An interesting story on an Ivy League student and would-be Rhodes Scholar in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Withdrawing charges that can’t be proven (she said/mom said) is different than saying the the daughter is a liar and mother was totally innocent. They don’t keep kids in foster care for 18+ months when there is no evidence. Usually the parent(s) are fighting hard to get them back as soon as possible. Maybe the mother WAS fighting to get her back while she was in hs, but there is nothing reported here that shows that. If the mother had entered into a parenting plan, was attending therapy, was being followed up with by social workers, you’d think she’d have argued that and shown she’d done everything she could to get custody back. If she did, why wasn’t the child returned to the home or at least to legal custody of her mother?

Isn’t it possible that the county didn’t see the point in spending a lot of resources fighting the mother as the child had already aged out of the system when the judge expunged the record? Judge may have found that the county wasn’t pursuing so granted the motion to expunge. The mother was rich. Her lawyers had more resources than the county attorneys who had plenty of other cases to work. They also weren’t expunging criminal convictions but allegations that hadn’t been fully prosecuted. I don’t think the officials cared. There weren’t other children in danger.

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the independent panel for child services believed there was abuse. Even if she lied about the topic of her essay and there was no abuse, is that reason to withhold her degrees?

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Material misrepresentations are grounds for withholding degrees. Penn doesnt really care whether or not this woman was abused, they care about whether the application was truthful and accurate, of which there is some doubt.

If the charges had been simply dropped due to insufficient evidence or lack of prosecutorial resources, I might have agreed with you.
That wasnt the case

The application was via QB and they reviewed it again and still say it is accurate. The only thing that so far has been proven to not be accurate is her claim to be first generation, is that enough to withhold her degrees? She seemed to have qualified as low income due to being in foster care.

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My opinion doesn’t matter; Penn’s does. I may think 1 page plagiarized in a 100 page thesis is not that big a deal; they do. It is their degree to award according to their rules. When I last checked, they were withholding the masters, not the bachelors degree.

Didnt at least 1 varsity blues kid get his/her degree rescinded? I think the kid claimed to have not even known his/her parents purchased the admission

One of the earlier articles quoted Penn’s definition of first gen and it included kids whose parents went to college, but not elite colleges.

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She had contemporaneous notes in her diary at the time it happened. It’s not a new add. The mother also acknowledged that it happened.

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And if she had explained that originally, today’s situation would be quite different…

I am not sure, I think a couple had their admissions rescinded.

But that’s not the University’s formal definition and since she was a QB scholar she needs to meet the definition for QB.

I go back and forth on the story because she clearly was in foster care, but we don’t know what she wrote in her essays.

Good point about QB. I don’t remember reading about QB in the original articles.

It’s amazing how new details keep coming up in this story. Definitely destined for a netflix movie.

Her essays were part of discovery and extensively referenced in the mother’s lawyer’s attempts to discredit her. The lawyer spent a lot of time picking at her incorrectly describing the material of her feeding tube, the details of the blood in her hair, the labeling another kid in her foster home as a foster child instead of a biological child, etc. There was no suggestion of any major misrepresentation like claiming she had grown up poor or was the first generation of her biological parents to go to college, etc. It was school advisors who suggested she apply through Questbridge. And the school’s definition of first gen included (at the time) people were were estranged from their parents.

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There was no deceit on the QB application. Her teacher even expressly dealt with her background in the letter of rec and it’s the school who said she qualified:

“Her college counsellor recommended that she apply to universities through a nonprofit, called QuestBridge, that matches exceptional students facing financial challenges with schools that will fully fund their tuition. In an evaluation for QuestBridge, Mackenzie’s history teacher wrote that Mackenzie, after escaping her “wealthy but abusive parent,” was “on her own in every way.””

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Yes and QB has reviewed the app again and says everything was fine with her application.

There is a question as to why she possibly lied about having to support her sister? Did she ever answer that? Why did she make that stmt to Penn? Was she attempting to get more aid?

I wasn’t referencing the prior articles, I was referencing the lack of details about the mother’s boyfriend in her lawsuit against Penn. That’s the curious part, since you generally throw anything you can into the initial lawsuit filing (I would have expected to see something like “lasting trauma from previous abuse impaired her recollection of childhood events”), so that it survives summary judgement and you can get discovery.

In contrast the New Yorker article downplays any connection with MF’s role in the lawsuit over the basement death on campus, which was a major feature of MF’s lawsuit against Penn (claiming retaliation).

That’s why it feels to me like this is devolving from an attempt to get a legal settlement from Penn into a separate battle with her mother in the court of public opinion. We haven’t seen a response from MF to Penn’s extensive filing yet, but there was a lot of detail in there about the Rhodes revocation process which the New Yorker article does very little to undermine.

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And the article and author were wrong. What they printed was the description of membership requirements of a student club at Penn, not the University’s official definition for Admissions.

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Not so. The article clearly makes this distinction, in detail, noting it was the definition used by the club and was consistent with the definition used by the Federal Higher Education Act which is quotes. It never says it was Penn’s official definition and even quotes Penn’s spokesperson as noting the distinction. Also, she didn’t indicate she was first gen in her undergraduate Penn application. It wasn’t until her Master’s application that she indicated that.

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I think that the student is the wrong focus for this story. Misdirection.