It’s fall and all across the country, universities are welcoming new students. However, some of these schools may face an unexpected issue: individuals who were not officially admitted pretending to be part of the student body. This time in 2023, one such individual infiltrated Harvard University. This “student” announced her acceptance on social media the December prior, and joined several Class of 2027 social media pages and group chats. In April 2023, she cemented her connections with the real admitted students at Harvard’s Visitas, an event to introduce prospective students to the school and help them decide whether or not they’d like to attend. Her ruse didn’t stop there. Once the fall semester began, she managed to blend into campus life, using a fake ID to gain access to school buildings while couch-surfing between dorms.
This was not the first time a deception like this had taken place at Harvard. In 2011, Abe Liu, a Harvard Extension School Student, posed as a freshman, engaged with the Harvard University Class of 2015 Facebook group, and lived in the dormitory Weld Hall under false pretenses. He managed to keep this up for months before he was caught. As far back as the 1960s, there have been reports of students attending classes without proper admittance to the school. The first reported case occurred when a student attended classes under an admitted high school acquaintance’s name, deceiving the university for nearly a full academic year before being discovered. The student’s name was voted to be expunged from the University’s records. This is Harvard’s most extreme punishment and was the first to occur since 1936. This severe action underscores how seriously organizations, structured, purposeful, and goal-oriented collections of people, can guard their boundaries, ensuring that only those who are rightfully admitted belong to their exclusive group. These incidents reveal a pattern that can provide sociological insight into the social structures of various groups and organizations.
The repetition of these cases inspires the question: why would someone fake their attendance to a university? The motivations for these occurrences often stem from the allure of belonging to an elite organization. For many, the prestige and social capital, the network of links that develop between people, which may result in personal, social, and professional advantage, associated with universities like Harvard can be incredibly tempting. Being accepted into one of these institutions is often seen as a marker of success and belonging, as they provide access to a vast array of resources, influential contacts, and career-enhancing experiences.
However, it is not easy to be accepted to Ivy League schools. Gaining entry involves meeting certain criteria or matching a series of logical or consistent traits that align with the university’s ideal type. In Harvard’s case, very few people achieve this and are allowed in. For the Class of 2028, only 1,974 out of the 54,008 applications were admitted, highlighting the extremely selective admissions process. To be accepted, applicants must demonstrate exceptional academic performance, with the average high school GPA of admitted students around 4.2 and 73 percent having a GPA of at least 4.0 with SAT scores between 730–780 in Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and 750–800 in Math. Furthermore, Harvard expects applicants to have completed a rigorous high school curriculum, including advanced courses in math, science, English, and foreign languages. For many, it can be challenging to meet these criteria and by faking their enrollment on these campuses, individuals can experience the perceived benefits of being part of an exclusive in-group, a social unit to which an individual belongs and feels a sense of “we” despite not meeting the requirements for true membership.
