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None of this has to do with the schools. This is all about a small number of individuals cheating the system. It's been blown out of proportion because a couple of celebrities are involved. People act all outraged like there is a systemic problem with the university system. These big schools get tens of thousands of applications every year. They don't do investigations on all of them. Lots of kids scam their way into college. Not saying it's right or something that should be ignored, just saying it's nothing to get upset about. Any time you are dealing with large numbers of people, a certain % are doing something wrong.
To me the bigger problem is how did these school athletic departments allow non-athletes to get spots on rosters? Are there no checks and balances to verify that these kids who are admitted based on a coach's recommendation are actually capable athletes? We hear the term "Lack of Institutional Control" used a lot when some school gets hammered for a recruiting violation. I guess that since none of these kids received scholarships that the NCAA really doesn't care about it.
@pgjackson I think you are overlooking the potential for a much bigger set of facts to emerge down the road. Primarily as a result of the guy at IMG who actually took the ACT, and likely the SAT, for high school students. The guy's title is "Director of College Admissions Exams", or something similar. Sounds like a fancy title for a teacher who preps students to take the ACT and SAT. He's a Harvard graduate working at a private high school school. What do you think his salary is for such a position at IMG? Probably not on the scale of what he could make elsewhere as a Harvard graduate. I going to guess his primary money making gig wasn't actually serving in the role of "Director" at IMG, but more as a test taker.
This guy has already been asked to make a voluntary civil forfeiture of $450,000 for income he received for taking the ACT and SAT. That's just what they know about right now. The issue with enrolling students as fake athletes is one thing, but how many times did he take the SAT/ACT for legitimate Div 1 athletes who received full scholarships at Major Div 1 programs? This answer may never see the light of day, but you absolutely have to think it happened. If those details drop then this will be a gigantic story - and yeah, it WILL be about the schools. Someone other than the student-athletes would have been footing the bill.
I think the whole idea of IMG is corrupt. I can't believe they are allowed to exist as a high school and compete against other high schools. I hate the whole idea of IMG. The whole "school" is designed to get kids athletic scholarships one way or another. If I was the NCAA, I'd be investigating IMG. I'll bet a paycheck there is a lot of questionable activity going on there.
It's not the school's job to verify that every student actually took an SAT. With thousands and thousands of applicants every year, they aren't set up to investigate that kind of potential fraud. If some D1 athlete submitted fraudulent credentials, it's not the school's fault...unless someone can prove the school administration knew about it.
By the way, if you don't have kids in school...the entire public school curriculum is basically designed to prepare kids for taking standardized tests. HOW to take the tests is more important that actually knowing stuff. There are TONS of programs out there specifically to train students how to get a better score on the ACT and SAT...and it's not all academic knowledge based.
There are a lot of kids out there with real potential who can't get into an elite school simply because they didn't get a super high SAT/ACT score. There are also countless dropouts who aced their standardized test, got into the elite school legitimately, but ultimately failed. Who knows, maybe some of these kids involved in this situation are actually pretty good students.
If he was taking tests for athletes, he is going to sell everybody out for a reduced sentence. "I took tests for a, b, c players and x, y, z boosters paid for it"
If you're disappointed by this scandal, wait till you hear that public school budgets are determined by local property taxes. The wealthy segregate themselves off into their own municipalities to hoard resources from poor communities of color; who get stuck with charters.
Yep. This could get interesting. But now we have a different situation. Before it was just some rich parents getting their kids accepted for admission. Now we are talking about kids not just getting accepted into a school, but getting full NCAA athletic scholarships based on fraud.
Pat Dye must be getting nervous
Those mocking the case might feel differently if they had a child they'd nurtured for 18 years who had the qualifications but was turned down by Yale or another school who sold their spot to some privileged son or daughter who was less qualified. This is essentially a zero sum game, there is a finite number of spots at these elite institutions and studies show the long term value of a diploma from one of those schools is life changing.
Lawsuits have value beyond those directly involved. They serve to moderate future behaviors.
One of my good friends is a high school principle. He says the crap that private schools get away with in sports, and still compete with the public schools is pretty outrageous. One example is they will state they have a student population of say 1000, and get lumped into the other public schools division of 1000 students. What they don't say is that they have a 1000 male students on this side of the street, and don't count the 1000 female students across the street. So they essentially compete in a division where everyone else has half the students to make a football team with.
3rd rule of EMS: If its warm and sticky and its not yours, leave it alone.
because there are no poor white communities in this country!
it already happens to a greater degree based on skin color
Yep no need to make a race issue out of it. There is definitely a class issue.
Parental involvement, not financial reaources, is what determines the quality of a school system. City of Atlanta schools has a huge budget, but the quality of the individual schools varies drastically from one zip code to the next. Lack of money is just a lazy excuse. How a student performs in american history or the low level math classes taught in earlier years, reading ability, etc has virtually nothing to do with technology and investment.
I agree that both parental involvement and overall environment have a huge impact on education results. If your environment is both nurturing and demanding, your chances of success in the classroom and in life are exponentially better than if you live in a bad environment.
Mentors can make a big difference, but they have to be there regularly for the child. Coaches, teachers, church leaders, Scout leaders, Boys And Girls Clubs, etc. I think funding mentoring organizations can be very effective in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The “entitlement mentality” is actually a socially designed personality trait. The larger problem with the school systems and higher learning spans the entire spectrum of educational achievement - and that is by design.
A 2007 survey from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute showed that college students graduate with less knowledge of history, politics, and economics than they had before they entered. The same is true of students leaving HS today vs students from my generation and the ones previous.
Our educational “system” has been manipulated to produce a desired citizen - one who understands very little about basic economies of scale and price elasticity, the Founding Fathers, or what separates what has been called the‘Great Experiment’ in severely limited central government, aka The United States of America, from the rest of the World.
Reading about Laurie Laughlin's daughter puts their case in a different light. It looks far more like a pure business bribe to me now. She clearly wanted in USC to further her social media business. She is on video expressing her desire to party and socialize while also saying she had no interest in using it to further her education. The girl now bases her 2 million plus subscriber social media company almost entirely on her USC experiences.
I'd treat her family's case like any other felony bribery prosecution.
The move towards "accountability" made us create more standardized tests. Which has made for more working towards those tests, because the schools are incentivized. to do so. I will say the my daughter's Math classes move very quickly and have been pretty advanced and I was always in the top classes at a good school.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) screwed up the system. This idea that every student needs to be well versed in science and math is absurd. Got rid of Economics, Shop, Music, History, PE classes in favor of hard sciences. I challenge anyone on this forum to complete a mandatory high school Algebra II class. Helping my son with his Algebra was probably the most frustrating and traumatic academic experience of my life. Square root of -i (negative i). **** is that? Your telling me some inner city kid with no family support needs to know imaginary numbers? They want kids to know advanced math concepts, but has no idea how to keep a budget.