Hard work got me into Stanford University, says Chinese student in viral video after parents paid US$6.5 million to get her accepted
- ‘The admissions officers basically do not know who you are’, teenager says in 2017 video in which she also admits her ‘natural IQ isn’t particularly high’
- Zhao Yusi is one of the students caught up in a US college admissions scandal; her family paid US$6.5 million to admit her to Stanford University
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 to 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.”
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.
