One Harvard senior almost made it out when the school finally discovered his admissions application was forged.
Maybe NU should keep an eye on the class of 2014—a former Harvard senior is facing criminal charges for forging transcripts and recommendation letters that not only led to his admission four years ago but secured him Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships.
Adam Wheeler, 23, is being charged with larceny (all that financial aid!), identity fraud, falsifying an endorsement or approval, and pretending to hold a degree. Harvard failed to discover that Wheeler did not attend MIT or Phillips Academy—a prestigious boarding school in Andover—as he claimed he did. It wasn’t until one of Wheeler’s professors found one of Wheeler’s scholarship submissions suspicious, later discovering his essay was plagiarized, that Harvard finally caught on last September.
Even after being caught, Wheeler did not stop. He started applying for transfers to other Ivy leagues like Yale and Brown, claiming false internships and submitting fake recommendations—even a fabricated one from the professor that caught him.
It’s hard to believe that lies of this magnitude could go undiscovered for so long, or be successful at any point. The odd case of Wheeler begets the question of what kind of oversight goes in to Harvard’s, and other prestigious universities’, application process.
[Middlesex District Attorney's Office]
[The Chronicle of Higher Education]
