[winflop]

By the way, I notice that neither my alma mater (Pomona) nor any of the other super elite small colleges (Swarthmore, Bowdoin. Reid, Carleton, Oberlin, etc.) were involved - to date. I don't imagine that's because of superior virtue, but because it's a lot harder to hide a suspect application in a student body that small.

I was going to ask whether Pomona gave preference to athletes, but a little Googling showed that Pomona was a Division III school and had a page titled "recruit me" with a link to a form where prospective student athletes could fill out a form that would be sent to the coach.  Division III doesn't offer scholarships, but it seems like the coaches probably could put a good word in with admissions.

So I think your theory is probably right.  The other thing is that for a lot of the schools you cite, their academic quality exceeds their name recognition.  Given that a lot of this was much more about the parents' egos than it was an attempt to advance their children's educations, it would make sense that the target schools were those with a lot of name recognition.

BC

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I actually don't think any school's admissions teams did anything wrong here. They all followed their own guidelines. We can argue that those guidelines give an advantage to people with money and that may be true but those are the rules they are given.

The fraud was perpetrated upon them by these parents and the company and its agents. Sadly, one of the parents is a b-school classmate of mine. I don't wish ill upon many people, but I hope he misses our next reunion because he's in jail.

I tend to agree with you here, though my wife raised the question as to why the admissions office didn't do at least a minimum of due diligence.  You can pick a random person on the Stanford sailing team and do a google search on them and find their times from old regattas, and sailing is probably one of the most obscure sports.  Something like tennis or soccer would have team pages and even local news articles.  My response is that presumably that is the coach's job, and that the admissions department's due diligence is to focus on the academics.

Obviously, inherent in the assumption is the now incorrect assumption that the coaches were not corruptable.  One would like to think that a coach would, above all else, try to maximize their probability of winning, and that with a limited number of scholarships (or a limited number of non-scholarship admissions "chits") they would use them on the players that they really need to recruit, not players who will never contribute.  But I guess if the dollar amount is high enough, a coach might be willing to sacrifice the marginal player. 

BC

I agree that more diligence should be done - but at what point in the admissions process? Can't do that level of diligence on 60,000+ applicants. But again, this is a shortcoming of the process as defined, not something that admissions folks deliberately did wrong to get these kids in.

If anything, the holes exposed here will force colleges across the country to be more diligent at later stages in the admissions process. And I hope that when they find fraud they will refer the matter to authorities for prosecution. There has to be a significant disincentive to do this.

[winflop]

By the way, I notice that neither my alma mater (Pomona) nor any of the other super elite small colleges (Swarthmore, Bowdoin. Reid, Carleton, Oberlin, etc.) were involved - to date. I don't imagine that's because of superior virtue, but because it's a lot harder to hide a suspect application in a student body that small.

I was going to ask whether Pomona gave preference to athletes, but a little Googling showed that Pomona was a Division III school and had a page titled "recruit me" with a link to a form where prospective student athletes could fill out a form that would be sent to the coach.  Division III doesn't offer scholarships, but it seems like the coaches probably could put a good word in with admissions.

So I think your theory is probably right.  The other thing is that for a lot of the schools you cite, their academic quality exceeds their name recognition.  Given that a lot of this was much more about the parents' egos than it was an attempt to advance their children's educations, it would make sense that the target schools were those with a lot of name recognition.

BC

---

I actually don't think any school's admissions teams did anything wrong here. They all followed their own guidelines. We can argue that those guidelines give an advantage to people with money and that may be true but those are the rules they are given.

The fraud was perpetrated upon them by these parents and the company and its agents. Sadly, one of the parents is a b-school classmate of mine. I don't wish ill upon many people, but I hope he misses our next reunion because he's in jail.

I tend to agree with you here, though my wife raised the question as to why the admissions office didn't do at least a minimum of due diligence.  You can pick a random person on the Stanford sailing team and do a google search on them and find their times from old regattas, and sailing is probably one of the most obscure sports.  Something like tennis or soccer would have team pages and even local news articles.  My response is that presumably that is the coach's job, and that the admissions department's due diligence is to focus on the academics.

Obviously, inherent in the assumption is the now incorrect assumption that the coaches were not corruptable.  One would like to think that a coach would, above all else, try to maximize their probability of winning, and that with a limited number of scholarships (or a limited number of non-scholarship admissions "chits") they would use them on the players that they really need to recruit, not players who will never contribute.  But I guess if the dollar amount is high enough, a coach might be willing to sacrifice the marginal player. 

BC

I agree that more diligence should be done - but at what point in the admissions process? Can't do that level of diligence on 60,000+ applicants. But again, this is a shortcoming of the process as defined, not something that admissions folks deliberately did wrong to get these kids in.

If anything, the holes exposed here will force colleges across the country to be more diligent at later stages in the admissions process. And I hope that when they find fraud they will refer the matter to authorities for prosecution. There has to be a significant disincentive to do this.