They also reported that the family of Yusi Zhao, a former Stanford student, paid $6.5 million to get her admitted as a recruited athlete. Zhao was removed from the school in April, although it’s unclear whether prosecutors are investigating Zhao or her parents.
The university said at the time that it had revoked a student’s admission related to the scandal, but did not identify her, and that it had fired its sailing coach, who was charged in the fraud case.
The news about Zhao’s identity — first reported by The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday — broke a week after I visited the Stanford campus.
Stanford is one of the most elite institutions in the world. It is so selective that the school recently stopped publicizing its admission rate, which had dropped to 4.3 percent, in an effort to downplay its exclusivity.
So I was curious about how the students there felt about the sprawling scandal that had touched their school. When you have a pool of thousands of eminently qualified applicants, what does it mean to deserve admission to Stanford? And what should happen to students whose families paid to get in?
For Jaymi McNabb, a 20-year-old freshman from Oregon, hearing about the scandal was frustrating, although she knows it doesn’t represent the majority of students from wealthy families.
She was raised mostly by her father, who spent her childhood working a variety of construction and other jobs. He didn’t go to college, she said, so it was mostly on her to navigate the application and financial aid process.
McNabb said that she wore her designation as a “FLI” student — or first-generation, low-income — proudly, and that it had been a way of building a community. The university has been supportive.
Nevertheless, she said the contrast between her experiences and those of most of her peers was marked.
“It’s like everything here is on a different scale than the real world,” she said.
David Gonzalez and Tita Chang, both 22-year-old seniors, agreed that not much about the scandal shocked them.
“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Chang said with a wry laugh. “I was just like, ‘Oh, they’ve finally got evidence.’”
But as they chatted more, the pair came down on different sides of the nuances of the case.
Gonzalez considered whether admitting applicants whose parents had made significant donations — like building a building or endowing a professorship — was different from bribery.
“I think that if your parents donate a building to the school, you get in and it is also unfair,” he said. “But then it’s different because everyone at the school gets to enjoy the benefits of that bribe.”
Chang, who said her parents sent her to British international schools in Thailand so she’d have a better shot at college abroad, shook her head.
“That’s only perpetuating even more inequality in the school,” she said.
Gonzalez’s mother, a psychologist in Miami, also went to Stanford. But he said he hadn’t thought much about himself as a legacy student.
“Maybe I just haven’t interrogated that enough,” he said.
“Because you actually do well,” Chang chimed in.
Both said that cheating to get in — even if you didn’t know about it — should warrant expulsion.
Later, I asked a Stanford spokesman about the university’s admission priorities and whether it was re-evaluating policies like legacy admission preferences in response to the scandal.
“A diverse campus community, including along economic lines, is critical to Stanford not only because we want to expand opportunity, but because we want the best environment for students to learn from each other’s diverse perspectives,” the spokesman, Brad Hayward, said. “We are continually working to learn from experience.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.