defend the indefensible: THE IVY LEAGUE

"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