I’m weirdly pissed because I was super honest on my applications for both grad and undergrad to the point where it probably affected certain outcomes, and perhaps even unnecessarily so. I didn’t help myself out a whole lot on the premise that I wasn’t trying to “get in,” but trying to match my institution for a good fit. This shit really pisses me off in ways I’m having trouble articulating. It’s more than the basic unfairness of it… I’ve always found the process somewhat arbitrary and elitist. There’s something else… I haven’t had time to process it yet, but I suspect I’m getting a little mad at people for following the rules in the first place. Like I said, underdeveloped feelings.
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Don’t forget “enough family money to be able to work the intern position for free”. It doesn’t matter what school you went to if you need a salary for mad money frivolities like student loans, rent, or food.
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True. I mentioned the unpaid internships issue above, but the compensation for lower-level paid positions in some of these industries aren’t enough to cover a lower-middle-class lifestyle in the big desirable cities like NYC, LA, SF, or Seattle where they’re based. Subsidies from family are the only way to avoid the slums-and-ramen lifestyle for these recent grads.
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Why not just photoshop the diploma?
Rich people are dumb.
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Pics or it didn’t happen!
Oh, wait…
Because future employers might call the school and ask for the transcripts. Plus they presumably actually want their kids to learn the relevant skills so they aren’t useless after college.
Since when do college applications ask you to include photos of yourself playing sports? I don’t remember having to submit any photos at all, but maybe that’s why I never got an Ivy League scholarship.
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Yeah, deepfake is not just a synonym for a digital composite. It specifically refers to how the composite was made - it’s right in the name. A bog standard photoshop job is not a deepfake. Headline seems a bit clickbaity. From the wiki:
Deepfake (a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”[1]) is a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence.
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It’s probably related to the prevalence of social media: if you say you rowed crew on your application, you better have some photos of “you” rowing on your Instagram account in case someone in the admissions office looks it up. So basically more bogus support for the lie in question.
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I think the pipeline is going to remain intact. It’s just too valuable, especially to its hidden stewards: The Dread Beasts of HR. After all, if it turns out that Hunter or Madison (I’m a devious foreign bastard, but I believe those names carry a suitable spoor of preppiness) turns out to be as dumb as a brick all the HR Creature has to do is point at Madison/Hunter’s shiny Harvard diploma and their job is secure.
So a few dings here and there won’t destroy it. It would take a massive shift for that to happen, especially for prestige jobs that are low-skill but lead to high-skill, high-impact, high-prestige positions, i.e. most things where they weed out the poors by insisting on internships.
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It’s like how every portrait posted on social media is a “selfie” now, even when it was clearly taken by someone other than the subject…
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Do admissions offices really do that now? Creepy.
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By the way, this suggests that some of these kids were actively complicit with the fraud, since they would have either had to give the parents access to their accounts or (more likely) posted the photos themselves.
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Highly competitive schools will take extracurriculars into account when considering admissions.
Yeah, they’ve been doing that forever. The part I wasn’t up to speed on was the “cyberstalking potential students on social media” part.
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Recruiting for college athletics is crazy. It’s not just, “Here’s my cross-country and mile times, coach. Oh, I have a good SAT score, too!” these days. People record hundreds of hours of video over the course of a student athlete’s competitions from the time they are little kids, pay professionals to turn it into a mix tape of hand-picked clips set to a soundtrack. There are companies that charge thousands to feature a prospective student-athlete on their recruiting website, and will target specific colleges. They do matching with what college coaches want (both athletically and sometimes academically/ethnically) to specific athletes.
The big two revenue sports (football and men’s basketball) are too closely monitored for this kind of shenanigans, for the most part, but there is going to be a recruiting file for every athlete being recruited by a Div. I school. At the very least photos are going to be part of the backstop documents for this kind of fraud.
ETA: the photos will be part of the recruiting file, which is at the heart of this scandal. It’s not even admissions, it’s that these kids were getting a lower admissions bar by paying for the “flagged for athletics recruiting” special case.
@gracchus @Brainspore
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Graduation is the thing I’m wondering about. Mumsy spent a million bucks to get me into Harvard. That’s bad enough. But did she also spend another million to be sure I’d graduate? THAT would really suck. Or did she spend the first million just so I could put “Dropped out of Harvard” on my resume?
Assuming that I really did the required coursework to earn a degree, is that degree still illegitimate somehow?
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The thing about Harvard and other Ivies is that, while it’s extremely difficult to get admitted to them, once you are in they do everything they can to make sure you don’t flunk out or drop out. It’s a version of what I call the “glass floor” effect: once the powers-that-be have invested in your success, they’ll keep giving you chance after chance and free pass after free pass no matter how badly you screw up (at least until the screw-up is so bad it makes the national news, and sometimes not even then).
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Huh. You would think that would make the degrees almost worthless. On the other hand, I could sort of see it like college athletes I suppose. You don’t compare the linebacker with the astrophysicist even though they both went to the same school.
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That’s consistent with George W. Bush’s record as a “C” student at Yale. The norm there is reputedly “you have to work hard to get ‘As’ but you have to be a real dumbass slacker to get anything lower than a ‘B.’”
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