I'm surprised that this scandal doesn't seem to be causing anyone to think one step further and realize that the entire premise of "elite" colleges with competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards.
I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.
As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.
The problem with elite colleges like Harvard, has nothing to do with meritocracy. In fact, it's the opposite. They use opaque and subjective criteria in their admissions process, in order to favor those born into privilege.
For a better example of a meritocracy, take a look at New York's elite magnet schools like Stuyvesant. Their admissions process is a pure meritocracy - based entirely on a standardized exam that is taken by all applicants. The end result - Stuyvesant has far more economic diversity than any elite university. Almost half the students come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. Harvard would do the nation a tremendous service if it became more meritocratic, not less
What ratio of the races can be said to be diverse? At a minimum, wouldn't one need to know the racial breakdown of the applicant pool before being able to conclude that Stuyvesant is not racially diverse?
I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian" one big race, but (for example) Caucasian and Hispanic two different races? It just seems so arbitrary.
Do you have an opinion on Stuyvesant's admission policy? Your comment seems rather pointed but stops short of condemning it.
I don't know the answer, so I was just pointing that out since the word diversity rarely comes with with economics. However, I think that since OP pointed out it's a meritocracy you get kids whose parents really care, and not poor kids whose parents are working all the time. That tends to be cultural to some extent.
Yes race is arbitrary but it is easy to catch on to what a society is referring to.
Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.
I'm glad this distinction got teased out. I find that it rarely does.
When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can).
For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy.
It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty.
The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course).
In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.
Are you saying that for example if someone's parents make over $150k/year, he better show 800 on SAT, but if the income is less than say $50k, 600 is fine?
Absolutely not. I suspect that the folks in admissions had more than enough 800's (from all walks of life) to choose from admission-wise. Their balancing act was trying to offer competitive scholarship and aid packages that would seduce the right mix of kids into taking their admission offer over the other admission offers they received.
Not an easy task, but an important one!
600's (literally or metaphorically) were a non-starter. Those kids got chewed up and spit out. Putting a perfectly innocent, well-meaning, ambitious high-school grad in that position was not a desirable outcome for anyone.
Perhaps you're not from the US? There is a strong current of sentiment in some quarters of the US that this is exactly what should happen if society's playing field is every going to be leveled.
How does letting in stupid people level the playing field? I want a doctor who is qualified to be a doctor, not someone who got by because they checked a diversity box.
The reason graduating from a prestigious school is valuable is because the graduates have some expected level of quality. Letting in stupid people doesn’t do the stupid people much good, and it certainly harms the prestige of an institution that was supposed to be focused on academics.
Would you add an obese minority to the olympic track team because the minority is underrepresented?
But it's not the Olympic track team, and we know disadvantaged kids placed into an advantaged situation demonstrate an IQ increase and perform up to par.
Education is uniquely different from training and certification. I say that as someone who has been through some of the most rigorous programs in both worlds. Education has no immediate impact on the outside world. You don't get to stamp a bridge design as a PE because you went to Stuy and MIT. You have to go through on-the-job training and certification exams. Same for physicians and attorneys. Education is part of it, but you absolutely have to pass the boards to practice.
Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
Also, this is Hacker News, why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
You missed the point. Schools are only prestigious because of an expected quality of students. Nobody is clamoring to hire random folks that took free online MIT courses and there is a reason for that.
>Also, who would you have in mind to be the minority on a track team?
I don’t know, a gay Muslim, a queer Christian, what does it matter? Once you’ve started selecting for diversity rather than merit, you’ve failed no matter which minority you choose.
>why would you want to be getting stodgy about educational qualifications up around here?
I don’t care about education, but that’s because in my field it’s relatives easy to check expertise with hands on exercises. But that misses the whole point of the conversation.
The only reason anyone cares about education on the hiring side is that it’s supposed to be an intelligence/competency signal. If you just let whoever into the MIT electrical engineering department because their skin is the right color then there really isn’t much to say for the aptitude of MIT EE grads.
Finally, if disadvantaged people performed up to par when placed in school and intelligence didn’t matter, then schools could simply save hundreds of thousands of dollars by firing the admissions department and replacing it with a random number generator.
Many of these "elite" colleges are one of the best avenues to eliminate inequality. Many of them have significant (at least double digit) percentages of the student population that are first generation college students. Elite universities often have the greatest degree of racial diversity.
They don't eliminate inequality, they just facilitate a game of musical chairs. America has a very high and very well documented level of income inequality. It's also well documented that the people at the top often change. There's a lot of turnover at the top from generation to generation.
But the system property of inequality -- that is to say that American society is a highly stratified society with huge winners and huge losers -- is not going away, in fact American society is becoming more stratified. The elite universities perpetuate this system by conferring exceptional career benefits to their alumni.
Even though a few people will get promoted to the top, and nowadays some of them will even be women, people of color, etc., this system of inequality has some pretty painful drawbacks for most Americans, which manifest in long working hours, higher rates of mental illness, etc. as compared to more equal societies.
Richer rich people leads to higher inequality but it really says nothing about the quality of life for the average person. If we euthanized the top 1% of the US, how much do you think the lives of the other 99% would improve?
The racial diversity and non-legacy admits are there to prop up the prestige of the school. They get the the odd genius admitted, so that the wealthy can brush elbows with him/her. It may lift those select few out of poverty, but it in no way helps the average smart person get ahead of the average smart rich person.
Screw that. If you work hard people take notice, that's it. You can go to a CC, grind hard through your classes, transfer into a school with a better network, continue to grind hard, and land the job because anyone who sees your CV will see that you are a fighter who gives a shit.
Some of the richest kids in my high school paid full tuition to ivy league schools, didn't come to play school, and ended up with a scrappy job anyone could have gotten from just about any school. Work hard.
I think there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program (SAT score, etc) that I simply don't have. That doesn't help matters at all.
> there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program
Yeah, the ability to be accepted into an elite program. This often has little bearing in real life (honestly, how much do you really care about the ability to get a good SAT score anymore?).
you can grind your way to a high SAT score (I know this personally because in a span of 2-3 months i went from mediocre to 'great' SAT scores just from grinding), you can grind your way to great grades, you can grind your way to an "elite" college. But ultimately, while those things may help you get ahead, they don't make or break you. What is needed to be successful is hard work, creativity,risk taking and luck. Your woe is me attitude is going to hold you back much more than your not attending an elite university.
I also grinded my way into an "OK" SAT score (2230 superscored, 1500/1600) but that isn't good enough to get into any of the elite schools. Worse yet all of my friends got 2250+ :(
Why not? The relationship between colleges and the accomplishments of the people attending them is tenuous at best. There are thousands of people at good universities that do essentially nothing, and wherever you are you have the opportunity to do better than them.
The cool stuff projects are never the right career move, the work/life balance doesn't exist, and even then you have to be on constant lookout for the right team to join.
"I'm willing to put up with insanity" is a more important criteria for working on cool projects than what school you went to.
Source: I've been on those cool projects, I've hired for them as well. End of the day, the questions "want to write an OS, work 70hrs+ a week and live under constant fear of not having a job when you come in tomorrow?" get asked, alma mater, not so much.
Of course at the end of the day, you get some great stories out of it. You also get literal grey hair, potential lost friendships (I lucked out there! Saw plenty of it around me though.), and an ongoing base level of stress that is very unhealthy.
I graduated from a state school over a decade ago. I'm working at a good company now doing things that some people would consider "cool". And I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head what university a single one of my coworkers went to.
I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
And the farther out you are from college, the less and less it matters. In programming, past a certain number of years out, it may not even matter if you have a degree at all.
Well, my state school (rank #50+) is quite a bit different from yours in terms of quality (rank #25 or less) for starters. I didn't get anywhere close to an 800 on my Math SAT, whereas I'm sure a lot of people at UMD CS did (and a few at my school did too!).
>I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".
Right, it's more of a correlation for inherent inferiority in my case more than anything else, but that's besides the point.
Ultimate accomplishment is driven more by hard work than by innate talent. I coasted on my talent in school through most of school and came into the working world unprepared to seriously go do cool stuff for quite awhile. It wasn't until much more recently that I buckled down and got better at applying myself that I really started to see an upward trajectory. And none of this has anything to do with what school you went to for undergrad awhile ago.
You're too hard on yourself. I know lots of people who went to elite universities and haven't done any really cool stuff.
More broadly, from an economic perspective, there are outliers, but most people only move one income quintile up or down from where their parents are (or don't move at all). So while we have some leverage over our futures, this suggests that we have less leverage than we believe. (So, for example, does the fact that 65% of millennials think they'll be millionaires by age 45, even though only 6% of Americans are millionaires.)
Certainly there's no reason to beat yourself up for not achieving things that are exceptional on an absolute scale (unless maybe you were born at the top and blew all your advantages).
Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). Never had any of that or knew how to do it.
I helped design/write an embedded runtime when I was ~29. Got a lot of patents out of it.
If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS.
Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare.
You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions.
Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.
No problem! If you are willing, for only a few thousand I'm willing to sit down and write a 1 page draft on a variety of topics!
Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything!
> I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless).
For each of those people there are a hundred that haven't done anything like that. "Ability" is a continuum: there are levels between "not doing anything" and "at the top of everything". Join your local research lab, try some competitive programming, do some open source work–just try your best and see what you can do! Not everyone can be the very best (though, it's entirely possible that you can, if you work hard and get lucky, so I don't want to close that off to you), but that doesn't make you unable to do cool things.
(FWIW, I'm in a middling undergraduate program, have no patents or papers in my name, and while I've competed in olympiads I have probably not done so at the level you're thinking of; I still feel that I've done cool things. YMMV, but if you want to chat personally feel free to shoot me an email.)
Are you dying soon? If not, there's no deadline. If the people you know did a cool thing at 20 or 21, and you do a cool thing at 24 or 25 (or 45 or 55 or 65 or ...), it is still cool, is it not?
It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.
If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”.
Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead.
That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into.
A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.
Perhaps you are focusing on a wrong sort of accomplishments. Do you really crave to be a highly paid Boeing PR drone, twisting the truth to protect their corrupt management from legal responsibility for 737-MAX screw-up?
You shouldn't feel that way at all, there are lots of unsuccessful people from each year's class at those kinds of universities, you just don't hear about them.
If you want to feel that condemned for life by the capitalist caste system feeling, read the part in The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz where people are trying to stop them from hiring Mark Cranney, even though he is apparently the best sales exec they have ever seen, because he went to "a weak school". They even admit he could be the CEO of IBM instead of a sales guy at a floundering startup if he didn't have "those things wrong with him".
No they are not. The numbers of first generation college students there are too small and the objective is to produce compliant members of establishment, not to rock the boat or derail the gravy train.
Back a while high school was the sort of "standard education" things have changed and now college is considered the default level people should have in the workforce, back when college was rare I think private colleges made sense, they were more of a final specialty training step at the end of your education - now that has shifted over to PhDs - let PhD programs remain privatized for whatever reasons, but we should extend government grants to cover all two and four year degrees and publicize the sector. Some kids will still stop their education at middle school - or high school, but we as a society benefit if everyone who wants one can get a college education.
So that college can have the same drop in quality that high schools have had, and PHD’s can be the next bachelors degree and we can continue pouring more and more of the GDP and percent of people’s lives into “education”? Why?
The whole labor dynamic has changed in the US over the last half century. Manufacturing left and never came back. Unskilled labor is not in demand any longer, skills are, so it's no wonder that there are a lot of people with bachelors degrees. Most PhDs, at least in stem, are fully funded at least.
Well, I guess that opinion just depends on how well you did on standardized tests in 5th grade. I smoked all my peers on that test they give you at the end of elementary. It would have been great if some communist party bureaucrat swooped in and took me to a school full of high scorers. Too bad that was my peak academically. Ha.
Many people would argue that "We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards." is exactly the point of higher education, and serves the goal of sustaining the power structures that currently exist.
That's why "legacy admissions" even exist. If your dad or your mom went to Harvard, of course you'd want to sustain the family line and have an easy time to get admitted to Harvard too.
I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school.
If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.
>I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school.
Or maybe the solution should be to stop accepting bribes. I really am surprised that almost all of the public outrage is being directed at the parents and more of it isn't being directed at the people who actually received the cash. I think lots of parents are willing to stretch their morals in order to give their kid every possible advantage in life. That isn't exactly noble behavior, but it is more forgivable to me than the old-fashioned financially motivated corruption of the people who accepted the bribes. And even the school agreeing to the "buying a building" style bribe has some type of altruistic motive to improve the welfare of the school. The people accepting these bribes were just trying to get rich.
That's the reason the public outage is directed at the parents, though; the choice they made is a conversation topic. Accepting the bribes is just run of the mill corruption--much less interesting.
Coaches and administrators of D1 sports programs are already well compensated. Plus no one needs $400k payments to feed their kids unless they have made some horrible financial mistakes.
Really? You think that the coach of, say, a D1 rowing team is going to be well-compensated? I doubt it. They'll certainly be less well-compensated than all of the FAANG engineers they're competing against in the housing market.
First result on Google[1] says the median salary for a Pac-12 rowing coach is $132,500 and I would bet Stanford is paying more than the median. That also doesn't include bonuses, other non-salary compensation from the school, or money from other non-school specific sources (it is relatively common for coaches to get compensated by vendors, run instructional camps, or have other auxiliary sources of income). So they might not match the arbitrary comparison of FAANG engineers, but they are a far cry from claiming they can't feed their kids without resulting to bribes.
> If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.
The tradition is nepotism and bribes. It's a relatively recent thing for the state to go after the moderately wealthy for doing what they've done for millennia.
That was a joke targeting the tradition of the rich and powerful using said riches and power to get in, but at least it was obvious and in the public eye - it doesn't take a huge amount of deductive reasoning to see the connection between the new "Mark McMarksFace" Building and little jimmy mcmarksface gets into school). Similarly seeing friends and family of the school board getting in shouldn't be shocking.
I think a key difference here is that the McMarksFace building is given to the university, while the bribery scandal involves giving money to individuals. An analogy would be "buying" a car by giving $5k to the salesperson to get the keys rather than $50k to the dealership to actually buy it.
"A donation does not purchase a place at Stanford, and we work very hard to ensure that prospective donors understand this. Stanford does not accept gifts if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the admission process."
Likely true, at least in a direct sense, but Stanford does give a nearly three-fold preference to legacy applicants. Alumni are more likely to donate to Stanford than non-alumni.
By definition a donation cannot come with strings attached. but it will influence their admissions process, because they don’t want to discourage future no strings attached donations...
You still get the wondrous private institution problem of hereditary entry (which is a great example of something that isn't explicitly racist still resulting in a fundamentally and uncorrectable racist result)
Yup and while they continue to practice legacy admissions they claim they’ve tried everything to achieve diversity and just have to do affirmative action.
Unless you change your admission process to be based on competitive entrance exams everyone has to take, with an anonymous review process. This is mostly the norm in France.
Off the top of my head I’m not sure, but my question isn’t asking about merit-based selection in the abstract. I’m asking if there are drawbacks to the specific system mentioned; that is, competitive entrance exams with anonymous review.
One one hand, donating to improve the chances of one's kid getting admitted is kind of scummy. On the other hand, the immense amount of money that gets donated is why elite schools are able to give very generous financial aid. Stanford doesn't even charge tuition if parents make less than $125,000 per year. On principle I'm adverse to wealthy people buying opportunities, but if buying opportunities creates more of them for other people then I think that may be a net good.
If the school would benefit from that building why should it be dependent on a rich kid needing to get in to secure that funding?
If that rich family didn't end up having a kid that needed to get into that school then the building would never be built - but the family is certainly able to afford funding the construction of that building. I think that's unfair in it's own way on all parties involved.
Rich people only have so many kids. For the price of admitting ~2 students every 25 years or so you get a free building or an endowment that pays the way for 10s or 100s of students every single year.
Thanks to the current tax environment the school doesn't have some alternate choice; the state is not going to step in and provide that funding.
As an administrator do you take the money or do you skip out on expanding a department or admitting 20 kids who need a full ride scholarship to attend?
People rarely give stuff away for free. Philanthropy often serves as a political tool, and a means to increase one's social status. University donations are no different. Families are more willing to donate if they believe that it improves the chances of their kids getting admitted to university.
It’s a good way to identify who is either not of taxpaying age or has never made a donation before. In either case, probably not someone who has things figured out yet enough to hold strong opinions on what other people do with their money.
Why not, it benefits the whole student body and is above board, everyone knows. These people were bribing people who were not in school governance, people in athletics for example, to get their kid in, denying another deserving kid. Neither the school or other students benefitted, only the people partaking in the bribery scheme.
Apparently academic talent is not reliably enough to get into a UC anymore, due to the vagaries of yield management and going to a school full of high achievers making it difficult to stand out when you’d walk it if you went to a school with less gifted average students. This is obviously only a problem for a very small segment of the population but if getting an academic publication in high school is not enough to get into an elite college the system is broken.
> In my local public schools, the average SAT is 1470, higher than half of the Ivy League (this pretty much tells you where I live). A lot of that is due to selection of middle class Bay Area professionals, but much of it is due to focussed test prep. Local test prep (which is ridiculously intense) can add 200 points, if you commit to doing it. As a result, all those people who have near straight As can increase their score until their SATs (or ACTs) are near perfect. This leaves a huge pool.
...
> Can you get into one of these schools by being academically brilliant? Essentially no. The professors have no power to help a student get accepted. There is just no way for them to intervene. People joke saying a first author paper in Nature would do the job, but as no teen has published a paper in Nature as first author in time for admissions (the paper needs to be accepted by November of your senior year, 6 months of review time would be fast, a high schooler is unlikely to get a straight accept, so most likely will need to revise and resubmit. Realistically, submitting your ground breaking research by the end of your sophmore year would be in time. This does not happen.) I know of cases where students have had published papers by admission time. Harvard, Yale and MIT have a way to upload published papers in the admission process, but in the case I am familiar with, the papers were not reviewed by professors. How do I know this? The student was in email contact with the relevant professors (in all three colleges), as about 80% of college professors will get back to high school students who send them papers, with marked up comments (professors are wonderful). They told the child the admission committee did not contact them, and said they would admit the child to graduate school, but had no power over undergraduate admissions. At least one child with one publication in Analytic Philosophy do not get admitted to these schools.
> the whole math competition system is incredibly valuable because it's the last bastion of truly meritocratic examination systems in the country. (The other Olympiads are as well, but they're not even 10% as large.) Test prep services for it barely do anything.
This is false, speaking from my experience at a top high school in the Bay Area (I was never +4 standard deviations, but did come close in some isolated cases). 90+% of the people who did well in math competitions were on Art of Problem Solving at some point. It's entirely possible to coach for these, it just requires coaching from people who are extremely talented (and expensive!)
Honestly, I really don't understand the motivations for some of these parents. Take Lori Loughlin. $500,000? For USC? For two daughters, one of whom clearly isn't that interested, isn't particularly academic and isn't particularly athletic? Like... why?
I can understand if someone bribes their kid into, say, Harvard or Yale Law School. There's a career where going to a good school matters. But this? It just makes no sense to me.
Felicity Huffman may end up being sentenced to 10 months in jail (and, let's face it, might serve only 5) but, still, that's a big deal for someone who probably never expected to go to jail. It's also on the lighter end because of her guilty plea and cooperation with the prosecution. What are these parents who have plead not guilty going to get when they're found guilty?
Add to this the children have to live with the stigma of these actions. I don't have a huge amount of sympathy here because at least some of them were complicit. Posing for photos faking crew, that sort of thing. But still... why would you want to risk your children having to live with that... to go to USC?
USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast (especially in Southern California). It's obviously not on the same academic level as UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford/Caltech, but it's still very much an exclusive brand. You don't get it because you don't live here and aren't surrounded by wealthy 16-year olds that yearn to go to USC (often times over UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford).
> USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast (especially in Southern California).
> it's still very much an exclusive brand
I would say weirdly exclusively in Southern California. I can’t think of a school with more regional status and less national status than USC. Maybe some of the bespoke NYC schools? Hell, I’ve worked with folks in Oregon and Washington who have thrown out resumes because they went to USC.
> ...I can’t think of a school with more regional status and less national status than USC...
The state schools in the midwest are an example of this - say, Kansas State University. Another one: Catholic schools -- St. Louis University; huge regionally, but not nationally. I was not marinated in NY State, but my impression is that the SUNY schools have some of this too.
Really, I think there are a lot of colleges with a big regional reputation, but not so much nationally.
If you know international students, you can see the same kind of thing play out in a larger stage -- universities that are top nationally, but not so well-known outside the country. Say, Seoul National University, or Tsinghua, or ENS, or some of the IITs or IISc. And incidentally, for these excellent schools, it's not their fault that their quality is not well-known outside their host region.
I went to Berkeley, it’s a far better public school than Washington or Oregon, who appear to be oddly insecure of their schools’ >40% acceptance rates. Surely our graduates would never make discriminatory hiring decisions that may deprive their company of talent.
Nothing says oddly insecure like creating a new account and repeatedly shilling for your alma mater when you are aggrieved because people happen to be criticizing it obliquely.
Just so you know, no one takes USNWR rankings seriously -- it's well-known that public schools are dinged due to lower endowments and higher student counts. To wit, the idea that Berkeley is academically comparable to USC is a joke.
This jives with engineering industries, where USC is a consistent producer of aerospace/mechanical and tech talent. USC is considered a top school in many other research fields as well.
I think it's more likely that you actually know very little about academics at these institutions.
Disclaimer: I work at UPenn (doing research!) and went to USC.
Maybe at the graduate level Berkeley should be ranked higher but how are public schools dinged? UCLA has an endowment almost as high as USC’s with comparable student body size. Thinking public schools are dinged because they’re poor is factually wrong.
Also, Berkeley is about where it would be given its acceptance standards and standardized scores outside of EECS are among the lowest in the top 25. The only school where it’s actually getting easier to be accepted year after year.
The student bodies aren't all that comparable. Although they both have 45k students, USC has twice as many graduate students as UCLA and they even outnumber the undergrads.
But really, its pretty foolish to compare an entire school to another. A given program against another given program? Sure. There are fields that USC and UCLA each might be at the top of, and there are fields where they are going to be much worse. That's the real rub with these rankings, combining and binning aspects of schools that aren't related at all. The only thing that's worth looking at is the rigor or research output of a specific program.
As far as ranking the quality of colleges, USNews is about as garbage as you can get. Anybody with any shred of awareness of what those three schools are would not rank them anywhere near each other.
I love posts like this, "I don't like your data, it is bad, and I have none"
All lists are lame, do you like Niche? UCLA is 29, USC is 20. UCLA has an acceptance rate of 16%, USC 17%. USC SAT range is 1300-1500, UCLA is 1220-1450
I was responding to the poster who said the schools weren't academically comparable. they obviously are shockingly similar. Don't know or care which is "better". But only a radical partisan would argue they aren't similar.
That’s measuring the quality of applicants, not the quality of the school. The subjects you are measuring the school by haven’t even spent their first day in class. A little premature to judge the quality of a product that has yet to be delivered.
If you want to get into data then at least cite the most recent numbers. I'm not going to bother doing the due diligence you should have done on your numbers, but at least for the USC acceptance rank, the most recent figure is 11%.
Hey, that's a great number, thanks for sharing it. It helps make my point. USC acceptance rate is now better than UCLA, so it is ludicrous to say it is not comparable to schools like UCLA.
How much due diligence do I you think I owe you in a comment on HN? If you google USC acceptance rate, the primary result is 16.6%. I was referring to Niche rankings, which says 17%. I think having a source and an accurate (albeit a couple years old) number is better than 99% of comments. So maybe you believe you are entitled to more, but if so, then maybe you should lead by example and share more data yourself instead of just sniping.
I’m from the Bay Area and I can tell you that as far as “status” goes, USC and UCLA don’t carry much status at all, if any. Berkeley is considered far more prestigious here. And of course, Stanford.
I grew up in norcal and live in the bay area. Plenty of my high school classmates chose UCLA over Berkeley because they wanted to get farther away from home. Some of them are now med school professors.
The difference between these two UCs is not as great as you might think. Neither has the elite status of ivy league schools, but most people I've run across on hiring committees viewed the two ad fairly comparable.
Note: I went to UCLA for grad school and have many family members that have gone to Cal.
Most people I’ve run into on hiring committees do not know or care what school the applicant went to, or if they even went to school. That data isn’t provided. Interview performance is the only factor.
Big firms care about what schools an associate went to. For partners (10+ years out), they care more about the book of business you'll bring. But there's definitely elitism that lasts well beyond your first few years.
I recall being asked by a visiting partner who was considering having me work on his case where I went to undergrad. At the time, I was a senior associate, so I had a decade of schooling and experience since undergrad.
I think they meant that Berkeley and Stanford are the hardest to get into, not that they are necessarily the 'best'. I would assume that anyone who got into Stanford or Berkeley could get into any other school in California.
And you can't forget that these wealthy parents have the same desire as many parents to keep their children close to them. So USC offers enough prestige while keeping their kids closer. It is also prestigious in that it is hard to get in and very expensive.
I think it is about status signalling for the parents
and the social status prospects for the children more than its about career prospects for the children.
What college your children attend seems to have a big affect on your social status in the US, and the children's social status is definitely hugely affected by what college they attend. Apparently it is much cooler to say you went to USC then the University of Arizona.
Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but I think the parents aren't stupid to be worried about their children's social status in this way.
I’ve met some mothers that place huge value on status signals based on school that their kids attended. I don’t understand it in the least, but I know it definitely exists. It doesn’t matter at all how the school ranks objectively, it’s entirely related to the status among the specific individuals that the mother wants to impress. Often, it’s other mothers whose kids went there.
Fathers might do this too, but I haven’t personally seen it. If I had to guess, the fathers that care about status are probably more likely to “one-up” than “keep-up”. Same insecurities, just manifested differently.
It’s really ridiculous and petty behavior on the adults part, at the expense of the child’s best interests.
A lot of parents see their kids as younger manifestations of themselves, so they take the kids achievements such as getting into a good school as validation for themselves (Good genetics, great parenting etc...) and feel the opposite if their kids fail to do so. This is the only explanation for going so out of the way to essentially "fake" achievement for the kids so you can look better.
If you aren’t familiar with the US education system, it’s a school ranked in the top 20 with an 11% acceptance rate, only twice as high as Stanford’s with a body 4x as large. It's a large school with a massively beneficial and incestuous network. Based on LinkedIn numbers, 1 out of 4 people in SV that didn't graduate from Stanford went to USC. Go around talking misinformation about that school in particular and see what wonders it does for your career.
Well I went to Berkeley, it’s questionable why we’re even ranked in the top 25 with an acceptance rate 30-40% higher than UCLA or USC this year whom like you said, don’t deserve to be in the top 20. Imagine what it would be without EECS. Berkeley grads need to pay attention to what’s happening with the school, it may be the only college in Californi where applications have been going down for the past 3-4 years.
Google says the acceptance rate is 17%. Would love to see your source on 25% of non-Stanford alumni SV people being from USC. Anecdotally, I’ve met one.
Not sure where you are getting that wild number. There are 4,206,862 people in SF Bay Area on LinkedIn and 28,676 have USC listed on their profile. That's....not 1 in 4.
They're not that elite if they're gonna get ensnared in this one. If you're one of the elite you just donate a building, which is a completely legal way to get your kids into a school of your choice.
Matt Levine's trademark... objectivity? cynicism? is perfect for this.
"It is not about fairness; it is about theft. Selective colleges have admissions spots that they want to award in particular ways. They want to award some based on academic factors; they want to award others based on athletic skill; they want to award others in exchange for cash, but—and this is crucial—really a whole lot of cash. Buildings are not cheap.
...The bribery scheme devalued the asset not only by stealing it and re-selling it for less than it was worth, but also by being so explicitly commercial.
...consultants and coaches are misappropriating the asset and selling it for their own benefit."
I reject this - if we want admission in the US to be entirely wealth based and Oligarchic we should just buy that concept whole-hog. Many of us (I hope?) believe that scholarships that allow smart people coming from bad backgrounds to succeed are worth their cost[1] so clearly the ability to make use of your education is part of our general societal motivation to give someone one.
[1] There are lots of scholarships, grants and other things out there, many go to people who don't need them and there are issues with the system both on that end and with regards to the cost for an education - please ignore those and just focus on the concept of financial aide to an intelligent driven student who genuinely needs it to pay fair value to get an education in terms of reimbursing all expenses given to give this student an education and nothing else.
Don't you need the funding of the super rich guy with the dumb kid who takes up a single student slot in order to offer free school to the dozen kids who "deserve" it academically?
Without the first (in aggregate, over generations), the others don't even have the option.
Plenty of people make donations for reasons of prestige, legacy and even genuine care, which have nothing to do with making sure their kid gets into a certain school.
But there would still be less of those donations. There would be some, yes. But significantly less. And less money means that these school are unable to let in as many poor people as they did before.
In general terms regarding systems in our society - If the system is dependent on charity to support it... it isn't supported, if the system is valued by society then society should support it up to the cost of it's value.
Education is absolutely worth the cost and the need to charity is highlighting the underfunding here[1].
[1] Also, the inefficient use of money, higher education is absolutely guilty of inefficient operation with lots of cushy bureaucrat jobs, but imagine we could make higher education efficient and it still required an additional injection of cash via charitable donations.
> If the system is dependent on charity to support it... it isn't supported
This could apply to literally everything in the world, forever.
Unless 1,000 trillion dollars per year is being spent on education, then that educational system would benefit from more charity.
More charity is basically always good.
Nobody at all loses from this. More money gets spent on the university, and this money more than pays for the cost of the student. This allows even more students to benefit from this.
Why should we sacrifice the education of 10 kids, just to stop 1 rich kid from going to a top college?
>In general terms regarding systems in our society - If the system is dependent on charity to support it... it isn't supported
Whoops, you got that backwards. If a system is dependent on compulsory taxes, it isn’t supported. If nobody cares to voluntarily donate to it or pay for services on their own, then it’s not something really valued by society.
There's a massive amount of daylight between wanting admissions to be completely oligarchic and recognizing that at some point a seat should have a price. For example, suppose it was worth it to Bezos to fund the entire Harvard class of '23, and the price is that his child ought to be a member of that class. It would be absurd for Harvard to turn this down. There is no victim of this trade, except perhaps Bezos' heirs -- Harvard can use a small fraction of the money to create an extra seat for the would be freshman.
That does not mean admissions would be oligarchic in its entirety. It would not have to affect the "meritocracy" by which the remaining seats are won. Being willing to accept profoundly large donations in exchange for a seat is not the same as turning the whole admissions process into an auction. There are not enough people willing to give such donations for a seat.
Or, maybe a slightly more cynical take? Look at the parental wealth distribution of private colleges, and you'll notice that it already is "oligarchic." I mean in the sense that children of relatively wealthy parents are by far more likely to make the cut to get in in the first place.
Why should Bezos, poor billionaire that he is, need to pay such a ridiculous price for his child's education. Wouldn't it make more sense to just publicly fund the creation of these seats and have people pay their fair share? I think the scenario you set up for Bezos is actually unjust against him - maybe people should pay admission costs to support the education of society's children in a manner that fairly spreads that cost across those who benefit from that education.
It's not up to me, or any of us. It's up to Harvard, and specifically its board of trustees. Presumably Harvard doesn't want just anyone to be able to donate the accounting cost of a seat, because the cost doesn't scale linearly. Just like with company culture, it's hard to scale up. And putting the machinery in place to facilitate such transactions would be difficult.
It's much easier to say that they'll give a spot only when the donation far exceeds the cost of a seat. That way you don't need any complicated machinery. The exact limit may not even be written down anywhere. It might just be a sort of "I'll know it when I see it," sort of deal, since the number of seats given this way per year should be fairly small, even at a university as famed as Harvard.
Of course, we don't actually know that any of this is happening at all. It's just a cynical presumption, as far as I can tell. All I'm saying is that it would be reasonable if it were done this way, at least from the perspective of all stakeholders who have a say in the matter.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to just publicly fund the creation of these seats and have people pay their fair share?
Even if education is publicly funded, allowing these "bribes" would allow even more people into elite institutions.
So by all means, fund stuff. Unless you are willing to spend infinity dollars, it is all better to allow even more funding to come in, and pay for people who wouldn't have been able to attend those institutions otherwise.
Dr. Dre's daughter got into USC after Dr Dre co-founded a school there. Sure, the donation was made in 2013, but I'm sure the 70 million dollar donation impacted their decision.
Colleges are an educational resource, that we currently conceive of as limited - this resource should be distributed primarily to the students who benefit from it the most. Other factors like legacy, donations, bribes, and athletic ability should all be removed from the equation.
This assertion that it's a value-add for the rest of the students assumes that they wouldn't have new buildings donated by alumni as an honest donation and not a bribe.
I think it would be very interesting to see a plot of the number of buildings named for the donor + how many children of donors were admitted in exchange for these buildings. I would expect that schools can get all the endowment they need without trading admission for it. Anyone seriously trading a building for a spot in the school is not making a trade in the best interest of the school, they are playing favorites to keep particular donors happy. But wouldn't the school be better off as a whole, to stand with integrity, without the cloud of corrupt donors?
What about the kids that didn’t get to go? The ones that the rich students replaced. That’s the real tragedy. The students don’t even know that they were out-moneid.
The amount to donate a building probably covers the cost to expand the student capacity of a university by several dozen students. With the donation they could easily afford to accept everyone they otherwise would have accepted and also accept the one rich kid and still come out way on top. So I'd be surprised if they did this -- though not shocked.
Sure, but if we're actually talking about donating a building (maybe I took that too literally?), we're talking about 3 kids a year, tops. It would barely change the 2nd decimal place in an acceptance percentage at a lot of schools.
Because they don’t want the illusion of meritocracy to be tarnished. It’s better to say 10k students were accepted on merit and an addition 3 building donation students.
Why is that a tragedy? So they didn’t go to Yale, Stanford, or USC (?!?). Presumably if they were borderline at those schools they ended up somewhere perfectly fine.
I’m happy these parents are being prosecuted, but I don’t think there were any tragedies here.
> which is a completely legal way to get your kids into a school of your choice.
It may not defraud the university, but that doesn't make it legal. When a university promises its admissions / grading are fair / based on neutral criteria, but in fact accepts bribes and gives preferential grades... that's also fraud. It's fraud against the students who have are paying for an education which is not what they were sold. Bribing the school makes those parents parties to that fraud. Donating a building (for the purpose of getting your kid into a university) is (usually) a crime.
Edit: That's not to say a University can't acknowledge in its application materials: "Yes, we accept bribes!" However, that may may hurt the business more than operating legally.
But that misses what's going on here. Some of the indicted parents certainly did have the means to donate a building. But social status is now built on at least the appearance of a meritocracy. Donate a building, and everyone says your kid just got in because you donated a building. Bribe a coach secretly, and sure, everyone knows your kid had tons of advantages growing up, but you can at least keep up the facade that the kid deserves to be there.
It might of made a nice check for one of those endowments, scholarship funds, or private (as in non-public) grants that make university administrators quite happy.
People have been giving buildings and endowments for hundreds of years. It is not illegal to give buildings and money for the endowments. What these folks did was run a scam on the university.
There is no hook or wrong doing in giving a building. It benefits a lot of people. These folks actually did something illegal. Grouping people who actually gave to the university with people who paid a scam artist is wrong.
Hrm, I don't think that's illegal in and of itself. I engage in quid pro quo transactions all the time. For example, when I go to the grocery store, I give them money and I get bananas. This for that. Quid pro quo is only illegal when the money is in exchange for otherwise illegal behavior, such as bribing a government official to assign a contract to your company.
Of course, it's not illegal to admit someone to a university for a price. The donor couldn't deduct the donation from your taxes, or at least the portion of it which was required to secure enrollment for a given student. But other than that, I'm not aware of any law which would put someone "on the hook" for this.
There's nothing wrong with giving, but there is something wrong with giving and calling it a donation, when in reality it's a quid pro quo transaction. Which is illegal, but unprovable. Matt Levine's comment quoted elsewhere in this thread is describes the only difference in the scenarios.
The problem comes down to taxes. Donations to universities are tax deductible, but if it's an explicit quid pro quo for admission, then it's no longer eligible. So any quid pro quo donations that are written off on taxes are tax fraud.
We have public and private universities. Private universities get public funds through a variety of means, mostly scientific grants, but not public funding in the sense of unconditional grants to the general university fisc.
The IRS would probably not look kindly on universities (tax-exempt) literally selling seats at massively inflated prices. But if you give a lot of money and your kid just happens to have really great “intangibles” well that’s just fine.
The actual problem here is not the bribery. The problem is that those bribes are being captured by random 3rd parties, rather than by the school itself. The correct way to implement college admissions is this: Charge a sliding scale fee based on application quality, and then use the excess revenue generated to subsidize poor kids tuition. Your kid has a 2.5 GPA and wants to go to Harvard? Great, that'll be a million dollars a year. You'll be funding the tuition of 20-30 kids of lesser means and everybody wins.
I'd urge you to think more about this. You can imagine the same thing for murder trials: 10 million per victim or you go to jail. You can use the money to make the world better!
I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty will be punished.
I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's naive to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the narratives end up serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can exist without those ideals.
> I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty will be punished.
Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action, which is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria. We are already a long ways from pure meritocracy.
> I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's naive to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the narratives end up serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can exist without those ideals.
Two things:
1. I think you're overindexing on the importance of these narratives a bit, but you're right, they're important.
2. More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by the eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules, they're just tempered by money.
Some of the idea behind programs like affirmative action is that because of race/class/gender, some people score lower on various exams than they could. They were not given equal opportunities - and so to judge them equally during admissions would not be fair.
I think affirmative action is tricky, because we single out some reasons for 'sub-potential' performance, but we ignore a lot of others. But even if I think it's tricky, I tend to be in favor of it.
My biggest issue with these programs is that they should really have some built-in "off-switch", when the program should be dismantled because there's no longer a pressing need for it. I don't think we're there yet, but hopefully we will get there - and then what?
Ya, I wasn't trying to argue for or against affirmative action in that comment. Just trying to point out that it's already not driven purely by intellectual merit. I agree on the off-switch issue as well. It's the problem with subsidies of any kind - they might be useful for a time, but at some point, we want to get rid of them...but they tend to be permanent.
> Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action, which is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria. We are already a long ways from pure meritocracy.
I think affirmative action is a bad idea for exactly this reason. It has eroded the narrative.
It's trendy for left-wing types to argue things like "Harvard isn't a meritocracy" or to sneer at the idea of a meritocracy altogether (don't get me started on the right-wing types).
> More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by the eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules, they're just tempered by money.
I think doing this in the open would be a disaster. What won't destroy the narratives is implementing your idea in the background. This has already happened to some degree. Most students at Harvard don't pay very much. Their education is subsidized by rich families one way or another.
But I don't think that's a good thing. Somewhere along the line our institutional narratives have become cliched in people's minds. Maybe this will lead us to a wonderful new world where we can be perfectly rational and implement ideas like yours. But I doubt it. I think if we lose the institutional narratives we're going to lose the institutions. Maybe the new institutions will be better, who knows? (I'm not optimistic).
> I think doing this in the open would be a disaster.
Thought experiment: What would happen if it were public knowledge how much each student was paying to attend school? If you were far down the sliding scale and you were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to get in, and that was public knowledge, would it hurt the school's reputation as much? Then it would be clear why this particular person got in, and their intelligence (or lack thereof) wouldn't weigh against people who earned their place by merit, which you could tell by seeing that their tuition cost is low or zero.
> I think affirmative action is a bad idea for exactly this reason. It has eroded the narrative. It's trendy for left-wing types to argue things like "Harvard isn't a meritocracy" or to sneer at the idea of a meritocracy altogether (don't get me started on the right-wing types).
I too hate those people passionately. I'm all for meritocracy in general. I'm just also for pareto-optimal outcomes in resource-constrained environments.
> I think doing this in the open would be a disaster. What won't destroy the narratives is implementing your idea in the background. This has already happened to some degree. Most students at Harvard don't pay very much. Their education is subsidized by rich families one way or another.
Ya it's definitely already a thing in the background. And maybe that's the right level for it, i'm not sure. Though I think we could basically be providing free tuition to say, 75% of students by opening it up to people who aren't willing to donate a building, but could pay say 500k/year. Which is quite a large group of people, especially when you consider international students.
> But I don't think that's a good thing. Somewhere along the line our institutional narratives have become cliched in people's minds. Maybe this will lead us to a wonderful new world where we can be perfectly rational and implement ideas like yours. But I doubt it. I think if we lose the institutional narratives we're going to lose the institutions. Maybe the new institutions will be better, who knows? (I'm not optimistic).
That could be. But I think a big part of the problem right now is that we don't treat education enough like a financial investment. The narrative around it is already too imbued with some moral character that it doesn't really have. We have people going into debt to earn degrees in poetry or psychology, in part because of this odd narrative that a college degree magically endows you with the ingredients for success - regardless of what that degree is in. I think dosing that with a degree of financial realism might be a benefit.
I would really like universities to be meritocracies. However I went to a highly ranked school for undergrad and I can assure you it was nowhere close to a meritocracy, nor did it really try to pretend that it was.
That narrative may exist for you and others, but it's entirely accidental.
See, I really don't think they are oriented much towards merit either. At least, not my idea of "merit". My idea of merit would be purely academic: test scores, grades (though these are very leaky), and academic achievements outside the classroom (e.g. performance in academic competitions). Yet many, if not most, people at highly ranked/competitive universities don't fall into the "academic" admissions bucket: there's also athletes, musicians, people with "quirky hobbies" (many of which are invented purely for college admissions), people who might have had standards relaxed a bit to meet demographic targets, and most of all kids from rich feeder schools + legacies.
Then you get the rest of the students who get in purely on academic merit. In my experience those maybe make up a plurality but not a majority. They're basically there to lend legitimacy to the rich kids.
Isn't research the main driving force behind many universities? Would they really be affected that much by how some undergraduates got in, especially since they likely wouldn't even be participating in research anyway?
The narratives aren’t superfluous, but they are at best aspirational.
Universities are not certainly not meritocracies, and the justice system certainly does not treat everyone equally. So I think it is by all means good to support moves towards the ideals that these institutions make, but there may be a practical middle ground where in recognition that they do not in fact meet these ideals, resources could be captured and used in ways that address this imbalance somewhat?
> The narratives aren’t superfluous, but they are at best aspirational.
This a paraphrase of what I wrote.
> Universities are not certainly not meritocracies, and the justice system certainly does not treat everyone equally.
Neither is perfect. But it's not like they're random. In universities there is correlation between "being smart" and "getting in/excelling at universities" and in the justice system there is a correlation between "killing someone" and "going to jail".
> So I think it is by all means good to support moves towards the ideals that these institutions make, but there may be a practical middle ground where in recognition that they do not in fact meet these ideals, resources could be captured and used in ways that address this imbalance somewhat?
The middle ground is understanding that the institutions aren't perfect and constantly working to shore them up.
But my feeling is that if we go from understanding that the institutions aren't perfect to throwing out the ideals completely then the institutions will crumble. My sense is that we can't do without the ideals. People aren't rational agents.
The middle ground is understanding that the institutions aren't perfect and constantly working to shore them up.
I think you are rejecting the idea of a middle ground completely. Holding institutions to their stated values is table stakes for me.
I don't think you have to reject the ideals in order to recognize that the world is not meeting them. For example, a university could be quite open about the pressure to allow lower merit students from privileged backgrounds. What if they said "look, we can't completely withstand the political and other pressure put on us. So we're going to allow 5% enrollment of students who do not meet our regular thresholds, so long as they pay 5x (10x?) full tuition. This extra tuition will be used to create N full scholarships and M partial scholarships for students that meet the academic requirements but do not have the financial ability to attend. All students will be treated equally academically throughout their programs"
To some degree you cannot stop this from happening (see prep schools, etc.) but you can bring it out in the light.
Using an analogy to murder isn't going to be very convincing when the thing you're comparing murder with isn't remotely as close to as bad as murder itself. It's a poor argument that trivially be rebutted by pointing out that the other thing isn't nearly as bad as murder, so the conclusions don't follow.
What the above poster is describing is effectively how the status quo works, but more explicit and with transparency. Universities are not purely meritocratic. They factor in race, gender, and VIP status into the application. Donating money is one way of obtaining VIP status.
I feel that your idea is already reality. It's just not official. The issue is that the people caught up in this scandal aren't wealthy enough to fund a building or even a building wing, or they would just go through the more acceptable route.
William Rick Singer, the guy at the center of this, said exactly that:
"There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in"
(unfortunately for him, he said it on a wiretapped phone call...)
When the news first broke there was an article where the some of the admissions officers were asked about it by journalist. Unfortunately I do not remember where the article was published. The gist of it was that the bribe devalued the schools -- the rate for "you will admit so and so" is north of $10 million.
The only reason admission to elite schools is so coveted is because, in theory, you can't buy your way into a degree. Once you can buy your way in then no one will want to.
Your idea would work for a bit but eventually, it would fall apart.
Well, being a legacy student can absolutely get you into the school. You can't buy it for yourself now, but someone can have bought it for you earlier.
No. No amount of money should get you a way to get into an "elite" school if you don't deserve it. Unless we're ready to admit that these schools aren't really elite if any billionaire's dumb dumb kid can get in with enough money thrown at the institution. The issue with trying to solve every single problem with money is that capitalism isn't designed to solve problems where a moral compass is needed.
There are many types of elites - financial elites, academic elites, social elites, etc, etc.
An elite school tries to cater to all of those. It would be better if they were more up-front about this rather than pretending they are all about academic achievement but they would still be elite schools. And they'd still have some exceptionally bright students in their classes.
> No. No amount of money should get you a way to get into an "elite" school if you don't deserve it.
Why? What's so precious about elite schooling that you're willing to sacrifice 10 kids getting a free education just to prevent one billionaire's kid from going to an elite school?
> The issue with trying to solve every single problem with money is that capitalism isn't designed to solve problems where a moral compass is needed.
Except that capitalism will give more people an elite education, and your moral compass will give fewer of them one. There's a reason we don't guide economies by moral compass - it doesn't work very well.
In the country I come from (France), all the top schools are publicly funded and you get in by taking exams where the whole country students compete once a year. Based on how you rank, you get in or not. Most of them have really low annual tuitions. In some of them, you're even paid! Hard to imagine anything remotely close here when there's always a way to throw money at something (your congressman, dean...) to get the outcome you want.
All the top schools are publicly funded because all the top schools were nationalized. And the rich have always been free to go to England, America, or elsewhere.
Many of the premiere U.S. schools are also public, and in general I think it's implied that pay-to-play college admission proposals would be limited to private institutions.
One reason the American university system is usually ranked so highly is because it's such a global destination for the world's rich. Not only does their tuition fund much of the system, but the demand drives the elite status, which in turn helps to attract real talent. And even smart people know that, all else being equal, it's better to sit in a classroom with the rich and elite. I don't think it's a coincidence that Stanford is a private university. Of the startups I've personally been involved with, directly or indirectly, I can't think of one that didn't successfully cash out where one of the founders didn't also have "connections", such as a rich uncle who made introductions.
The fact that the rich and elite drive eduction in the U.S. creates problems of its own, but there's no getting around the inherent funding dilemmas. Especially in a culture like in the U.S. where t-a-x is a four-letter word (i.e. unspeakable), it's better to view these proposals as alternative taxation schemes.
Go research financial aid programs and outcomes at elite US Universities. The fact that these schools are subject to financial pressure at the margins absolutely does not mean that they are closed to needy students. There are MANY unfair elements of the US educational system that disadvantage poor and minority students, but access to elite schools for the deserving fraction is just not one of them. We're doing fine here.
What about the middle-class kid who doesn't qualify to any of these programs whose chance to get the best teachers and nurturing environment is spoiled by the dumb rich kid taking a spot and wasting it? What about the extra administrative, time burden and uncertainty of outcome the poor kids have to suffer to chase all these financial aid programs? There's clearly room for improvement.
> What about the middle-class kid who doesn't qualify to any of these programs
Citation needed. I was that kid myself. There are no "programs" to "qualify" for. You file a financial aid form. Whatever you and your parents can reasonably pay, you pay, and the school covers the rest. It works for everyone. And one of the reasons it works for everyone is revenue that the school generates, and yeah, that includes some shady benefactor greasing.
I'm not going to sit here and deny that legacy admissions are distasteful and unfair. I jumped in the thread to point out that what they do not do is significantly disadvantage the needy. If you really care about these issues, call your congressperson about federal education funding and stop bitching at Harvard.
yea that doesnt work. anyone with a family above poverty level basically gets no financial aid other saying get some loans. try asking literally any of the thousands of kids applying in california or texas or new york
Elite schools are a great mechanism to entrench privelege. Paying to get your slacker kid a middling GPA at an elite school is a great way to connect them to a business network of other wealthy people, and fast track them for high paying jobs at the top of the corporate ladder. Also some poorer kids get a good education, while not quite being able to tap into those same connections.
In terms of research output, it's true that elite institutions are at the top... but not if you adjust for their revenue and assets. We'd get way more bang for our buck socially and scientifically by spreading those billion dollar endowments around, and properly funding state institutions like most other sensible countries.
> We'd get way more bang for our buck socially and scientifically by spreading those billion dollar endowments around, and properly funding state institutions like most other sensible countries.
The Obamacare fiasco has proven to me that such approaches are impossible in the near term. The 2017 tax cut really drove it home. How are people not seeing this?
A principally public approach is not viable. It could be, as amply demonstrated around the world. But roughly 50% of the American population rejects these schemes when they're forced to reckon with the costs. It's been this way since before Roosevelt. Social Security was a watered down, private labor market-focused program for the precisely the same political reasons Obamacare was.
The exceptions are clearly and demonstrably anomalous. For example, the heyday of public universities come from a time when only a fraction of the population went to college, much of the land and capital assets were donated, labor was relatively cheap, and the burden on the public purse was negligible.
> Elite schools are a great mechanism to entrench privelege. Paying to get your slacker kid a middling GPA at an elite school is a great way to connect them to a business network of other wealthy people, and fast track them for high paying jobs at the top of the corporate ladder. Also some poorer kids get a good education, while not quite being able to tap into those same connections.
The children of the wealthy already have connections. You know who doesn't? Poor kids. The poor kids they'd be subsidizing.
Then why are wealthy people paying (and in many cases risking) so much to get their kids into elite schools? It's an important signalling complement to existing networks, and a way to extend them.
The point of an elite school is that it's meant to be 'elite', i.e. selective. The more dumb rich kids get in, the more the value of the school's degree declines. This deal has always been bent at the high end ('buy us a new library wing and we'll ignore that little Timmy has a room temp IQ') but not overtly broken, which is what this proposal (and the behavior that people are being prosecuted for) amounts to.
> The point of an elite school is that it's meant to be 'elite', i.e. selective. The more dumb rich kids get in, the more the value of the school's degree declines.
If that had any truth to it then affirmative action wouldn't work.
Has it? At the margins, but I don't think it's even come close to achieving the type of societal transformations envisioned.
The percentage of African Americans at Harvard this past year was only 15%, roughly comparable to the overall population demographics (~%12 black, ~14% mixed). I suspect Harvard is average or above average in this regard. It's not saying much that the rich are okay with going to historically elite schools with the same demographic ratio as the country-wide general population.
And before anybody brings up Asians as the exception, don't forget that smaller liberal arts colleges and less well known tier-1 private universities (e.g. George Washington) are still very popular with the wealthy, and those colleges are much whiter and richer. Even on HN you still see the trope about how Americans are more "creative" than the Chinese, and someone who claims that such sentiments don't at least partially reflect prejudices against American Asians and don't color college preferences are fooling themselves. I mean, if you don't get into Berkeley you can just wave it off with the observation that it's mostly Asian anyhow--i.e. you didn't really have a fair chance to get in and/or it's somehow less desirable than historically.
It's pretty wild that you think that providing preference to the most able people who have typically come from disadvantaged backgrounds (i.e. affirmative action) is equivalent to providing preference to insanely rich people who are vastly underperforming their privileged cohort.
I’m sure someone has a reason to not like this, but I actually think this is a fantastic approach. Especially when you raise the bar that high (a million) that it could fund many students. There’s just got to be a way to enforce it so the money doesn’t end up in some stadium renovation fund or executive bonus.
While we're all angry at this bribery program, can we please also be angry at legacy admissions? Far more kids skate in on legacy than bribes and the school doesn't even get a nice bit of cash for those sorts of admissions.
In the quoted article, Felicity Huffman pleaded guilty to pay a college counselor $15,000 to arrange cheating on an SAT test. Hence, one data point on the market price for cheating, as agreed upon by Ms. Huffman and college counselor, is $15,000. One claim about Ms. Huffman's net worth is that she earns $275,000 per episode of "Desperate Housewives", which airs weekly. This fine is about half a day's work for her, if that. For half a day's worth of work, she can doctor her daughter's SAT scores. This is assuming that the episodes aren't recorded at once and take much less time than one week for filming, freeing up time to invest in other income streams. So cheating in this case is a very rational thing to do, given zero cost for broken morals or ethics.
The only real "hard-power" argument I can think of for children who may inherit great wealth to gain intelligence is to avoid a run-around by the family lawyers after Mom and Dad croak. But even then, that doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence (Donald Trump is smart enough to avoid that fate), and it kind of doesn't make sense for a family lawyer to do that anyways. If the kids are stupid and can't manage their money, just charge more in fees instead of rocking the boat in order to pocket a greater portion of the pie.
Crime does pay, if we don't punish it. That's why people do it. It's especially true in white-collar crime.
They should do something on the lines that politicians do in Australia.. property developers slip a property into a trust and slip that trust into the polys superfund as a contribution
Affirmative action on one side, cheaters on the other. At least a dozen people cheated on the SAT in my school and had the audacity to brag about it.
Financial aid if you poor, paid for if you rich. Middle class honest kids hurt the most. Had top 1% scores, no ivies or UCLA for me (got UCB at least) and I’m Asian. My little cousin, same scores and rejected from UCSC 10 years later...much worse now than before
Two people in my high school told me they cheated on the SAT. They got _perfect_ scores and the high school actually bragged about them during graduation. They also happened to live across the street from each other in a relatively large town.
I’ve always wondered what they did to cheat, I wonder if they’d be as open about it now since they’re both graduating at MIT and Harvard soon.
Please familiarize yourself with minimum sentencing guidelines for drug possession. These parents, by preventing other students from being able to get an education they earned, are causing far more harm.
I absolutely agree and personally feel that incarceration as vengeance is immoral and incarceration only becomes a moral action when it is a deterrent to future actions. If you were omnipresent and knew that a murderer would never murder again - and that the jailing of that murderer would not prevent any future murders - then I'd consider it to be immoral to jail them.
Unfortunately a lot of America is on the vengeance path when it comes to punishments for crimes. We need a lot more criminal justice reform but, please, let's not start by giving the elites a pass - justice is already inequal enough.
So you get one free murder? No, the deterrent had to be there beforehand, so that our hypothetical killer who is certain she only wants to kill one person will be exposed to that deterrence. Even if she is not thereby deterred, the fact that the punishment is applied to her will have a deterrent effect on others contemplating a similar crime. Therefore the punishment has value even if there is no need to prevent the murderer from killing again. (Edit: you did point out that the omniscience allows you to know that there will actually be no deterrent effect but that's asking a lot :)
I included omniscience specifically for that reason, I agree that murders must be punished because otherwise people will see fewer downsides to committing murders themselves.
Can I push this to the concept of Botany Bay the far away prison colony - if murder results in the murderer being shipped off and everyone in society understands how terrible it is there... do you actually need to send people there? Wouldn't the effect on society be the same if you just shipped them somewhere nice and (again lots of omnipotence and omnipresence here) could ensure no one ever learned of your deception?
I'm mostly pushing this out in an effort to clarify what we as a society get out of punishment (in my opinion) we are seeking to reduce these sorts of actions we consider to be bad for society, any punishment that exists solely to inflict pain on someone (even if they're really bad) without any associated benefits to deterrence or a decrease in recidivism ... it's pointless and cruel (again, in my eyes).
And yes, I like philosophy, so this scenario is super removed from the real world.
It is absurd. There is a black woman who was sentenced to 5 years in jail for falsifying her location so her children could go to a better school district. Yet this outright fraud only sees a 2 year sentence by comparison.
If I were interested in this kind of scheme, I'd be in it for my own ego - my image of myself would be better if my kids went to a big name college, and other peoples' image of me would also be better. Well, my image of myself (and others' image of me) would take a hit from even a week in jail.
Mind you, I'm not saying a week is the right answer. Just saying that, to those kind of people, it's embarrassing, and that's a deterrent.
Generally a person who is caught and convicted of crime X is penalized enough to dissuade others of that crime. Which means that the severity of the penalty times the odds of being caught has to be proportional to the value of committing the crime. Since the parents were willing to spend tens of thousands, and their odds of being caught were low, the appropriate penalty should be stiff if it is to have the right effect.
Now is it disproportionate to other crimes? No. Most states have laws about the theft of large amounts of property. With per state thresholds starting in the $1-$5k range, you can get a prison sentence for grand larceny of 1-10 years.
So treat this as stealing from some other applicant the right to go to the university of their choice. I can come to this being a value stolen of tens of thousands in multiple ways. Starting with the fact that the thieves were willing to spend tens of thousands, and continuing with an estimate of the impact on that unlucky loser's future income. That makes it grand larceny, and a 2 year jail sentence is perfectly in line with crimes of a similar magnitude.
While I am generally against how much the US puts people in jail, I applaud the fact that this case treats white collar crime with similar seriousness to blue collar crime.
I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery.
As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.