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

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01/12/2022 20:48

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

Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Reading only the content you quoted, it does seem like she is describing herself as someone who was in the foster system a long time. I get that just one year in the system is difficult, but there are undoubtedly many, many kids who are in the system their whole lives—unlike Fierceton who had a home with her mother for all but 1 year before heading off to college, if I understand correctly. She seems to be equating her experience with theirs and I would imagine that the two experiences are very different. So this suggests she is intentionally misleading by encouraging people to think it was different than it was.

DP but all it says is "having spent time" - she's not misleading with this article. I think when the typical layperson reads "aged out of foster care" the assumption is that the person was in from early childhood to 18, but that's not necessarily true. She did age out of the foster system.