UMC suburban college student lied about background to become prestigious Rhodes Scholar

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone wonder why she voluntary withdrew from the scholarship if she felt so strongly she was being treated unfairly?
She and her lawyer were presented with the discrepancies and given a chance to respond, and then she withdrew from participating in the program.

Her lawyer told her to. She will sue them and get millions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone wonder why she voluntary withdrew from the scholarship if she felt so strongly she was being treated unfairly?
She and her lawyer were presented with the discrepancies and given a chance to respond, and then she withdrew from participating in the program.

Her lawyer told her to. She will sue them and get millions.

Haha no. I'm sorry, but that's delusional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone wonder why she voluntary withdrew from the scholarship if she felt so strongly she was being treated unfairly?
She and her lawyer were presented with the discrepancies and given a chance to respond, and then she withdrew from participating in the program.

Her lawyer told her to. She will sue them and get millions. [/quote]


Not if she lied her way into all of this. UPenn and other Ivies have enormous in-house counsel's offices. Harvard had a phalanx of them just on campus. Then of course they always have outside counsel as well. They have proceeded with care and caution. You just can't tell yet because of the lies the plaintiff's lawyers throw out and the media hubbub. This is a big Education law (there is such a thing) and first amendment case. I have no doubt that U Penn did everything by the book and with great care. No doubt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:from the chronicle of higher ed reporting, anyone who had access to her high school yearbook could be the tipster:

"But after The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about Fierceton’s scholarship, university officials received an anonymous email raising doubts about her biography. In reality, the email said, Fierceton had grown up in an affluent suburb of St. Louis with her mother, a radiologist, and had attended private schools. A similar email, sent to the Rhodes Trust, accused her of being “blatantly dishonest in the representation of her childhood” and included photos from her high-school yearbook of Fierceton skydiving, riding a horse, and whitewater rafting."

From those facts it seems highly unlikely it was the mother. Why the PP so adamant it was the mother? Is there proof elsewhere?

Read the story

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:from the chronicle of higher ed reporting, anyone who had access to her high school yearbook could be the tipster:

"But after The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about Fierceton’s scholarship, university officials received an anonymous email raising doubts about her biography. In reality, the email said, Fierceton had grown up in an affluent suburb of St. Louis with her mother, a radiologist, and had attended private schools. A similar email, sent to the Rhodes Trust, accused her of being “blatantly dishonest in the representation of her childhood” and included photos from her high-school yearbook of Fierceton skydiving, riding a horse, and whitewater rafting."

From those facts it seems highly unlikely it was the mother. Why the PP so adamant it was the mother? Is there proof elsewhere?

Read the story

I did. I don't see any support for it being the mother who called.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone wonder why she voluntary withdrew from the scholarship if she felt so strongly she was being treated unfairly?
She and her lawyer were presented with the discrepancies and given a chance to respond, and then she withdrew from participating in the program.

Her lawyer told her to. She will sue them and get millions. [/quote]


Not if she lied her way into all of this. UPenn and other Ivies have enormous in-house counsel's offices. Harvard had a phalanx of them just on campus. Then of course they always have outside counsel as well. They have proceeded with care and caution. You just can't tell yet because of the lies the plaintiff's lawyers throw out and the media hubbub. This is a big Education law (there is such a thing) and first amendment case. I have no doubt that U Penn did everything by the book and with great care. No doubt.

Plus that, they aren't suing the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, who conducted an independent investigation and decided to revoke her scholarship.

If I was her, I'd stop struggling now. I think if the case turns on credibility, as many do, she's done for. More will come out about things she claimed in her applications and there are still unanswered questions like why she lied about her injuries

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t doubt that her mom is a total piece of work. But there is a big difference between being the child of a radiologist snd attending private school - making her someone who had multiple examples of academic and financial success in her peer group, school and family during her entire childhood — and someone who was plucked out of foster care by Penn after a lifetime surrounded by people with GEDs and a crap high school. Come on now.

There is a really well known college consultant who encourages applicants to shade the truth. I.e. Don't ay that your mom is the head of cardiology at Mass General. Say she is a "hospital worker" so the admissions people will think she works in the cafeteria for minimum wage, etc

Yeah, sure, but all of the financials come out when you file the CSS as a needy child of said hospital worker. I don’t see how a huge discrepancy in job title and salary could be spun.

If I'm recalling what I've read so far, she applied & was accepted as an independent student. Due to that brief foster care status she was regarded as parentless. My guess is she got in on a full ride with this heroic victimhood she presented. As another FGLI before it was thing, I know how difficult it was/is to have legitimate "independent" status as a 17 yo. If it weren't imagine how many parents would work that advantage. It's bad enough what happens just under the current system of "shading" & finagling the truth.

[Anonymous]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXKo79OAGAk

this girl "lied" on her applications too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone wonder why she voluntary withdrew from the scholarship if she felt so strongly she was being treated unfairly?
She and her lawyer were presented with the discrepancies and given a chance to respond, and then she withdrew from participating in the program.

Her lawyer told her to. She will sue them and get millions.

Haha no. I'm sorry, but that's delusional.

Intuitively, you lawyer up to keep the scholarship cuz that's worth "millions" already. She would have been set for life with Rhodes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just admit the students solely on academic merits.

Why do you have to be poor to get additioanl points while they also take tons of money from rich people/legacy and admit them

It's always only the middle class that suffers.

+1. It's not just the "poor" angle. Why does every single American student have to come up with a "I was a victim but overcame it" story? It's become beyond bizarre in the College Admissions Wars. It's not that way with the British Schools. You get in on grades and test scores. It's a meritocracy. Why is our "meritocracy" now so dependent upon finding kids who have to exaggerate their backgrounds into such tortured tales to gain admission? We have First Generation, Questbridge, Low Income, Single parent, divorced victims, URM, Native American, East Indian, International, and the list of sub-categories goes on and on! Just scrap it all and go back to GPA and test scores and letters of recommendaiton from teachers that actually know the kids. It's clear our system isn't working anymore.

The problem is you'll be disenfranchising every group you mentioned: First Generation, Questbridge, Low Income, Single parent, divorced victims, URM, Native American, East Indian, International, and the list of sub-categories that goes on and on!

It's like advocating a flat rate tax system. You'll be disenfranchising every group and subgroup that's paying less than their fair share. Every group with lawyer up to maintain the status quo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t doubt that her mom is a total piece of work. But there is a big difference between being the child of a radiologist snd attending private school - making her someone who had multiple examples of academic and financial success in her peer group, school and family during her entire childhood — and someone who was plucked out of foster care by Penn after a lifetime surrounded by people with GEDs and a crap high school. Come on now.

There is a really well known college consultant who encourages applicants to shade the truth. I.e. Don't ay that your mom is the head of cardiology at Mass General. Say she is a "hospital worker" so the admissions people will think she works in the cafeteria for minimum wage, etc

Yeah, sure, but all of the financials come out when you file the CSS as a needy child of said hospital worker. I don’t see how a huge discrepancy in job title and salary could be spun.

If I'm recalling what I've read so far, she applied & was accepted as an independent student. Due to that brief foster care status she was regarded as parentless. My guess is she got in on a full ride with this heroic victimhood she presented. As another FGLI before it was thing, I know how difficult it was/is to have legitimate "independent" status as a 17 yo. If it weren't imagine how many parents would work that advantage. It's bad enough what happens just under the current system of "shading" & finagling the truth.

Right, that’s what happened at UIUC. Some shady parents had their kids declare themselves independent to get 100% aid. Well, at least those fools got caught.

[Anonymous]

Google her and you'll find a bunch of news stories from when she won the Rhodes in the Philly and St. Louis papers as well as in various Penn publications. She clearly misrepresented herself to make it sound like she spent most or all of her childhood in the foster care system when in truth she was living with her UMC doctor mother for most of that time. I still think she probably believed her own delusions. But she was persistently dishonest and that's a pretty bad look for all involved.

[Anonymous]

Wow. Lots of thoughts.

Reading the various articles, I think no one knows what really went on, but you don't get removed from a mother (especially a $$$, educated, white one) without something being radically wrong. Maybe she wasn't raised in poverty, but thrown into poverty or unmoored even for a year is not nothing on a perseverance scale. Plus, the chronicle article makes it sounds like all of the particularly egregious inaccurate representations of Fierceton’s background were made by the UPenn administrators and the author of the original article about her Rhodes scholarship, where it sounds like people who read too much poverty porn without knowing much about the reality of such situations jumped to conclusions and made bad assumptions...claims that were NOT made directly by Mackenzie.

Lastly, taking a person's failure to remember precise details of a traumatic event they experienced as a child as an indicator of lack of integrity is counter to everything we now understand about trauma and memory. It's not like there's no objective corroboration that something went seriously wrong in her family life like I said earlier. She was in the hospital for nearly three weeks (and maybe they were having trouble finding somewhere to discharge her to, but she wasn't taking up an ICU bed for a few days for that reason!). She went into foster care--from the demographic where it's almost impossible to end up there if you have a living close relative. Without some evidence of deliberate falsification, who cares whether she actually had blood in her hair or just how swollen her facial features were?

[Anonymous]

Quote:
"Still, in selecting Rhodes candidates, Penn officials had heard what they wanted to hear, and told Mackenzie’s story in the way that they wanted to tell it," the professors wrote. "The Philadelphia Inquirer had done the same when reporting on her Rhodes award. As the media buzz grew, Mackenzie’s high school time in foster care was made to sound like a lifetime in foster care, despite the precision of Mackenzie’s own statements and her subsequent efforts at correction."

When I graduated from undergrad I won one of the university's high prestige awards/scholarships. The university newspaper (the one put out by the university itself, sent to alumni, used for press and fundraising etc. , not the student paper) did a pull out profile on the award winners. They interviewed me and hired a photographer to take pictures of me and my professors.

When the little pull-out came out, I was kind of horrified. I mean the things in the profile were technically true, but they made it sound like I walked on water (I do not!). And I was embarrassed because I thought "people I know are going to read this and they're going to think I'm the one who presented myself this way to the interviewer." And I told this to one of my professors and she explained to me that the purpose of the article was not to make me sound good, but to make the University sound good. Students who walk on water make the university look good.

So Penn bragged about her and embellished her story when it was to their benefit and then when she was costing them money they sought to discredit her and attempted to punish her for helping a grieving widow.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What is off about her being in foster care and being hospitalized because of her mother's abuse?

The incident happened in 2014, a year before she went to college. So she was in foster homes for one year. But she lied about the rest of her childhood, omitting apparently to tell them she went to a $30,000 a year private school and her mother was a radiologist. And of course the prosecutor dropped the charges against the mother and said they couldn't be proven. And the Rhodes Committee said her description of her injuries were inconsistent with the hospital records. Does that answer your question?

I am not sure where you are getting this information. here's what I found in an article from February 2021. It sounds like Mackenzie has been forthcoming about her private school.
Fierceton’s research hits close to home. Having spent time in foster homes in St. Louis, she understands how the system stacks odds against children like her. According to studies, about 50 percent of foster youth graduate from high school and only 2.5 percent from a four-year college. “The overwhelming majority of foster youth do want to complete high school and go on to college or trade school or vocational school,” Fierceton claims. “But then when we get there, we have no support and the wheels just kind of fall off, in a sense.”

Fierceton notes that her experience in the foster system, while still difficult, was an exception to the rule. She went to a private high school, where the adults looked out for her, almost approximating a sense of family. Teachers showed up at soccer games and theater performances, while friends’ families invited her over for holidays and ensured she had clothes and “everything she needed” while she moved through the system.

“For foster youth, in particular, your success is determined by your social support and social capital,” she says. “I got where I am today because I don’t face the innumerable racial, educational, and sociopolitical marginalizations that the vast majority of foster youth experience. That’s why I was able to go to Penn, and why I have access to so many spaces.”

Fierceton is currently pursuing a master’s in social work at Penn with an eye toward reforming the system she spent time in—even if that means having a gentler understanding of the social workers who struggled to support her. “When I aged out of the foster care system, I wanted to get as far away from [it] as possible. I never wanted to talk to another social worker for the rest of my life,” she says, remembering one particular caseworker of hers who never bothered to learn her name after skipping visits for months. At the time, again from a hospital bed, Fierceton emailed “every politician [she] could think of” about how they must reform child welfare and find her a better caseworker.