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[joey_fan]

Not sure where to post this one, but I'm curious what people think:

Is anyone following the story of high school grad who pretended to be a Stanford student, even living in the dorms, and pulled it off for 8 months?

http://stanforddaily.com/article/2007/5/24/imposterCaught
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/25/yearbookForcedKimsExposure
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/25/MNG6EQ1IDA1.DTL

..AND the second impostor they discovered the next day?

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/25/imposterIiFourYearsInVarian
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/26/IMPOSTER.TMP

Strange.

[expatinuk]

I read one story. What really made me laugh was the female students who let her stay in their room, then blamed Stanford for letting her on the campus.

[brunhilde]

I like the part where the Stanford Daily uses a search of Facebook as an indication that one person has no formal affiliation with Stanford.

[prytania3]

There was an old sit com about a kid who couldn't afford college and was always sneaking in and getting booted out. I can't remember the name of it.

Student could probably pulled it off and gotten a degree had hu not insisted on dorm space.

[larryc]

Acrimone's little sister!

(Sorry, Acrimone, couldn't help myself.)

[acrimone]

No offense taken.

The fact is that you can't prevent something like this without fundamentally changing the nature of how Universities work.  Take a dining hall, for instance.  Most college dining halls that I've seen have two options to pay: cash or meal plan points.  The cash options are there so that students who forget their cards, visiting friends, faculty, etc. can come in and get a bite to eat.  Unless you are going to require person-by-person verification of every ID card and guest pass (which would slow down the line to the point of inutility) you can't keep people out, and even then you'd have to have some way to account for a student who forgot their card.  If you just decide that at least one person in a group has to have an ID, you haven't solved the problem at all.

Classes are pretty much the same.  Sure it's easy to figure out who is in a seminar by checking the attendance roster.  But are you going to card each and every student in a 200+ person lecture hall?

Dorm security is much the same way.  It's hard enough to get students to keep their damn halls locked -- do we really think that the students aren't going to find a way around any sort of checkpoint we put in place?  And do we really want an environment where a student from Jones Hall II has to stop at the little security checkpoint and see if the student at Jones Hall III is in to buzz him in? 

Constant internal checkpoints simply won't work -- the transaction costs are too high and they'd be ignored in any case.

The only thing that might work is to have an outside perimeter -- a big ass wall with big ass stylishly designed iron spikes on top of it -- where no one can actually get onto the campus itself without either being affiliated with the university or obtaining a daily pass.  Walls work in situations like that.

That would be easier at a place like Washington & Lee, but how would you do that at a place like NYU?  Harvard already has it -- sort of -- for part of the campus, anyway; they just would need to monitor the gates.

But how would such a wall affect town-gown issues?

The students who complain that this represents some sort of failure by the university are kidding themselves and are just talking without thinking through things.  What exactly do they want the university to do?

I guarantee the same students would complain to high heaven the minute any sort of actually effective protocol were put into place. 

And they'd be right to.

[abu_fletcher]

The only thing that might work is to have an outside perimeter -- a big ass wall with big ass stylishly designed iron spikes on top of it -- where no one can actually get onto the campus itself without either being affiliated with the university or obtaining a daily pass.  Walls work in situations like that.

The women's dorm at the American University of Sharjah has just such a big ass wall around it.  With a machine gun carrying guard in army fatigues at the gate.

[abu_fletcher]

Actually, to me, the worst part of this story is the pressue the girl felt under to pretend she was going to Stanford.  There's something deeply wrong with this.

[prytania3]

Actually, to me, the worst part of this story is the pressue the girl felt under to pretend she was going to Stanford.  There's something deeply wrong with this.

I'll bet she gets a deal from Hollywood. It's a great movie.

[_touchedbyanoodle_]

Actually, to me, the worst part of this story is the pressue the girl felt under to pretend she was going to Stanford.  There's something deeply wrong with this.

I had the same response. I didn't focus on the security issue at all, but the pressure the poor girl must have been feeling. And now, to read the columns in which her peers describe her as an average student who was obviously headed to "Subpar U."

[spork]

Actually, to me, the worst part of this story is the pressue the girl felt under to pretend she was going to Stanford.  There's something deeply wrong with this.

Both women are liars.  I don't buy the "let's blame society" argument.

What I find interesting about this is the gender effect.  A male sleeping in offices, dorm lounges, and dorm bedrooms would attract suspicion.  Even a non-student boyfriend of a female dorm resident is closely scrutinized, if not by the RAs and other authority figures, by other female students in the dorm.  The presence of the non-student is noticed.  No one thought twice about the presence of these women.

[francie_]

Hmmm, Acrimone does seem to have give a little too much thought to the issue.

[_touchedbyanoodle_]

Hmmm, Acrimone does seem to have give a little too much thought to the issue.

I daresay you're right. I don't think it was acrimone's little sister. I think it was acrimone! :)

[larryc]

My older son actually tried this when he was 18. He helped a friend move to New Orleans to attend Tulane. He fell in love with the city and decided to try and blend in at Tulane and use it as his base for an extended stay. He slept on the floor of his friend's dorm room and slid in and out of the cafeteria. 

He only made it a few weeks before getting caught and kicked out. I will have to show him this article.

[acrimone]

Hmmm, Acrimone does seem to have give a little too much thought to the issue.

You know, I've noticed that a lot of people on these fora seem to think I'm really wordy.... I just don't get it.  A post like the one I wrote takes like... 2 minutes to write, maybe three if I go back and edit and try to think of better examples (I originally had another school instead of NYU). 

The "thought" about the issue of security and perimeters and transaction costs and the like just comes from the sort of conversations you have on a day to day basis if you're really involved in educational and school policy -- which I am.