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UMC suburban college student lied about background to become prestigious Rhodes Scholar
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Anonymous
higher Education lawyer here. Please show m EXACTLY using primary resources where Penn has done this (and, no, I have no allegiance with Penn -I simply know the painstaking process universities go through before making anything public). |
Anonymous
I have no idea and neither do you. |
Anonymous
| Is there actually any proof she got a "full scholarship" to pay for her 12th grade year at a $30,000 a year private school? I have never heard of a 100% full scholarship, especially for just one year, even if you're technically full need. And you have to apply for any aid very far in advance of the school year. If you want to claim the school's board and administration felt so bad for her that they bent all the aid rules and waived her $30,000 in tuition — so everyone at the school loved her that much but nobody there would let her move in with them for 12th grade? It's all very fishy. |
Anonymous
| Maybe she is playing weasel words with "scholarship." As in, maybe a grandparent had been paying tuition all through high school, so he paid for her senior year per usual and she's creatively calling that a "scholarship" from grandpa? |
Anonymous
| I suspect forcing her way into the foster care system at age 17 was a long-game plot to get into Harvard or Stanford. It makes zero sense a wealthy and resource-rich near legal adult would waste time doing that unless there was an ulterior motive. It's just pointless. One brief conversation with a friend's parents and she has another mansion to stay for all of senior year if she wanted. She already had the stats to be a shoo-in for local WashU, a top 15 university. The fact that she was class president suggests she had striver drive well before the foster thing. This wasn't some low-key kid, this is a status-obsessed gunner. She craved more, WashU wasn't going to be good enough and she was too "basic" to Ivy admissions officers, especially HYPS. I would love to learn when this was first cooked up. Like where did she read about the foster system and how it was the ultimate hook in admissions. |
Anonymous
| She should come clean and capitalize via Netflix ex. Tinder Swindler. |
Anonymous
Either her biological parents paid or she got a full ride. Foster care will not pay for that kind of school or she had really wealthy foster parents who paid (which is pretty doubtful as they probably wouldn't be taking in a teenager). If she's in foster care, she couldn't move in with someone without them becoming foster parents or legal guardians. Which could have happened. |
Anonymous
Sure, it's a grand mystery. I wonder whatever on earth could explain it? Hmm. |
Anonymous
Wild speculation. Really wild. MF was removed from the custody of her mother. That is rare. It’s not something you engineer. Social services does everything they can to keep children with their biological parent(s) or with another close relative. Especially when the parent is a doctor with substantial financial resources. Maybe they require counseling. Maybe they schedule frequent home visits. But they don’t remove children capriciously. Something was very wrong with the relationship between this mother and daughter. At the time of the mother’s divorce, the social services report included concerns about abuse. MF was 8-years-old at the time. With all of the focus on what happened with the hospital incident when MF turned 17, there’s is no discussion of the fact that this problem didn’t begin with her hospitalization. This situation didn’t emerge out of nowhere. There was abuse and other issues in the home long before that. Normally when a child exhibits problematic behaviour, the first place to look is at the parent(s), not the child. There is only one adult in this relationship and that’s who’s been responsible for the nurturing and upbringing of the child, that’s who’s shaped the child’s personality. But too many here want to either ignore the mother or treat her like she’s the victim of a scheming, conniving child. The mother is the grown up and is the one with grown up responsibilities. Where has she been in all of this? The same is true with UPenn. Powerful, influential, deep pockets. Plenty of resources to draw upon in a fight with this young woman with no resources in her effort to fight back but somehow UPenn was underresourced in their ability to verify anything about her backstory. Endorsing the application of a potential Rhodes scholar is on of the most important things a university can do from many different perspectives, including PR, but apparently UPenn either didn’t care or didn’t have the resources to make her application a collaborative enough process, to conduct a probing interview, or to check he biography sufficiently to know who they were actually endorsing. And then when their sloppiness was exposed, instead of dealing with it in a collaborative way as recommended by their own professors (see Big Trial letter to editor linked earlier in this thread), they elected to strong arm her in a belligerent manner in the same way that they are currently doing with members of their swim team who have issues of gender equity. But many here want to make UPenn the victim? Cry me a River. They had 5 years with MF as their student and a year before that when she was an applicant to get things right with her. They failed and are taking no responsibility for that failure. |
Anonymous
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"this young woman with no resource"
She was a rich private school lifer in a ritzy suburb with rich friends, all As, and a school leader! Stop infantilizing what is clearly a very mature, very elbowy, and very astute young woman. This wasn't some poor kid in craphole inner-city schools with a heroin addicted mom and gunfire outside of their housing projects. |
Anonymous
No one says she was the latter. “You’re leaving out the key word. She was an ABUSED rich private school lifer . . .” (Key word inserted with emphasis mine.) She is not at all mature. If she were, she wouldn’t have mad the mistakes she did. What is clear is that she is a driven overachiever, which is a classic psychological defense mechanism for people who have longstanding lacks o basic nurturance and parental love from an early age. Growing up in a wealthy household does not by itself set the conditions for being well adjusted. There are plenty of screwed up rich kids. I love this characterization of her as “mature” and “astute”. Let’s contrast this with how society characterized Monica Lewinsky, as a “child” at the same age, exploited by the President because she was incapable of entering into a consensual relationship. Can’t have it both ways. For her to have engineered this whole scheme as has been alleged here, her plot would have been concocted at the age of 16 at the latest, the point at which she had contemporaneous notes in her diary about her toxic relationship with her mother. And we have to ignore the abuse alleged in the social services report when she was age 8. Mature? Astute? I don’t think so. Not at that age. It’s not infantilizing anyone to be honest and truthful about ALL the facts in this story. The ones who are being infantilized are the poor, helpless mother who was supposedly victimized by this kid and UPenn, the helpless institution who was supposedly exploited by one of their students with claims that there was nothing they could have done about it. UPenn was happy to bask in the reflected glory of her Rhodes Scholarship and take credit for shaping the future which she was realizing, but when it all blew up ON them, they ran for the edits faster than someone shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Suddenly they had no role in influencing who she became and wanted to throw themselves a pity party. Excuse me while I vomit. Let’s put responsibility where it belongs - on the adults in this story. |
Anonymous
| DP. But she sued Penn? I don’t get this weird concept that Penn should somehow not respond as a defendant in a lawsuit. |
Anonymous
Yes, she sued Penn. That's not going to have been a decision to celebrate int he long run, but oh well. |
Anonymous
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Odd that posters emphasize her being a kid. An 11th or 12th grader is not a kid, I don't care if they're still 17 or just turned 18. And this isn't some normal middle class American slacker teen with no resources. She was a rich, hyper-driven gunner, who was groomed in elite private schools all of her life, had all As, president of her class, multiple sports, etc. and sought to attend a hyper-elite college. I love that she's such a helpless child but apparently she could figure out how to pursue entry into foster care instead of just moving out of her mom's house and in with a friend's family... you know, like any normal 12th grader who has serious issues with their parents?
And during all of this trauma & chaos she was IMMEDIATELY savvy enough to not only get a $30,000 full ride scholarship to her private high school (allegedly) but she also IMMEDIATELY filled out at least one of the most exhaustive, prestigious and lucrative college scholarships there is, Questbridge? You know what I bet? I bet she also hedged her bets and filled out multiple other lavish scholarships and admissions program apps, e.g. Gates Millennium Scholar. So she JUST entered foster system and she IMMEDIATELY knows she can seize on all of these lavish scholarship programs she was 100% excluded from just months prior as she was white, rich, with highly credentialed parent(s)? What a quick study... |
Anonymous
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I'm really seized on how she allegedly paid for 12th grade.
Show me the private school board who's going to give some rich doctor's 12th grader a free $30,000 in institution aid, presumably long past the financial aid deadlines at that. Not to mention this implies she just entered the foster care system and immediately knew to go use that technicality to go qualify for scholarships at her own high school? My husband is on a private school board and that's just not going to happen. And the school board is far more likely to believe a well-respected medical doctor parent who was paying cash for tuition for years over some brat, making it incredibly unlikely they'd give her even a cent, let alone all $30,000. And then later, while she was still in 12th grade or after graduation (?), the charges against the mom were dropped, right? So the school gave her $30,000 and then sees the mom was allegedly innocent and the school still lets her have the $30,000? |