“How a Chinese company bought access to college admissions officers at top U.S. colleges”

This story may surprise many of you, but it doesn’t surprise us at all.  We have known about these types of situations ever since  U.S. higher education began to open the floodgates to Chinese students more than 2 decades ago.    Although many American schools may be aware of some unethical recruiting practices in China, they may not fully understand just how blatant and common these practices are in China.

The news article illustrates how Dipont, a Chinese education company, helps its’ students cheat on their applications to U.S. schools.   Reuters reports that the company has cleverly managed to get its student-clients gain an advantage over other applicants throughout the world include but are not limited to:

• Using a New York-based charity organization called CACE (the Council for American Culture and Education Inc.) to pay big money to admissions officers at U.S. top universities,
• Writing application essays for its clients,
• Erasing all the bad grades on applicant transcripts,
• Forging recommendation letters,
• Claiming its “special relationship” with some 20 top U.S. colleges, such as Vanderbilt University, Wellesley College, Tulane University, the University of Virginia, and many others,
• Using U.S. top schools’ admissions officers’ photos and videos as its marketing materials without permission,
• Paying U.S. top schools’ representatives for attending its annual summer admissions workshops stipend plus airfare and accommodations,
• Donating $750,000 to “a University of Southern California research center that’s creating a program to combat fraud among Chinese applicants to American colleges,”
• Charging Chinese students to participate in the “summer admissions workshops”  in order to hear to schools’ admissions officers give application’s tips, and
• Charging Chinese students up to $32,500 per person a counseling fee for U.S. college applications.

One of Dipont’s former employees once warned U.S. top colleges about Dipont: “is one of the primary architects of the system of fraud and misinformation that pervades the application process to U.S. institutions.”

U.S. college admissions officers under scrutiny

For comments on what U.S. top schools have said about working with Dipont, here is some info we have gathered for Reuters:

[supsystic-tables id=’40’]

Fyi, The New York Attorney General’s office said it would review the charity, CACE’s ties to Dipont.   Marcus Owens, former director of the tax-exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), said “$750,000 is a considerable amount of money. That alone should attract the attention of the (New York) attorney general and it should also attract the attention of the IRS.”

Please click here for further detailed on Reuters’ original report.    After reading the report, you may have a bigger picture of how U.S. college admissions officers worked with Dipont.