The Fraud Squad, and the Lesson It Teaches
Judd Shapiro, Clearing College Bound Counseling
The Wall Street Journal reported last month on a four-person team inside the Caltech admissions office that the staff call the fraud squad. Caltech admitted fewer than four percent of the 11,400 students who applied this year, and once a student accepts an offer, the squad goes back through the file and takes nothing on faith. They look at the fonts on science fair certificates. They check the address printed on the transcript against the school. They study the signatures on award letters, call competition officials and high school counselors, and put students on video to talk through the research they claimed to have done.
The team was formed about two years ago, partly because the office was receiving a rising number of anonymous tips that applicants had lied. One squad member told the Journal he does not think everyone is lying, but that he cannot let a small dishonest fraction spoil the pool for everyone else. Most colleges still investigate only when something looks off, when the essay describes an award-winning robotics team and none of the recommendation letters mention it. Caltech decided to look at everyone.
I have had a version of this conversation with families every fall for twenty years, and the article gives me a reason to put it in writing.
Why this is happening now
Applications to selective colleges have grown long and strange. Students are asked for research, competitions, independent projects, and lists of honors that no admissions reader can verify the way they can verify a grade. At the same time, it has become easy to manufacture a certificate, a letter, a summary of a project that never happened. And the stakes feel higher to seventeen-year-olds than they ever have. Put those three things together and you get a fraud squad.
Surveys of college students find large numbers admitting they inflated volunteer hours, invented a job, or padded an activity on the way in. I do not doubt it. What I doubt is that most of them thought of it as lying. They thought of it as presenting well. That is the mistake I want to take apart.
The practical case for the truth
Start with the least interesting reason to be honest, which is that it works and the alternative does not.
An admissions reader at a competitive school has read tens of thousands of files.They know what a real fifteen hours a week looks like, and they can add. Ten activities at twelve hours each is more week than exists. A founder of a nonprofit with no website, no partner organization, and no mention in the counselor letter is not a founder. A research internship the student cannot describe in the second paragraph of the supplement is not a research internship. Readers do not need a fraud squad to see most of this. They need the file to disagree with itself, and padded files always do.
That is the real risk, and it is larger than getting caught. The transcript, the recommendations, the activities list, and the essays are supposed to describe one person. When one of them describes someone bigger than the other three, the reader stops trusting all four. The student loses credit for the true things because of the untrue one.
The lesson a padded list teaches
The deeper problem is what a seventeen-year-old learns when an adult helps them inflate.
They learn that who they actually are was not enough. They learn that the way to get what you want is to appear to be someone else. And they learn that the adults who love them will help them do it. I spent thirty-three years teaching English and a good many more sitting with families as a therapist, and I can tell you that lesson does not stay in the application. The student who learns to round up at seventeen is rounding up on the résumé at twenty-seven and in the marriage at thirty-seven. We should not be surprised. We taught it.
There is a quieter cost too. A parent who rewrites the activities list to make a child look more impressive has told that child, without meaning to, what the parent thinks of the real one.
What I do instead
The activities section of the Common App is ten lines with 150 characters each. It is not a résumé and it does not reward titles. It rewards evidence. Two questions decide whether something belongs there. Did you actually do it? And could you talk about it for five minutes to a stranger without notes?
If both answers are yes, we describe it precisely, with verbs. Not “member of environmental club.” Instead, what the student did on Thursdays, what they built or fixed or organized, what changed because they were there. Four true things described that way beat ten vague ones every time, and I have watched them do it.
If the honest answer is no, the line comes out, and the student and I go find something real. There is always something real. I have never met a student without one.
The fraud squad is good news for honest kids, and every application that leaves my office is honest, not because I audited it, but because we built it out of things that happened. That is slower than padding. It is also the whole point.
If you would like to talk about how your student’s application can tell the truth well, I offer every family a free introductory conversation. You can schedule one at calendly.com/clearingcbc/30min.
Judd Shapiro is the founder of Clearing College Bound Counseling in Miami. He taught English for 33 years, chaired a department for 25, and has worked as a marital and family therapist. He works with a small number of students each year, closely and individually.