Harvard: Where You Get In If You Can Lie Well Enough
At this point, we should just start a program at Harvard for people who cheated their way in; these are the future leaders of America, people. If you think a little jail time is going to keep this Jim Halpert look-alike out of a corner office on Wall Street, you must be working at the White House on finance reform.
Adam Wheeler managed to transfer to Harvard as a sophomore, in itself an impressive feat, but made more impressive by the fact that he blatantly fabricated his entire academic career to get in. He told Harvard that he had scored a 1600 on his SATs, attended Phillips Academy and then MIT before deciding to transfer, all the while posting straight-A averages. Apparently, even applicants are above reproach on Harvard Yard, and nobody bothered to check the veracity of any of these claims (making me wonder why I ever had to take the SATs, let alone do well on them), and Wheeler was on course to graduate this year with a degree in English.
So where did he go wrong? The bastard got greedy and applied for Rhodes and Fulbright Scholarships, which necessitated that professors briefly read his CV before writing him the requisite fluff pieces. One of these professors actually looked at his resume, realized that it was really similar bio to another professor’s at Harvard, and blew the whistle. That fake MIT degree comes in handy though, as Wheeler has to be able to count up to twenty, which is the number of indictments he is being slapped with. He’s probably going to do jail time for stealing financial aid money to fund his education spree. For a kid so smart, it seems sort of stupid to blow $45,000+ for two years of skunky beer and pulling all-nighters in the library.
Regardless, now that this kid is on the radar, he’s going to go far. He got into the Ivy League the real fucking way—he picked himself up from his bootstraps, and without the help of Mommy, Daddy and Kaplan SAT review. While he might not have the degree to prove it, Adam Wheeler probably learned more getting into college than most students learn in four years spent there legitimately, so good for him; plus, a story about how you cheated your way into Harvard is always more interesting than a story about how you earned your way into Harvard, so he’s got that going for him, too. Little victories.



Battle stations, daily newspaper feature writers, battle stations!! Three examples makes a trend piece, and we’ve just received word of yet another complaint over too-public sex on an Ivy campus. First it was the
Whoa, today’s Brown Daily Herald has a major scoop:
If you read this blog with any regularity, you know it’s been a constant struggle to criticize 02138, a magazine we know we should hate but somehow, inexplicably (well, sometimes
Early headlines are coming over the wire after the Crimson‘s scoop that 
On good days, tips arrive in our inbox and we’re all, “Hey, that’s fun to write about.” Or “Silly Ivy League kids, that’s sure ripe for a tweaking!”
Aleksey Vayner is having a bad day. Imagine you’re a recruiting director at an investment bank. Aleksay’s resume come across your desk. The ’07 Yalie’s stuff seems normal enough, until the link to