defend the indefensible: THE IVY LEAGUE

it's a bit too early for there to be any actual studies, but it has been written about: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/climate/climate-change-children.html

AOC also mentioned it earlier this year: "Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around. There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?"

I heard there were celebrity parents involved here, but turns out it was Lori Loughlin and Forgotten Whoozis.

if they had died you would still post about them (and the 70s film shorts they were in) in the obit thread

William H Macy also apparently involved though not named in the complaint.

typical Frank Gallagher

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.

fuck all these schools and their connections, burn them shits to the ground

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2017/04/12/subsidizing_the_ivy_league.html

lol

it's a bit too early for there to be any actual studies, but it has been written about: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/climate/climate-change-children.html

AOC also mentioned it earlier this year: "Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around. There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?"

― theorizing your yells (katherine), Wednesday, March 13, 2019 3:21 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thanks. I’m not very convinced this has much to do with the trends we’ve been seeing over the past couple of decades, at least compared to things like widespread access to birth control, student loan debt, and people marrying later (which of course could be related to the above)
also as evol alludes to, philosophical opposition to having kids has a long history, and this may just be the latest reason for it

Uh

OMG: “My daughter and a group of students left for spring break prior to the government's announcement yesterday. Once we became aware of the investigation, the young woman decided it would be in her best interests to return home.” https://t.co/1GHMMlKABA

— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) March 13, 2019

sprang braaaaaaaaaake

if they had died you would still post about them (and the 70s film shorts they were in) in the obit thread

Given that Lori Loughlin's most prestigious credit was Full House, you may be lil bit off there mook

William H Macy also apparently involved though not named in the complaint.

That seems a very favorable reading of the evidence. But yeah they didn’t have enough to charge him.

when I was a TA at a uni famous for football I taught a class of football players & one guy who literally was "heir to a popular processed-meat company’s fortune" was in the class. he'd been given a football scholarship at this uni, & I don't think he ever played a down in his 4 years. always figured it was this kind of bullshit. one weekend during the class (it was during the summer) this guy flew the whole football team to his dad's mansion in arizona or whatever for a giant party. I think they ate a ton of canned chili.

one thing that's pretty fucked up is it seems like most of these kids had no idea what their parents were doing, so now they have to deal with the possibility that they'll be expelled from the schools they were accepted to, and the ones who aren't at least have to deal with public humiliation at having been accepted illegitimately. And they'll be labeled as cheaters even though with few exceptions they were not privy to the cheating done on their behalf. I do feel bad for most of them. Though not super bad for the Loughlin/Mossimo scion, tbh.

I do think the reporting around this has done a good job of painting the parents as the monsters over the students, with the glaring and well-deserved exception of Loughlin's daughter

well them and this guy:

Son defends parents caught in college admissions scandal while smoking blunt https://t.co/4zD4EdKM5q pic.twitter.com/rYC05uGRdt

— New York Post (@nypost) March 14, 2019

"no idea" is a stretch. many of the shady activities required the kids' participation.

to the extent that they'd have "no idea" that e.g. collaborating with friendly doctors to support a disability diagnosis allowing for extra time or unorthodox proctoring it's bc so many privileged families are doing this already but stopping sort of changing answers or submitting someone else's test.

"son, we need to have a talk. our family has been implicated in a massive college admissions cheating scandal the likes of which have not been publicized in decades, but one where it's theoretically possible the kids can mostly escape blame. so, what I need you to do is go out and be as unsympathetic as humanly possible. do you think you can do that for us?"

omg lol at that dude, wow

xp -- at least for the cases where the proctors changed the kids' scores, I've seen a couple of arguments along the lines of "of course the kids knew when they got a SAT score 400 points higher than the last one," which doesn't make sense to me at all. have people never taken an exam, walked out of the room being utterly convinced they flunked it, and then found out they got an A? or have people never just straight-up guessed on a multiple-choice test and found out they guessed correctly?

The toker, who sports a ponytail and raps under the name “Billa,” then shamelessly plugged his music. “Check out my CD, ‘Cheese and Crackers,’ ” he said of his 2018 five-track rec­ord that includes a song titled “If I Lost My Money.”

xp: Agreed, also some of these kids seem to have been actively studying for these tests, so an improvement in scores would have been interpreted by them as validation that their studying paid off.

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.

I will freely admit that I don't really understand the world of 'connections' but I was figuring that:

i) the kids of wealthy celebrities already have a lot of connections by virtue of being the children of celebrities and

ii) the kinds of Yale connections that would lead to starting up or being invited to join seven-figure ventures would still require you to be, idk, pretty good at what you were studying at Yale.

But yeah, clearly not a world I get.

Although now, when I put i) and ii) together, I realize you probably mean that competent go-getters at Ivies may well want to associate themselves with children of the rich and famous because of their names.

I think there are probably very few kids who were not in on it, and I am not going to feel bad about these Richie Riches when this will likely have exactly zero effect on their future life prospects.

xp: ding ding ding

I think they ate a ton of canned chili

thank you for this

i used this story in a class today to talk about financial fraud, it was wild, students have all kinds of shit to say about it

I do think the reporting around this has done a good job of painting the parents as the monsters over the students, with the glaring and well-deserved exception of Loughlin's daughter

j., you can become an influencer on ig --
"shit my students say"

Also had a girl in our shop. She was saying she just finished a year at Oxford. I asked which uni she attended in the US. She was sort of shy saying:"Oh Brown." I replied:"Don't be shy! You should be proud of it." She said she was trembling when she read ab the scam. Dunno if it was bec her parents bought her way into Brown. Lol.

or because she didn't know whether they did!!!

things that cause me to tremble: 1) pondering how they crucified my lord. 2) pondering how they laid him in a tomb. 3) pondering how admittance into Brown University isn't validation of one's life.

Apparently this investigation was kicked off by a finance dude who was under investigation by the SEC for pumping/dumping stock - when caught he flipped on the Yale woman's soccer coach who was taking bribes.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-yale-dad-who-set-off-the-college-admissions-scandal-11552588402

Harvard had $41 billion before the market crash. It would cost them almost nothing to keep paying workers. It should be socialized. https://t.co/Eh020XBbmi

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) March 22, 2020