.

― jmm, Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:49 AM (twenty-four minutes ago)

hahaha considering this is the Ivy League thread ... I mean, I got that score when I took the test when I was 13. ... I could definitely use $15,000 rn, they should contact me

haha that's how you do a humblebrag, well played.

c'mon, this is the Ivy League thread ... it would be like going on a thread for "defending rich people" and saying your family had a yacht when you were a kid

and then another poster who is also "defending rich ppl" would say, "yes! my family also had a yacht! did you vacation in the hamptons or on martha's vineyard?"

i'm assuming what's not common is
having another person take the SAT exam in your place.

I’m not sure why this wouldn’t be common when you can make $15k a time and there is barely anything to stop you.

because it is easier to get caught? this type of
corruption has been going on since i was a kid.

if you get higher than a specific score (not a high,
though), but the board sees potential in you, they
can interview you and re-assess your qualifications
based on other factors. the problem is the board
changes every year or so, i believe?

I’m assuming this will lead to a crackdown on SAT administrators and low-level admissions staff at universities, and not on the upper echelons of university executives who have known about stuff like this going on for centuries

Like, Donald Trump got into the Wharton school at UPenn and did “very very well” even though though he’s clearly one of the dumbest people in North America

Ivy League = elaborate scam to make Dartmouth, Cornell and Brown seem like impressive places to have gone to school

yeah, there was talk of this when george w. bush was
elected president.

I’m not sure it is that easy to get caught if you know what you’re doing, tbh. The College Board aiui has two main security mechanisms - ID check on the day and access to test-taker photographs in the event of any post-test query about identity. They’re both easily circumvented if you just find someone who looks sufficiently similar to you. Xps

hahaha considering this is the Ivy League thread ...

ha, sorry, I wasn't being serious. ftr, I didn't take the SAT or go to a fancy school.

According to his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, Trump threatened to sue Wharton and UPenn if they released his grades, so "very very well" rests upon the word of a serial liar. However, I am willing to believe Trump is regressing and is measurably dumber now than when he was a young man.

Okay so here's a good story on the goon who founded/ran this whole scam:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article227457069.html

Among other things:

Singer in 1988 was fired as boys basketball coach of Encina High School, with a district spokesman at the time only referring to it as a“personnel matter.” The Bee reported at the time that parents said Singer had an abusive nature toward referees.

In the early 90s, Sacramento Bee archives show Singer was an assistant coach for Sacramento State’s men’s basketball team.

And of course though he's from Sacramento the scam was based out of Newport Beach. Why WOULDN'T it be based out of Newport Beach?

Also, the dude looks like this:

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/n6py9w/picture227458594/alternates/FREE_768/Rick-Singer.jpg

He looks like sherbet.

burt bacharach, no!

This is extremely depressing. The kid wants to keep testing until she scores well, but the mom is like ‘let’s cheat so I don’t have to deal with that.' pic.twitter.com/CqxT4BrdRT

— Barry Petchesky (@barry) March 12, 2019

Lol. Here we don't have SATs nor entrance exams. So you enroll and prove your worth. (Which I did not do: college dropout. Lol)

Is it bad that my takeaway from this whole thing is "lol Yale"?

"lol Yale" would be a more defensible takeaway if you had not gone to Harvard.

harvard alumni can definitely say "lol Yale". they just need to 'power pose' and accept a useless heart stem cell injection while they say it.

itt Aimless fundamentally misunderstands school rivalries

I went to Berkeley and even I know Yale is the school of celebrities and rich kids and Harvard is a real university.

here's my quick ranking of the ivy leagues from most to least comprehensively objectionable

Yale
Princeton
Harvard
Dartmouth
Penn
Columbia
Cornell
Brown

caveat is if I lived in Providence I would probably object to Brown a whole lot

my main reaction was being afraid this was done for me on my behalf and I didn't actually earn the scores on the SAT I thought I did; it would certainly explain a lot

A true winner today:

If only there was a succinct turn of phrase these kids could have used to inform their parents they were not desirous of their life path... https://t.co/cxOTDI5J1B

— James Van Der Beek (@vanderjames) March 12, 2019

itt Aimless fundamentally misunderstands school rivalries

nah. you arrived at "lol Yale" decades before this story broke, so your professed "takeaway" was not taken from, but brought to the whole thing.

here's my quick ranking of the ivy leagues from most to least comprehensively objectionable

Yale
Princeton
Harvard
Dartmouth
Penn
Columbia
Cornell
Brown

― moose; squirrel (silby), Tuesday, March 12, 2019 1:28 PM (four hours ago

lol so proud to be an alumna of the least objectionable Ivy

ty for using 'alumna' correctly. even the ivy league schools' branded and trademarked gift shop items (bumper stickers, sweatshirts, etc.) tend to use "alumnus" for both men and women and for both singular and plural.

If you still have to learn Latin, then what's the point of paying someone off?

The whole story is so nuts to me. They didn't buy degrees; they just bought admission, which doesn't seem like it guarantees much. Presumably, they would keep paying that kind of money for good grades? And to what end? The kids of millionaire celebrities and businessmen are not lacking for money and connections. Just to be able to say your kid got into Yale? That's worth six to seven figures?

"Just to be able to say your kid got into Yale? That's worth six to seven figures?"

I mean, yeah, the root of this is vanity more than anything

Also, if you're a well-connected person at a school like Yale, you are going to have the opportunity to ride the coattails of other well-connected people into ventures with a possible upside of well over six to seven figures.

For sure. Plus, what this scam/ruse lays bare is that the bar to get into some of these schools is much higher than the bar to graduation. You basically need to be an A student to get in, but you don't need to do A-grade work to graduate.

this is what i was getting at yesterday:
https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/college-cheating-scandal-an-admissions-officer-speaks-out.html

Not infrequently, I would pull up a student’s file, see my “Defer” or “Deny” recommendation, and then a second reviewer recommending the same thing, and then a high-ranking admissions staff member would flip the decision to admit. Usually, the justification would be a brief couple of sentences with purposefully vague language, like “Student has struggled with math sequence but should be fine with on campus tutoring resources, ADMIT.” I saw these decisions flipped frequently for students from affluent backgrounds, and rarely for students who’d applied for financial aid. Once, I saw a student who fell far below our clearly outlined admissions requirements admitted — this student was heir to a popular processed-meat company’s fortune.

Although our school advertised our “holistic” review process, our director typically used test scores to screen applicants. His rationale was that these were “riskier” students. The only time he didn’t? If the student could pay full price to attend our institution, or a “full pay” student. He was not coy about this fact, and would frequently make comments about how students from Silicon Valley could “afford” to come here. When I planned my recruitment trip in California, I was given an Excel spreadsheet that listed high schools by average household income.

processed meat scion tyler hormel

yeah, another article I was reading was saying that full pay, white men were highly sought after since demographics of colleges had been skewing more female.

Eh, full pay, full stop more like. Up until maybe very recently University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign had something like 6000 Chinese students, over 10% of the student body, because reportedly students from China were more likely to pay full price.

Isn't Tucker Carlson literally an heir to a processed meat fortune?

It means nothing but the difference between Laughlin and Luke Perry struck me. They were both on foolish programs but Laughlin seemed content to cash the check while Perry wanted to be an actor.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 13, 2019

my other main thought about this is that people are still shocked that the millennial generation is having fewer children. having children means subjecting them to this shit

(well, not *always*, but for people who want their children to attend college)

i thought it was because millenials have an absurd amount of student loan debt compared to the relative value of their college educations

like, if you compare the inflation of college tuition to the housing market 10 yrs ago, and how the subprime mortgage industry contributed to it ... you can't just abandon your college degree for the bank to take back, or even, refi your student loan debt based on the increased value of your degree ... I feel like it's in this context -- average adults with 6 figures of education debt -- that rich people paying tens of thousands of dollars so that they can pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their kids' college education is grotesque

but back to defending the Ivy League -- the main reason I went to an Ivy League school is that they had the money to give me a scholarship for 1/3 - 1/2 of the tuition whereas my 1st choice school waitlisted me for financial aid.

Can't help but hear Brett Kavanaugh's voice ringing out -- "When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. I've worked my a... tail off"

I do kind of wonder just how widespread this sort of out and out bribery is. I never assumed merit, but I usually assumed it was more "playing the game the right way" that got affluent kids into these schools -- juicing up your extracurriculars with stuff that you were half-hearted about, getting an essay coach to heavily edit your essay, tons of SAT tutoring, subject tutoring to get grades up etc. I didn't imagine merit but I imagined there was still some degree of effort and shrewdness involved, not just your parents literally writing a check (outside of a handful of ultra-wealthy donors like Jared Kushner's dad).

It means nothing but the difference between Laughlin and Luke Perry struck me. They were both on foolish programs but Laughlin seemed content to cash the check while Perry wanted to be an actor.
— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 13, 2019
― Let's have sensible centrist armageddon (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, March 13, 2019 12:52 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel dumber after having read that.

ya also i'm pretty sure Richard Nixon is dead

i thought it was because millenials have an absurd amount of student loan debt compared to the relative value of their college educations

― sarahell, Wednesday, March 13, 2019 1:31 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, yeah, there are a lot of factors (an oft-cited one is climate change) but this certainly does not help