BEIJING, May 3 -- A video shot in 2017 of Zhao Yusi, the Chinese student whose family paid US$6.5 million for her fraudulent admission to Stanford University, has gone viral on social media. In it, she claims she was accepted because of her “hard work”. In the 90-minute video, made when she was 17, Zhao offered viewers advice on getting into prestigious American universities while admitting that her “natural IQ isn’t particularly high”. “I want tell everyone that getting into Stanford isn’t just a dream. You just need to have a clear goal and work as hard as you can towards it,” she said. “Some people think, ‘Did you get into Stanford because your family is rich?’ No, the admissions officers basically do not know who you are.” Chinese family reportedly paid US$6.5 million to ‘fixer’ for admission into Stanford Zhao, known as “Molly”, said she was awarded a full grant scholarship to Stanford, whose last publicised acceptance rate from 2017 at 4.65 per cent was lower than those of Harvard and Yale, at 5.2 per cent and 6.7 per cent respectively. In comparison, the acceptance rate for Oxford and Cambridge universities is about 20 per cent. Zhao is one of the students caught up in a US college admissions scandal that resulted in 33 parents, including celebrities, investors and company executives, facing fraud charges. The fixer and the main architect of the scam, William “Rick” Singer, admitted laundering their payments through his charitable foundation to bribe university administrators and sports coaches to place students. The international scheme was revealed by the US Justice Department in March, in what is the biggest criminal case involving college admissions yet. The alleged payment by Zhao’s family was by far the largest in the case. Zhao’s mother, identified as “Mrs Zhao”, released a statement through her lawyer on Friday saying that she was “misled” into donating to Singer’s charity “which was represented to her as a substantial and legitimate non-profit foundation” funding student scholarships at Stanford. She said Singer’s university admissions consultancy “did not guarantee admission into any particular school” and that her daughter was also a “victim”.
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