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October 8, 2019 04:02 pm PDT

How the "Varsity Blues" admissions scam punished deserving, hard working kids so that mediocre kids of the super-rich could prosper

Propublica's latest longread is ostensibly a profile of two kids who attended Orange County's Sage Hill School, where tuition runs $40,000/year and where an estimated 25% of students get into elite colleges thanks to their parents shelling out for "independent counsellors" who run the gamut from people who help with admissions essays and strategic donations to the schools of their choice all the way up to William "Rick" Singer, who pleaded guilty to collecting millions to grease the path for mediocre rich kids to attend elite colleges by bribing coaches.

One of the kids profiled is Grant Janavs, a middling tennis player who is also the scion of the ultra rich Merage/Janavs family, inheritors of a fortune from Hot Pockets and other products from Chef America, Inc. The other is Adam Langevin, a superb and dedicated tennis player who "suicided" tennis (in the words of his high school coach), devoting his life to it while simultaneously succeeding academically. Langevin played on the school team despite the fact that it took away from his ability to play in the tournaments that would have helped him get into a college athletics program, because he felt a sense of duty to the school -- even playing through serious injuries.

But it wasn't Adam who got into a top athletics program, it was Grant, who was admitted to Georgetown. Grant's mother hired Rick Singer to "consult" on that admissions, and once the admission was secured, a foundation controlled by Grant's grandfather "donated" $400,000 to a "charity" run by Singer. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/EdgnBlpEcJw/michelle-janavs.html

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