The Dredging – She was an Ivy League student with an inspiring story. Then her university started investigating (free registration):

One Monday morning in the fall of 2020, Mackenzie Fierceton received an email asking her to meet with Beth Winkelstein, deputy provost of the University of Pennsylvania. That afternoon, she spoke via Zoom with Winkelstein and Jane Morris, executive director of the university’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. “There are questions that now need to be answered,” Winkelstein informed her, according to Fierceton’s recollection. Who were her parents? Did her mother go to college? Was she given a car? Who was Darren? Would medical records show she had broken ribs? What about injuries to her face? The questions kept coming. At one point, Fierceton took a sip of water and began to cry.

When I initially read this story, it was somewhat sensationalized. I read the whole thing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and here are my conclusions:

1) Mackenzi Fierceton clearly violated the spirit of what the application essay was asking for. She had a grandparent who was college-educated at a time when most Americans did not graduate high school, and her mother is a doctor. She was not “first generation” university-educated, though she was first-generation elite university educated. Her mother is a radiologist, she grew up affluent.

2) Mackenzie Fierceton does believe she underwent serious trauma. She wasn’t lying in her perception. She did go into foster care for a year.

3) The system incentivizes high-achieving students from upper-middle-class backgrounds to emphasize how they are victims. Mackenzi Fierceton provided them with what they wanted, albeit a bit too thoroughly.

4) If the university went looking into the applications of many students they would find shadings of the truth and exaggerations. Not to the same extent, but the difference would be quantitative, not qualitative.