Posted on 01/11/2022 7:28:19 PM PST by karpov
In November 2020, when University of Pennsylvania graduate student Mackenzie Fierceton won the prestigious and highly competitive Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford — one of just 32 scholars selected from a pool of 2,300 applicants — she was praised by the Ivy League school’s president in a newsletter.
“Mackenzie is so deserving of this prestigious opportunity,” declared President Amy Gutmann of the 23-year-old from suburban St. Louis. “As a first-generation [to go to college] low-income student and a former foster youth, Mackenzie is passionate about championing young people [and] dedicating herself to a life of public service.”
But a few months later, Fierceton had lost her prestigious scholarship and was fighting against accusations that she had been “blatantly dishonest” about her childhood in her Penn and Rhodes applications.
Now, the investigation into her story is being revealed by the Chronicle of High Education — including the Rhodes committee’s findings that Fierceton “created and repeatedly shared false narratives about herself,” using these “misrepresentations” to “serve her interests as an applicant for competitive programs.”
The case also exposes the murky underbelly of elite schools like Penn and their quest to “show that they’re transforming society rather than laundering its inequalities” by accepting “remarkable” applicants with truly tragic backgrounds, according to the Chronicle report.
Multiple college consultants told The Post that the college application process now features more questions about overcoming obstacles. The 2021-2022 essay prompts from Common App, the organization that oversees undergrad applications for more than 900 schools, include “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure.”
“There are a lot of pressures out there for applications right now,” Marco Santini, a New York-based college education consultant, told The Post.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
This is due to the colleges rewarding students with the biggest sob story.
You can self identify as any race on the applications - any you think you could qualify as - and those who play the game win the prizes.
As soon as they threw out grades and objective testing it opened the door to all this insanity.
“It was never easy for me....I grew up a poor, black child...”
Does she know shit from Shinola?
Try USAF Major General ...
Regardless of the sob story.
Did this woman meet the academic requirements of other Rhodes scholars either past or present?
If she has the academic merit, then she’s a Rhodes Scholar in my book.
Besides Cecil Rhodes was hardly a saint.
Does she claim to be of American Indian heritage like Pochahontas???
Rhodes scholar: hand selected DS in training
She lied thats what they do. She is doing so well already that she already deserves a second one.
“Fierceton seems to have few regrets about her essays. As she told the Chronicle: “Where I’ve landed is that I have a right to write about my experiences as I experienced them. Period.”
No moral foundation. A lie is truth, if she says so. Lord have mercy on us all, if this is the prevailing position among our youth.
Oh, yes. I got Kristofferson and Jim Morrison mixed up.
How Janis Joplin Recorded "Me & Bobby McGee" - Told by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster
Universities are too stupid to understand that victims are loosers, that’s why they are victims! Praising victims raises looserhood to a whole new level of stupidity!
Loser, not looser.
She graduated from Whitfield High School near St Louis. That school is private and very expensive, $30K per year tuition. That should have been Penn’s first clue that she was not poor.
It is weird and hypocritical. It probably helped Kristoferson get the Rhodes Scholarship that his father was a major general.
You cannot buy a Rhodes Scholarship, but admissions to US elite schools is a lot money and connections. The schools are extremely expensive to begin with and then it is a big advantage to donate more money.
I went to a top 30 university. At the interview, they seemed mostly interested in what my political connection were, which really were not what they though, and how classy I came across. Then the people were real snobbish and thought I was unsophisticated.
They may want some good story about adversity, but they do not take many people who really experienced much adversity.
Now if she can just find another hapless glib morally bankrupt character like Bill, perhaps she will be the next Hillary Clinton.
Now that is funny! When movies entertained.
She was in foster care from her junior year in high school. She was removed from her physician mother for reasons of child abuse. She never made a secret of her upbringing, to the point where she gave interviews about it in the college newspaper. It was the college that polished up a sob story to ensure they could crow about producing a Rhodes scholar. And it was the mother who shopped her to the papers.
Poor kid.
It's got to be something with that generation. My daughter is on the older side of that generation. She pays a therapist to listen to her talk about things that never happened in her childhood that messed her up. We weren't the best parents, and I take responsibility for the good and bad; all of it. Some of the things she says she's getting help for leave me scratching my head, though. They never happened. I know, because I was there.
Over the holidays, we've been bombarded with images of shivering puppies, stranded polar bears, and hairless children in an appeal for money.
I found it interesting that the dogs and bears will get help for $19 a month, while the child requires only $12.
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