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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This reminds me of the kids who “publish” (I.e. their parents pay a prof to “work” with their kid and put their name on a paper).[/quote]

Pretty sure no professors would go for this as a paid arrangement. Come on!

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Junior assistant professors and lecturers do.[/quote]

The big name New York private college counselors facilitate this for your kid….yes it happens. Quite easy tbh.

Remember who is reading the application. It’s usually mid to late 20s woman (super-liberal/woke) who majored in a soft major likely at that same institution. She’s not going to do deep research on whether or not this professor at a random - sometimes no name or lower ranked uni is reputable or not.

Ask me how I know.[/quote]

The readers you describe are the first and/or second points of sorting/sifting in the process (sometimes the initial "read' is automated/algorithm). Do you think the senior AOs and Dean(s) who make the final decisions at elite, highly selective schools, usually through committees, don't know what is going on? Seriously asking your opinion. [/quote]

DP here. They do, but the problem is that by that time the non-hustling kid may have been weeded out already. Unless the more experienced senior person reads every single application, your kid has to fit the first AO's criteria, just so he or she can show up for the second reading.

Some universities, like Georgetown, have a specific criteria for "service". If candidates don't score well in that category, they've lost before they can play. In that scenario, even a fake service (ie initiated by parents, massaged and exaggerated) is better than just getting the required number of SSL hours. I have a college freshman and 8th grader who did not/are not doing their own non-profits, so I don't have a personal bias here. I'm just drawing conclusions from what I've observed.
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How have you "observed" that?  Do you have insight into the process revealing what you have described?[/quote]

I've observed, from my limited vantage point, that students, including mine, who had service experience that were difficult to measure and not "packaged", even though it was real and sincere, were rejected from certain schools where service is important, like Georgetown (academic stats being the same). I know kids going to Ivies who put much more strategic effort into their service goals: their non-profits or community service efforts are genuine and way beyond what my kid did, so I'm not complaining. They are also very slick, but maybe that's normal, because they come from very competent and thoughtful people. I also know a kid who got into Yale without any particular effort into service - but he did win a number of science olympiads and was otherwise a very well-rounded student.

Service is very appealing to a good number of selective schools, and in my opinion, it must be impossible for an admission officer to tell whether the effort was driven by the kid or by other people.

Having said all this, I don't find it upsetting. There are sneaky people everywhere at every stage of life. The barrier mostly comes down to the effort involved in creating this on behalf of a student. There aren't a lot of parents willing to do that, in the grand scheme of things.

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You say that the stats are the same but you don’t know that for certain. You also don’t know about the recommendations or other things in the application.  You really can’t know if it was the service aspect that pushed the student over the admissions fence. That’s my point, don’t assume it was some silly, fake effort that you could tell but admissions officers couldn’t.[/quote]

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