People are always going to use their money to buy status. So as long as these college offer prestige & status, people with money are going to use it to get in.
Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game.
I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admissions into two pots: people who pay their way in and the other who earns it. And they announce ahead of time what the size of each bucket is. When you apply, you chose which path you will take and that's it, you're stuck.
The people who choose the merit path take the standard entry exams, have their grades review, etc. And the ones who do the best get in. Those who choose to pay for admission participate in a silent auction, and those willing to pay the most are admitted.
This system isn't "fair", but the outcome is effectively the same as our current setup. With the most notable difference being that, at least this system is transparent and acknowledges that X% of incoming students paid for their post.
And that ambiguity is an economy: the rich slackers are seen as smart by association with the achievements of (past) students admitted by merit, and the rabble students acquire aristocratic social cache by the same token. I'm not an economist, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a self-powering machine.
Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. You don’t even need to admit any rich slackers. Just let some of the qualified substitute money for luck.
> Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants.
This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.
I suspect the schools are trying to curate their student body so it doesn't turn into a freak show, which would itself reduce prestige. It would be like a zoo that contains exactly one species of animal. This is the dilemma. Taking the top 1000 scorers on some particularly difficult exam, and putting them all together in one place, would be a freak show. Not because they are freaks per se, but because any monoculture of an extreme trait will turn itself into a freak show.
Also pure test based admission ends up being something around 75% asian, 15% white, and 10% others. See Stuyvesant for example[1]. For some reason Harvard feels like being 75-80% Asian would be bad for their brand so they got sued for discrimination. But Harvard is Harvard and it's hard to win a lawsuit against an institution that is that well connected.
As someone who went to one of those “pure test based” NYC schools: this is not the testament that you think it is.
The number of Black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science was an order of magnitude higher in the 1970s; the current demographics are a consequence of paid preparation being a reliable way to score highly on the SHSAT.
It’s amazing that people don’t realise this. I always think back to the study that showed the amount of books in a household was a strong predictor for IQ. Background matters a whole lot, but high performance people don’t want to hear it, because they want to feel like it’s all their own credit.
Nope. Just like money, there’s also an intellectual family bank that gets inherited. And it’s not genes, it’s access to knowledge which is purchased by capital.
It can be even more basic. Just having your own quiet space makes a huge difference to study outcomes. Someone living in a tiny apartment with a shared bedroom, the TV next door, and constant street noise is going to have a much harder time concentrating than someone with a private bedroom at the top of a detached house.
Of course genes play a part, but eugenics is mostly economic and political discrimination, not objective assessment of absolute potential.
>the amount of books in a household was a strong predictor for IQ. Background matters a whole lot...
That doesn't follow at all. IQ is correlated with parental IQ, due to genetics. Equally plausible, if not more so, than "books cause high IQ" is "high IQ causes books". Smart people a) like to read, and b) have smart children. I don't think it's likely that kids are boosting their IQ scores by cracking open their parent's book collection.
Well, you didn't provide a link to the study, and people mistaking correlation for causation is a frequent thing even in science (replication crisis).
The hypothesis "smart people are likely to buy more books, and smart people are likely to have smart children" sounds quite plausible to me. Does it seem implausible to you?
The best way to convince me that books directly increase IQ is to donate a ton of books to kids who need it, and measure the gains. (As a side effect, you would probably win a Nobel price if that worked.) My experience with charity says that actually many people are willing to donate books to charities; charities refuse them, because they already have enough books and the kids are not reading them anyway.
There are many ways how poverty can hurt intellectual development. This is not one of them.
There are many people who want to get rid of old books for kids, because the kids grew up and don't need them anymore; if you asked them to donate the books to you, you would be doing them a favor -- saving them from a dilemma between the bad feeling of throwing the book away, and the wasted space at home. If any NGO would bring a truck and say "please give us the books for kids you no longer need", the truck would be full in an afternoon. Then... according to your theory, the truck could go a few blocks further and turn hundred poor kids into Einsteins. I would be so happy if that worked! Unfortunately, it does not.
Book count being a predictor isn't the same thing as book count being the cause. It is likely that instead, book count is an easy to measure attribute of a household which has many other correlative factors that contribute to success.
On the other hand, a Mensa gathering (not a member, myself) is one of the few situations I've been in that was hard to characterize as anything other than freakshow on earth. Shows that you can maximize a single dimension so much that you are left with people incapable of communication.
Similarly, an organization of students maximizing academic performance has a certain vibe that definitely doesn't feel "perfect". It doesn't even seem like that useful of a skill, but I'd have to know the purpose of a uni to comment further.
Mensa is for those who are insecure about their intelligence and like the idea that they can easily rank themselves above others with a number designed to check if you're mentally handicapped. I'm not surprised they can't communicate.
I always thought to myself, what if I take the test and pass it? Then what?
If I fail, that's easy. I lick my wounds and go home.
But if I pass? The shape of the distribution -- basically slicing off one end of a bell curve -- means that in all likelihood, I would be at the lower end of the IQ scale within the group, even if at the upper end within the overall population.
So I'd be taking a test and paying money for the privilege of being the dumbest person in the room. It hardly seemed attractive to me.
If you're talking about the SAT and ACT, I would challenge the idea that they can accurately distinguish between the good and outstanding. At most they provide a rough indication. I know this because I got a much higher score than I deserved to on the ACT because you can read the test pretty easily if you put yourself in the shoes of the people making it (I got a 31 overall and a near-perfect 35 on the science portion without studing)
I'm specifically not talking about the SAT and ACT since they're widely used by elite universities. Those tests top out way too early and can't reliably distinguish between the top 1% and the top 0.1% (The fraction of perfect scorers is much smaller than 1% but the standard error of measurement is way too large). The exams I have in mind are those like the science olympiads and the Cambridge STEP. STEP in particular is basically used for this purpose (olympiads are a slightly different beast).
Are you trying to get students that can pass specific kinds of tests or students that will be successful? The two aren't strongly correlated. I'd argue successful builds more prestige for the university. And let's be real, everyone knows these tests are purposefully tricky. In the real world people don't give you multiple choices and try to trick you into picking the wrong answer and then laugh at you when you picked the one try tried to get you to pick (politics aside). In classes, unless your professor is an asshole, they aren't trying to trick you. Success depends on a lot of factors well beyond what these tests measure. This is why SAT and ACT don't measure success or even academic success (as in they don't strongly correlate [0][1] with success. This source should decent correlation with first year grades but not second).
I'm not sure why one would even think an academic test could determine success. One of the biggest lies many of us have been told is that if you're just smart enough you'll be successful. Sorry, but that's not how it works.
At the extreme end of the spectrum with quant hedge funds this actually becomes somewhat true. They expect strong academic understanding of math and make a killing by hiring those who do.
I have some useful background here that leads me to strongly disagree with you. I did well at these international science olympiads in high school. To do that I studied for the particular shape of the exam questions. I became friends with many other people who were high performers at these olympiads. Later on I got a PhD from a prestigious institution and I am now a scientist at another one. Throughout this time, I was very involved in the pedagogical work at these institutions.
One very important piece of insight I gained throughout that time is that after you use some exam to get the top 25% (ish) percent of students, the exam performance really does not matter: it does not correlate with scientific output or originality of work. If anything, I had to unlearn some of the skills that made me good at olympiads because they were severely limiting my creativity. At an olympiad you know there is a solution, while true research problems might be unsolvable and need to be approached differently.
TL;DR: Exams (selective or not, hard or not) are great at giving you the top 20% of students, but they are inherently terrible at telling you who among the top 20% will be a productive scientist or engineer.
Your anecdotal evidence is contradicted by wider evidence.
In particular the famous Benbow study [1] that established that even among the top percentile of the population there are massive differences: the top quarter percentile (99.75-99.99) was 2-3 times more likely to have authored academic research later in life, and about 1.5x more likely to have attended postgrad education, to have gone for a STEM degree, to have gone for a PhD than the bottom quarter of the top percent (99.00-99.24).
To update on the sibling comment I posted, after reading this study, I think it is pretty flawed. They indeed have an interesting population they have chosen to test, but to claim that they are the 1% top performers is incredibly misleading. The other 99% of their peers were never tested in the same fashion, which leads to obvious sampling and bias problems. This special population was treated differently from the other 99% of students from the very start of the study, so there is no surprise that new internal dynamics will appear among them, simply by virtue of being observed and treated as a separate group.
To start testing the validity of the claims in this paper a study needs to be performed where the strength of effect has to be considered, when comparing a similar one-percenter group and a larger ten-percenter group. My prediction is that the strength of effect would show only negligible differences, confirming my hunch that the special treatment[1] is what created the new subdivision in this new group.
More reading material on this topic would certainly be interesting, if you have anything in mind.
[1]: The special treatment in this paper being telling a kid "you are only a 7th grader, but you are as smart as a high schooler".
This is interesting, thanks for sharing it! It would take me some time to read it, but given that you seem the have already looked into this, I was wondering whether you have suggestion for a wider set of studies, a meta-study maybe.
I am asking, because if I have to choose between my empirical observations (anecdotal as they are, given it is n=1 observers), and a single piece of research without followups, I do feel justified to stick to what I have seen myself. But I am open to be convinced otherwise.
It those were used for admissions, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a huge market for answers (from somewhere in the production chain), stand-in test takers, etc.
> I got a much higher score than I deserved to on the ACT because you can read the test pretty easily if you put yourself in the shoes of the people making it
I don't understand why that is some secretly accessible knowledge that is only available to some. FWIW, the ACT always seemed more game-y to me what with its hard time crunches and stuff.
No, there are other ways to separate the pack. A perfect score on those tests isn't rare enough, plus you're still going to see a lot of exceptional candidates who got a few wrong.
They aren't being used, so they aren't the existing standardized tests, which are being used.
But it's not that hard to simply extend the difficulty gradient higher. Stick some math olympiad-type problems on there, for instance.
Further, the only thing that the SAT claims to be able to predict is a student’s first semester performance, and wasn’t found to be a better predictor than other factors on other measures.
Of course I can’t find a reference for that right now, but it certainly doesn’t predict college graduation rates best.
A test that splits the top .1% of test takers vs. the top 1% likely isn't the best indicator of future career performance ( the source of university prestige ), or necessarily academic performance.
Ok, a test that splits between the top 0.01% and the top 1%. One student goes to national competitions, the other is merely a decent student at your local high school. The SAT lacks the granularity to distinguish between them.
My point was that there is likely diminishing likelihood that the a test with such granularity would return a meaningful score. One would need to include a both a wider and deeper set of subject matter that still conforms to the context of the test. Eventually such a test would pick out the best studiers of generalized aptitude tests. While studying for a test is useful in academia - it's not "The" skill.
It's much simpler to have a candidate include notable achievements on their CV including competitions and after-school programs. However, even here you'll find factors that don't correlate to future performance e.g. those with the means and desire to min-max a CV for college admittance ( A very important life skill ) may not be the best leaders, academics, or students.
While both of the above skills will be correlated to future performance there are almost certainly diminishing returns from selecting the top .1% according to a single dimension.
Curiously the list of fields medalists does not appear to contain a mathlete at present. Providing at least one datapoint that performance in math competitions may not be correlated to future (Academic) mathematics achievement.
I just included that to point out that there is a tangible difference at the high end, it’s not just “everyone getting 800 on the math SAT is similar in their mathematical ability”. Whether competition performance correlates to mathematical achievement in college later in life is unclear, although I do want to point out that many do end up becoming professors and such. Many of the rest don’t show up on the “math radar” because they major in computer science instead and get jobs in the industry.
Throughout my academic career, I've met quite a few brilliant mathematicians with no interest in such competitions. And quite a few "goes to competitions" folks with little interest in higher pursuits. Placing too much faith in any measure is fraught
I’m not saying it’s the only measure we should have. But in the context of the chain this was in I was feeling a sort of “does it really matter if we can separate these people” and I just wanted to illustrate that in actual competitions that discriminate to this level you get a meaningful difference out of it. Now, whether that is an effective indicator of success…I’m not completely sure. A lot of the math competition winners I know are doing startups and HFT, so there’s that.
> A lot of the math competition winners I know are doing startups and HFT, so there’s that.
That's in line with my experience, too. Selecting olympiads is a preference for highly competitive people. In math, at least, collaboration is much more important.
Most of 21st century Fields medal winners are IMO medalists, so that seems to contradict your hypothesis.
Terence Tao, Venkatesh, Miryam were all famously young and/or good contestants.
I think admitting legacies is morally and ethically wrong but the idea that what we need is another test even harder than the SATs to distinguish the "outstanding" is misguided.
The difference between kid who gets a 1550 and a 1600 on the SAT is so marginal that calling one "outstanding" and one "merely very good" is just silly.
Is that difference the extra $20,000 parents spent on tutoring? Or is that difference actually correlated with outcomes in and after college? Doubtful.
I think what the parent comment is saying is that neither the 1550 or 1600 is "outstanding" and the SAT is a flawed exam that doesn't really get you the "genius" level kids
And my point is that no test exists which will determine who are the "genius" kids.
There are tens of thousands of adults all over the world who went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford etc. that then went on to live completely mediocre middle class lives.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but my point is that how you do on a test at 16-17 years old does not make you a "genius", nor does scoring in the 99.999% ensure that a person will achieve academic or career outcomes superior than the person who scored 99.9%
Yes does outstanding mean a high depth of knowledge in one area, does it mean a high breadth of knowledge in many different areas? Does it mean a high potential to learn (memory/metacognition skills)? Does it mean comfort with high levels of abstraction? All of these would require different tests.
Or what even is "success?" Isn't that what garners prestige for the school? Do these tests determine your soft skills? Your ability to network? Handle different stressed environments? How you can manage people?
It's different, though maybe native English speakers will struggle because there is no equivalent of "é".
"et", "è", "ai" are all pronounced the same. Similar to the "e" in "best".
For "é" and "er" I struggle to find a definite English equivalent sound. Sometimes "a" is close, but it depends on the accent of the speaker. Maybe the best example is just the last "é" when pronouncing "Beyoncé" or "fiancée"
Then you don't pronounce it well :D
The link you gave me looks like someone with a strong English accent trying to pronounce French (which make sense for an AI)
No, it's someone speaking the anglicised pronunciation which is correct in English just like for the other 1000s of borrowed French words in English.
Though you'll be happy to know that where I grew up in Texas, everyone tried to pronounce "croissant" the French way when (and only when) ordering one at a deli counter. But we weren't far from Paris, Texas.
I did not say the audio clip pronunciation is wrong. I said it was pronounced with an English accent, which bounces a bit the vowels, though the sound of "è" is correct.
What I said is incorrect, is the parent poster saying it sounds closer to "é" than the sound of "best".
If you can't tell the difference, too bad for you, but that doesn't make you right.
"è" (or "et" in French) is pronounced /ɛ/. Wikipedia will confirm that this is indeed the same sound as in "best" (/ˈbɛst/). https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/best
> I said it was pronounced with an English accent,
Cachet is an english word in this context, so how could the English pronunciation be incorrect?
> "è" (or "et" in French) is pronounced /ɛ/. Wikipedia will confirm that this is indeed the same sound as in "best"
Yep.
> "é" is not the same sound. It's pronounced /e/ like in "fiancée"
Also yep. Nobody is disputing you on those.
The problem is when you're saying that the english pronunciation for an english word is
incorrect." It can't be. Cachet, in this context, is an english word and this is the english pronunciation.
Do you understand? This is the statement that we're saying is incorrect. The english word cachet is not pronounced phonetically "cachè" in english. There is another word, cachet, in french. It is not the same word. It does not mean the same thing. It has a common etymology, but that doesn't make you the authority on its pronunciation.
You are trying to argue with an American how an English word since the 1600s is pronounced!
I'm not telling you how it's pronounced in French, I'm suggesting how I pronounce it in English using French as a reference. I don't really think an accent aigu sounds anything like an accent grave.
I don't pronounce "cachet" as "cachè" but rather "caché".
It’s like all the silly mobile games, you need a pool of cheap players so the rich people can feel accomplished when they spend money.
This is similar, there needs to be enough for people being accepted to and graduating from a university so when the rich kids also does it people think that he is smart and accomplished.
The last thing you want is rich mediocre kids believing they're smart and accomplished when they aren't.
Some of them will go into politics and business, and their entitlement and delusionally rosy view of their talents will make them a national liability.
You really want to steer rich slackers towards wasting their lives with dumb hedonism, keeping them as far away as possible from any activity with strategic influence.
Just because you know the relative size of each cohort doesn't mean you know if a specific person was in one or the other. There's always the possibility that someone admitted for money actually ends up excelling. I know quite a few people that got far more serious in college and ended up doing quite well even through in high school they were far from good students.
That's before even considering that some small amount of what graduating from one of these schools conveys is a high likelihood of having networked with other people that will be well placed later. My naive expectation is that someone graduating with a science major from MIT might have had a harder curriculum than someone graduating from that same major from Harvard, but I also (again, naively) expect that the person from Harvard may have made contacts with people that will be more diversely placed and in more powerful positions later.
not really. If the auction monetary results were somehow leaked (or hell even if they were published) it's a very strong indicator of what people are willing to pay to be around kids who have brains. You're only in a bind if you're rich AND your kid is smart, because everyone will be suspicious that your kid only got in because of $$. And then, if I were rich I'd probably want my kid to have to struggle a bit to see what it's like for a change. I'm sure there are plenty of actually rich people who think like me.
Not necessarily. Fancy high-end watch bands like Rolex and Omega are not fundamentally better at telling the time than a Casio F-91W. The difference is pure prestige.
I'm generally opposed to this kind of acceptance-of-bad-things but in this case I kinda agree. If people are willing to pay millions to go to college, that's potentially a great advantage to students who otherwise have trouble affording it -- let the rich kids subsidize it for everyone else. By not funneling the donations through weird under-the-table transactions it can be more directly used for a net good for the student body.
It is tricky to maintain the 'prestige' associated with an institution doing this, so I don't really agree with making it too public. But, after all, it was kinda an open secret that this happens and the prestige was maintained away, so if it kept happening with a bit more legitimacy it probably wouldn't change much. Prestige doesn't just mean academic credentials: for some people, if they see Berkeley on a resumé they probably want it to be because that applicant is super-rich and well-connected!
My ideal reform would be a simultaneous enactment of several things:
* allow people to pay millions to go to college; allow this to fund student aid for other students. Explicitly stop using it to build buildings
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
This reframes things so that the point of strong applications isn't to _get in_, it's to get the scholarships required to get in for free instead of paying the absurd tuition. Meanwhile the school has to keep admitting remarkable kids in order to maintain its brand as prestigious. All of this is already how it works, but making it explicit ought to align incentivizes in a way that makes the whole thing less disturbingly bizarre.
> let the rich kids subsidize it for everyone else
The state schools already do this. It's called "out of state tuition". For example, UC Berkeley charges California residents $14k/yr tuition while everyone else pays $44k/yr. Not surprisingly, the number of out of state students admitted to the UC system is increasing every year. [0]
The problem is at some point in the future the university only accepts the actually paying kind of students. This is already an issue for the UC system.
Is grade inflation for rich students really an issue at many colleges? Most majors at most colleges are honestly not that hard. Anyone who shows up and does a modicum of work can skate by with a gentleman's C.
At D1 schools the football and basketball programs generate huge revenue, which is used to subsidize less popular sports (particularly women's teams under Title IX). For better or worse a lot of prospective students care about sports and it's a factor in making colleges more attractive.
Grade inflation for everyone is an issue at most colleges. Grades should reflect your credibility in a subject, and should be roughly normalized across subjects. But because they are so important for the rest of one's career, they end up being heavily pressured towards A's -- which results in careers not paying as much attention to them because they're widely understood to be not meaningful. A better world would see the degree itself as marking credibility in the subject, and grades + GPAs not mattering outside of admissions into higher-education or honor programs -- and 'blow-off' degrees removed entirely.
and --
Lots of people care about sports but that's partly cause lots of people in the past cared and baked it into our culture. It's still a perverse misalignment of incentivizes -- education should be about education; university should be about education + social development + various other forms of development. The American university system is largely about sports and partying for lots of people and I hope no one thinks that's healthy. I don't necessarily think the big sports should be cut, but there's no reason in 2020 that a university should regularly have people who are there on, like, golf scholarships. Universities should certainly take remarkable people of all walks of life -- but the emphasis on sports is insanely beyond what is appropriate.
>But because they are so important for the rest of one's career
Seriously?
I'd never even thought about mentioning college grades _in my country_ and if somebody e.g during interview tried to use tham as strong argument then I'd consider it as a red flag
why anybody competent would need to brag about something unreliable as grades?
I wasn't saying that the grades themselves are important for the rest of anyone's career. They're important for determining what happens to you right after school -- how good of a grad school or job you get -- which has exponential returns for the rest of your life.
> [grades] are so important for the rest of one's career
This isn't really true beyond specific gates (college admission, grad school administration) and for a couple of years after you graduate. 5 years after graduation no one looks at someone's college grades.
> Lots of people care about sports but that's partly cause lots of people in the past cared and baked it into our culture.
What does this mean? Sport is baked into culture but that's because people still like it. And the changing popularity of different sports (eg MMA 25 years ago vs today) shows that this isn't some forced behavior - people like watching and participating.
I meant, the reason college sports are such a big deal in America is that they've been growing for decades with the support of tuition, donations, etc -- which is due to the perverse state of American university system. It didn't necessarily have to end up like this, but it would be hard to undo it now because it has become so important to so many people.
* allow people to pay millions to go to college; allow this to fund student aid for other students. Explicitly stop using it to build buildings
Most elite colleges (not the UCs though) offer 100% need-based aid to accepted students and are need blind in the admissions process. This comes directly from the endownment or the rich alumni and donors already.
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
I completely agree.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
They do have to do as well as everyone else. Grade inflation is a school-wide phenomenon, but GPA in general is a poor indicator of academic performance: all of the prospective med school students at my school are being advised to apply to colleges which practice grade inflation. The grading system at colleges is taken into account by graduate and preprofessional programs.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
The admissions office is somewhat decoupled from the rest of the institution, and receive fixed salaries -- this problem does not exist.
With the little weird caveat that poor students at top institutions have to work doing things like cleaning the bathrooms of the richer kids as part of their "term-time work expectation" for receiving financial aid.
At Harvard at least, there is a "dorm crew", comprised mostly of poorer students meeting their term-time work requirements that come with finaid, that is responsible for cleaning the in-suite bathrooms.
I think I recall recently reading that some schools might have finally eliminated the requirement (maybe, Yale?) but I'm not sure. It was definitely the case at Harvard as of ~March 2020. (but probably not for this year for obvious reasons!)
Yale has a `student income contribution`, where students on finanical aid are expected to work in some term-time jobs. However these jobs are virtually all administrative (doing paperwork, making calls, etc.), research or teaching assistant-ships. I have not heard of poorer students doing any cleaning.
> The admissions office is somewhat decoupled from the rest of the institution, and receive fixed salaries -- this problem does not exist.
It's not the admissions office that that was targeted at. The donations today go to programs, buildings, etc -- things that involve lots of administrative staff and leaders who are payed executive-level salaries. This should all be going to support students and educators.
> I'm generally opposed to this kind of acceptance-of-bad-things but in this case I kinda agree. If people are willing to pay millions to go to college, that's potentially a great advantage to students who otherwise have trouble affording it.
That's true until the University is so rich that it no longer has any need to acquire any more money. Harvard has a $40 billion investment fund. No amount of rich kids are going meaningful move the needle there. At that point, why bother selling spots to rich kids at all? If you're worried about bribery, why not just literally ban students whose parents are wealthy?
Harvard benefits from the prestige of its alum network, and admitting the children of wealthy parents ensures a certain level of influence/access to said parent.
> If people are willing to pay millions to go to college, that's potentially a great advantage to students who otherwise have trouble affording it -- let the rich kids subsidize it for everyone else.
The correct way to do this is via marginal tax rates.
Taxes are the fairer way for society’s rich to help the poor.
Letting rich people choose who to subsidize results in them building up their own tribes.
Obviously government has some of the same risks, but theoretically, at least they can be countered with laws requiring transparency and allowing for corrective actions if problems are found.
I went to a boarding school in the UK that followed this model. Ultimately you lose the prestige. Not necessarily quickly enough for any individual to care. But that's the path.
Lots of boys sitting in their rooms smoking weed and ordering pizza and having to be edged out over 2 or 3 years because their parents paid for a swimming pool...
Probably depends on the portion of donor vs. merit positions though doesn't it? As long as the overwhelming majority is merit-based, the academic reputation of the school should be maintained.
No, lots of things are maintained on a collective illusion. We pretend that you have to be smart to get into Yale but you could donate a building and get in. But if Yale put up a sign saying you can get in for the price of a building, now buying a building makes the admission worthless to you.
This also completely ignores the effect on the other pupils. It's like any form of corruption, it lowers morale and makes people view their situation in a reductive and transactional manner. Ultimately it fosters an attitude which is characterised by a desire to game, control and exploit as opposed to learn, understand and engage.
I did a bit of research work at the University of Ottawa, which by necessity ends up having a sizeable contingent of diplomats' offsprings.
A guy walked up to me and straight up offered to pay me to do his senior project for him. I reported him to his academic advisor. She told me "Thanks for telling me, but there's not much we can do about it without causing an international accident." So next time we saw each other, I agreed to help him with his senior project if I got to go a few rounds with him. He didn't take me up on it.
I went to a school that had essentially this system in place. There wasn't a reverse auction, but rather, full tuition was a significant chunk of change, and as a result, a significant chunk of the student body was there on various merit-based scholarships.
You could usually tell which group a given individual was from, and saying so was a common insult. Either "Your folks may have money, but you're dumb as a post", or "You might be smart but you're poor". There were a select few students where the circles seemed to overlap...
This seems like a natural solution to me, since it's not all that different from merit-based scholarships. At my school for example, the full tuition price was ~$40k, but a portion of admitted students were offered a $10k merit scholarship.
So we already had two categories of students, with somewhat different prices and somewhat different admission standards. I don't see a problem with adding adding more categories along the same lines, as long as some minimum academic standard is enforced.
If I'm in the middle category, I'm happy with my peers who pay more than me because they subsidize the other categories, and I'm happy with my peers who pay less because they elevate the school's reputation.
A large part of the prestige comes from being associated with the people who got in on merit. A school that did this would implicitly devalue that prestige for anyone from an obviously wealthy background. Instead they pretend this doesn’t happen to keep the prestige of “got into x school” valuable.
A large part of the prestige comes from being associated with the people who got in on merit.
I can see that for UC Berkeley, but would that be true of somewhere like Harvard? I get the feeling it would devalue some of the perks of a Harvard education to accept on merit, when a lot of the students from low income backgrounds find the value in mixing with the legacy students.
Plenty of legacy students would get in anyways because of the incredible access to tutors, impressive sounding enrichment programs, and plain better schools wealth brings in this country, no need to stack the deck even further. "Got into harvard" is supposed to be a mark of a high achieving individual and would be devalued if they were more explicit about pay-to-play.
Imagine seeing that type of perverse qualification for sports teams? Some players that pay for the privilege to play, others through dedication and skill. Is this the type of spectacle you would want to watch? Actually, maybe seeing some spoilt rich brat getting creamed on a football field would be worth admission.
This is pretty much what happens in most of the top private engineering schools in India. About a third of the seats are earmarked for "management quota", meaning you pay the management to get in. The rest qualify via various exams.
Works well, doesn't really devalue the prestige of the uni or the students who get in by paying like some of the sibling comments are speculating.
And the private ones aren't really prestigious like the public funded IITs.
> Works well, doesn't really devalue the prestige of the uni or the students who get in by paying like some of the sibling comments are speculating.
Not sure which part of India you lived in but private engineering schools like Manipal, SRM, Vellore aren't considered prestigious. BITS is the only private one which has good clout but they don't have any management quotas.
That would probably be illegal for a public university. Elite private universities frequently defend themselves against the criticism that they reinforce social hierarchy and class privilege. They would incur significant reputational damage if they had official policies that did just that.
What do you mean? We just had a huge lawsuit where Harvard produced detailed evidence that they have exactly those policies, and it was never a secret before then.
The University of California is a public university. It's also huge and doesn't really suffer from the artificial scarcity of something like 'an undergrad spot at Harvard'. There are lots of ways to get in. What you're describing sounds at once cynical and naive to me and that's a questionable starting place for thinking about public policy in a country-sized state.
> This system isn't "fair", but the outcome is effectively the same as our current setup. With the most notable difference being that, at least this system is transparent and acknowledges that X% of incoming students paid for their post.
With the current setup, there are consequences to trying to pay your way in if you're caught. What's the point of removing those consequences?
Those consequences, in practice, simply act as an additional filter: you have to be savvy enough, and well-connected enough, to make a large alumni donation, and butter up the admissions committee.
This would replace that with cash on the barrel, which is simpler and more honest.
I'm not convinced it's better, but that would be the point of so doing.
> I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige
But this has how it has always been. Everyone knew it was always like this, had a feeling it was like this while they were considering or going through higher education, and now a couple articles and investigations come out.
Is anyone surprised here?
The only thing that has occurred is that people covet these institutions and also think they have a chance of accessing them, thanks to illusions of meritocracy that become real enough to be meaningful avenues for a wider population than before.
In the past it was very clear who didn't have a chance and who did.
Look at the example applicants in the article! A babysitter who knew reality and took a chance they got - babysit with this connected family and ask for the favor. DUH! Ka-CHING! Even dropping out of that kind of university looks good. Life upgraded. What game are the rest of you all even playing?
That is how ancient universities used to operate, there were several types of student who paid different amounts for their tuition, some background here [1].
This is fairly common in India in private institutions, especially professional schools such as for Engineering, Medicine, Dentistry and Business Administration.
A certain percentage of places are designated 'Management Quota', i.e., the management is free to do with them as it wishes. They are used in many ways. For example, if a certain religious community/sect/order runs the place, it may set aside a large chunk of the management quota to admit students from its community/sect/order; if a (non-sectarian) charitable trust runs the place, as is very common, it may set aside some percentage of the management quota for indigent students who would otherwise not had the chance to attend the institution. Additionally, almost invariably, some part of the management quota is sold to the highest bidder in a pure cash transaction. In this way, rich students end up subsidizing a reasonable number of otherwise deserving students.
There is a significant number of (relatively much less deserving) candidates that all institutions (private or public) are required to admit, such as those coming from the so-called "Scheduled Castes", "Scheduled Tribes", "Other Backward Classes" (from communities that have been lagging in privilege and access to economic opportunities because of their caste/religion), and candidates that have done most of their prior schooling in (massively underserved) rural areas (IOTW, "Reservation" aka Affirmative Action candidates). In fact, the chunk of places allotted (by Government Order) to Affirmative Action candidates is much larger than Management Quota, and even 'Merit Quota' (i.e., candidates who sit competitive examinations in order to gain admission).
As far as subsequent success is concerned, though, it's sink-or-swim for all the candidates who are admitted: they are not given any preference in tests, exams, etc. In some specific cases, for a small initial period, affirmative action candidates may be allowed to advance with lower scores, but that is very much a small exception, not the norm.
I'm curious - here in England, calling a person or a group of people "backward" would be rude/demeaning. Is that different in India, or is it a case or mixed wires in translating terms to English? Or do the people being called that find it demeaning but it's still socially acceptable among other people?
"Backward" has negative connotations here, in the west. But generally, the abbreviation "OBC" (Other Backward Castes) is used. From my personal observation, SC/ST/OBC folks are as caste-conscious as anyone else, but have successfully translated their caste identity into political power in India. In fact, it is fair to say that people from these categories (who comprise a numerically significant portion of the population) have a pretty good grip on power at every level of government, down from your local municipality ward up to the offices of the Prime Minister/President (do you know that the current Prime Minister of India is from a OBC)?
Generally, in polite conversation, no one ever talks about the other person's caste. A lot of the time, this is unnecessary, though. There are tons of caste signifiers, such as your last name, your skin tone, your language (both speakers can use the same language but the set of words used and usage/abusage can tell you a lot about the person's background. Like how you could tell a cockney from an upper-crust West Londoner.) Don't even get me started on food. If you are a "pure vegetarian", then it's a very good chance you are high-caste. With the professions also, things are changing a bit more quickly, but age-old divisions remain. You would be hard-pressed to find a Brahmin working a construction site (there's a good chance a Brahmin would be in an air-conditioned office drawing up the plans for said site); almost zero chance you'd see an upper-caste person going out fishing to sell the catch and make a living, and so on.
If you participate in a conversation with a group of Indians who have just met (at the workplace, say), just observe how they interact: they will put out direct or subtle questions like: "Where are you from originally?", "Where did you attend college?", "What do your parents do?", "Are you vegetarian or non-vegetarian?"... It just goes on and on. You can tell a lot about a person within 15 minutes of meeting him, if you have been raised in India.
EDIT: BTW, the terms "Scheduled Caste", "Scheduled Tribe" (perhaps even "Other Backward Classes") were introduced by the British! The British bureaucrats who ruled the country had an obsession with making tidy lists to categorise people (hence the "Schedule" in "Scheduled"!) and came up with the (original) lists of these castes and tribes!
That's probably true if done the way suggested, where the auctioned slots are open to anyone who pays enough money.
Suppose that instead the auction was only open to people who got put on the wait list after the regular admissions process?
Top schools get a lot more qualified applicants than they have openings for, and a lot of people end up on the wait list who are just as qualified as people who were admitted.
Another way, which would solve other problems as well, would simply be to uncouple credentials and education, and require any institution that receives federal funding to open the credentialing to everyone. Just as anyone who meets the requirements is eligible to take the exam for the CFA or CPA, anyone who meets the requirements should be eligible to take whatever exams or projects a college uses for it's credentials to obtain a degree (colleges could opt in to using a nationwide credentialing system instead of creating their own if they prefer). Open internships and the like to everyone as well.
This would theoretically lead to college degrees representing what they claim to represent (skill of an individual at graduation, not at their junior year of High School), would solve most of the cost issue (self studying and taking the exam would be a viable option that wouldn't be penalized), and admittance would be much less important (since it'd be disconnected from credentials). Of course it would also defang the leverage universities currently hold over society, so I imagine they'd fight tooth and nail against it.
Private schools can decide what they sell, but the UCs should “sell” a great education to as many people as possible at the lowest cost. In that view, pricing schemes that buy only a few scholarships for the low income is an insane priority.
Nobody is complaining about fairness or that it happens, let it happen but be open and honest about these transactions so other market participants can behave accordingly.
I think this is largely how it works, but it's not explicitly separated into two pots. Rather, things like legacy status and family donors are factors in a multifaceted admissions process. Someone who donated twice as much might not have their kid get admitted if academics and test scores are bad, whereas someone who didn't donate as much might get in with good grades and test scores.
>I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admissions into two pots
These universities also provide valuable networking opportunities. Would it be appropriate to completely segregate the pots so that they couldn't network?
There are three systems. People who pay their way in, people who has the highest grades, and people who get in through diversity quota. Transparency in all three would cause a major waves into the public perspective of admission practices.
Every competitive school has a diversity goal (though perhaps not outright quota) at some level for many dimensions of diversity. Many/most schools have academic floors but are then looking to blend in other factors other than pure academic achievement.
The UC chancellors would certainly like to blend diversity goals into their admissions process, but they're prohibited from doing so by state law, and most commentators I've seen believe the prohibition is reasonably effective.
And yet, they still try to introduce racial diversity by using policies in disguise.
The entire sub-part of UC admissions having to do with top 9% of students (by school) being guaranteed admission is an effort to achieve racial diversity without calling it that and violating the law.
It's funny you mention that policy, because note it can only have a substantial effect on admissions by race if a lot of high schools are racially segregated, as is the case.
If you don't think UC has a diversity quota, you are deceiving yourself.
The entire sub-part of UC admissions having to do with top 9% of students (by school) being guaranteed admission is an effort to achieve racial diversity without calling it that and violating the law.
No, it's racism against everyone who is displaced from otherwise being admitted, so that the UC can under-the-table enact a policy designed to increase the number of black and Hispanic admits without saying it's affirmative action.
Well and classism against more affluent students displaced when some poor kid of any color at some rural school gets an advantage. Or favoring kids that are first to attend college is displacing kids with better-educated families.
I don't have a moral problem with this. It's not a good strategy in life to voluntary switch to a poorer performing school to give yourself a leg up in UC admissions while taking the cost of having less academically competitive high school classmates. It is a reasonable metric to view students through the lens of "how much have they accomplished given the opportunities afforded to them" -- the issue with something like Prop 16 is that it engages in statistical racial discrimination (mostly against racial minorities for that matter) to make that consideration.
"Providing an education" and "selling prestige" are going to decouple more and more as remote education gets better, which it will since right now there's no choice but to invest in it.
I'd agree with this if the diploma had an indication which bucket the degree came from. When I need a brain surgeon, I'd like to know if he/she got the degree on merit or connections.
Is the implication here that the college doesn’t not actually test knowledge? If so, I’m not sure I’d want a doctor from there whether or not he/she happened to be smart as a 17 year old.
Why not just let students sell their slots? Sell at any time, but any earned credits are forfeited and they can't be re-accepted to the institution for some number of years.
In this day and age, with all the fierce competition, it's a real problem that elite universities are admitting rich kids on such unfair and uneven grounds.
Going to the "correct" school can transform the life of some people, essentially pulling them up from the lower working classes, and opening up the doors to middle, or even upper-middle classes.
And what's even worse, a lot of these rich kids could go pretty much anywhere, without it affecting their future finances or lifestyle - if anything, it almost seems like a vanity project from their parents side, where they get the bragging rights that their kids are studying at HYPS or whatever.
And it's not that the kids of richer parents are necessarily worse, academically speaking - many of them get private tutors, go to private / prep schools, etc. from young age, but still the parents are so risk averse, that they feel the need to pour even more money, just to eliminate the stress of uncertainty. Even if it's illegal.
I know these cases encompass a broad range of controversy (for example that top-tier Asian-American students can't get into certain schools, because of some nonsensical "personality" assessments) - but in the end, it's just plain old classism. Doesn't mater what skin color you have, where you come from; As long as you have the cash, the odds are increasing in your favor.
Then you have rich folks like David E. Shaw. The guy spent literally tens of millions in donations, to all the top schools, just to increase the chance of his kids getting accepted (or rather - minimize the chances of their kids getting rejected)
And just in case anyone thinks the idea that an elite school won't help a rich kid, there have been studies indicating that is the case.
The one that comes to mind was the study that compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend.
Average future incomes were not statistically different.
But the study did note that the starkest improvents in future incomes were found in poor and minority students.
I'm not going to shit on a study I haven't read, but it seems likely that if you come from a "rich" family capable of buying you into a college via back channels, you've probably already got a pretty solid leg up in the game. I can't imagine correcting for all of those variables in a manner which isn't going to leave at least a few questions.
Either way, I'm sure having a diploma from Harvard would open some doors for pretty much anyone, and I'm not naïve enough to pretend otherwise, but I have serious doubts that a diploma from Harvard can truly tell you anything other than that person has the ability to make it through Harvards' admission filter, and do mindless homework for X number of years, like every other college.
> compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend.
I don’t know if this comparison controls for the confounders. Alice and Bob are both accepted to Harvard, and Alice decides to attend and Bob decides to chill out at the University of Maui for four years. That’s pretty indicative of Alice being more ambitious and achievement-oriented.
Do you have a cite for this? Not saying you're wrong as it's my prior that selection bias is the most important factor in any difference in educational outcomes. But I'd love to have something solid to point to.
I will say I don't totally understand how future income differences can be not statistically significant and also be "stark" between lower income students at the same time.
The no-difference in financial outcomes was based on comparing the average incomes of the two groups. So naturally, you will have outliers on both sides. They found that minority students tended to be the outliers.
Part of that probably has to do with the more prestigious school getting them a job they wouldn't have had. But also probably has to do with minority students getting access to the rich, well connected network that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise.
Environment and options, too. The Finance Path, Consulting Path, Tech Path, Startup Path - the implicit assumptions of school A to Company B to Grad School C to Company D is objectively super weird (why is I-Banking > MBA > Consulting so standard a path?), but often critical to making a certain salary.
I’ve previously read this study (and at least one follow on study) and what they said jibes with my recollection. I’ll see if I can find the exact citation
Garbage in, garbage out. If you admit dummies, they are not
going to become a genius. The bigger issue for all of us is, now we are not supporting the students who could really move the needle. So the needle doesn't move.
It's probably true that generally rich kids could go to school pretty much anywhere and be okay, and that non-rich kids can have their lives transformed for the better by going to a reputable school. But isn't the latter due to the fact that people with power associate reputable schools with elite social status? Presumably if rich kids stopped going to a reputable school, it wouldn't take long for that school's reputation to diminish, even if the actual merit's of the education provided by the school didn't change.
I looked at DE Shaw's "philanthropy", the dude just gave top colleges a million dollars a year for like 5-6 years, which according to Wikipedia represented "60% of the Fund's philanthropy"
seeing this as an international student from a developing country, this is simply disheartening. It’s coming to the point where I’m starting to think hard about if it’s really worth applying to a US university at this point.
If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise:
> In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections
> UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants
the UC schools as a whole have ~226K students, and at Berkeley, it's ~17,000. I'm very surprised that the corresponding fractions are so small.
Then again, if you get recruited to play a sport that is all-but-exclusively a rich person's leisure activity -- Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, and Beach volleyball are all played at Berkeley -- and recruiting gave you an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would. The line between corruption and "that's just how we do things around here" is not self-evident to me here.
> if you get recruited to play Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, or Beach volleyball at UC Berkeley, and ~95% of kids who play those sports come from wealthy families, and recruiting gave them an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would.
The report comes close: "the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74. Similarly, two‑thirds of the admitted student athletes whom UC Berkeley evaluated through its holistic review process for academic years 2017–18 through 2019–20 received the lowest possible rating from its application readers—which is equivalent to a recommendation that the applicant be denied admission."
> the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74
So the student athletes averaged halfway between an A and an A-? So did I in HS, 15 years ago, and I was a pretty good student! GPAs are really hard to make sense of with all the AP bonuses and whatnot. Standardized test scores strike me as providing a more apples-to-apples comparison. Of course that’s increasingly difficult to do in a test-optional world. (My recollection from an article about ‘The Chosen’ in 2005 is that recruited athletes tend to score 100-200 points lower on the SAT, on average, at Ivy League schools. I would double-check had I not exceeded my monthly free New Yorker quota: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in/amp)
For regular classes, A: 4.0, B: 3.0, C: 2.0, D: 1.0 (with some variance depending on + or - grades offered). For Honors/AP classes, every grade is essentially bumped up 1.0 point.
So yes, a 3.74 is around an A- average, but that's an A- average in less rigorous classes, without competition from top students. That's more of a B-/C+ average in AP/Honors classes (obviously the calculation is far from perfect, though, because every school has it's quirks- at mine, you couldn't get above a ~4.5 overall). For reference, I graduated high school with a 3.6 with multiple Cs and hardly any As, simply by virtue of taking the maximum number of AP/Honors classes. The point being, a 3.74 is not a terrible GPA, but good students are generally over a 4.0 these days.
I thought it was widely regarded as acceptable that athletes had lower academic requirements. You can meet the admissions criteria via academics or via athletics. This doesn't mean any sort of inappropriate behavior.
The article describes something actually inappropriate: falsely saying students are good athletes in exchange for money.
This only includes those admitted from large donors. The number of students admitted for being friends/family of staff/administration/faculty is probably the highest percentage.
When I worked for Stanford in admissions, it ended up making up about 10-15% of each incoming class.
People on "the list" could still be denied, but the admissions officer would need to write a letter to the Dean explaining why - and that never happened.
People think donating small amounts to the school or being a legacy student help admissions, but they absolutely do not have an impact. The most impactful variables to admission are grades, race/gender, test scores, and essays - roughly in that order.
Side note, but why are water polo and volleyball considered upper-class sports in the USA? I understand regular polo, rowing, etc, because of the cost of equipment. But at my school (on the other side of the world), volleyball was for the islanders, and water polo was for the misfits who couldn't make it in a more popular sport. What sports in the USA are for the plebs? Baseball?
>Side note, but why are water polo and volleyball considered upper-class sports in the USA?
Beach volleyball is more common in areas close to the beach. Beach and indoor players are also significantly taller than the average person-- in the league that my college was a part of, the shortest woman playing middle blocker was still 185cm. Height and beach access both have correlations to socioeconomic factors.
For various reasons, the US has huge racial disparities when it comes to swimming ability. Most African American and Hispanic children don't know how to swim.
As others have mentioned, football, basketball and to a lesser extent soccer/baseball tend to be the "pleb" sports. But even within a sport, you'll see class and racial distinctions when you compare different positions. When you look at pros and college, the majority of quarterbacks and centers are white. QBs also tend to come from wealthier families. Meanwhile, wide receivers and running backs are mostly black. The defense is mostly black, and I don't think there's a single non-black cornerback in the NFL (unless you miscount Tre'Davious White)
> Most African American and Hispanic children don't know how to swim.
Out of curiosity, how common is it for public elementary, middle and high-schools to include swimming lessons in (mandatory) PE class in general? How often do schools without their own swimming pools take their PE class at a nearby public pool?
A club might go elsewhere for a pool or track, but I don't think it's at all common for a plain old PE class to go off campus except perhaps to use a gym if the school lacks one. And I don't think having your own pool is very common for a high school or below.
Water polo requires a pool which is an expense that doesn't make sense for non-rich schools. Volleyball doesn't have a major professional league nor one of the big college sports in the USA, so its not in the interest of poor students to take part in because they probably could also be playing Basketball which has a very high profile league and is a major college sport.
Basketball and football are for the plebs. You can usually detect which sports by taking Census race-income measures then comparing them against the visible racial demographic of participants in the sport.
This works well as a heuristic because visible racial characteristics are visible and the rich don't usually want to play with the poor.
Water polo requires a pool, which is expensive. Baseball requires a large field, also expensive. I believe basketball is so popular in part because of the (relatively) low equipment/space cost.
> If you had asked me yesterday what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%
I don't think it's in the double digits for any school. You need large amounts of wealth to donate your way in.
> what percent of students I thought got into UC schools due to personal connection or wealth, I would have estimated between 10-20%. But this report seems to suggest otherwise:
It's among the private schools, such as the Ivies, where this really comes into play.
Even (some) test scores like the SAT are getting disfavored by some colleges. Rich kids have more support (private teachers, mentors, test preps), sometimes their parents have more free time.
Where on earth do you think inner city kids are playing water polo and golf? Just because golf courses aren't that expensive to play on doesn't mean they're accessible to poor people (plus there's the cost of clubs, obviously).
And water polo... even if there are public pools near you, they probably aren't dedicating space for competitive water polo.
Inner city kids would be considered poor, particularly time-poor (parents/caregivers have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet). There are the rich, the poor and the (majority) middling sort. For the majority, wouldn't water polo be affordable? I don't know about golf, though, but given that most cities have public golf courses, perhaps golf is also in the reach of most folks who want to play.
The vast majority of high schools where I'm from don't have public pools. Pools have also been less available historically to Blacks.
After segregation ended, many jurisdictions defunded public pools rather than fund desegregated pools. Instead, wealthier whites used private ones. For a brief history:
Oh yeah, I don't dispute the history of pools in America in general of having a lot of racist gatekeeping behind them, that's absolutely true. I was just saying that swimming and water polo are super cheap sports to participate in as an athlete.
But to become a competitive student athlete accomplished enough to get into a school like Berkeley, you have to go to a high school with its own pool, coach, and roster of fellow competitive swimmers.
When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it possible to become an elite athlete in that sport. Most public schools--especially poor ones--don't have those resources.
One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.
Natural talent is still a thing. Though I do agree that more $$$ = better training.
David Epstein's Range talks a lot about training in your younger years. He has a much better argument than me, but the gist is that you have to have a 'trial' period before you commit (depending on sport conditions). In 'unkind' (his term) sports, if you overtrain early, you'll burn out. I'd say Water Polo and Volleyball are those kids of sports. Swimming, on the other hand, is a 'kind' sport where early identification and rigorsous training are beneficial.
> One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.
Of course it's not always true. However your rebuttal actually proves the point of this discussion. You can name one outlier, who is exactly that, an outlier. The issue isn't "athletic scholarships are 100% inaccessible to people outside of the top 10% wealth bracket", it's more along the lines of "the overwhelming majority of athletic scholarships for sports are provided to people who are already benefitting from systemic privelege, and the remaining slots will be filled by outliers"
Consider two equally skilled waterpolo players, one who has a shared pool and the facilities to go with it, and one who has a private pool, coaching staff, etc. Now consider who is more likely to be in that position in the first place. That's not to say that there are no minorities in the second group, but they are overwhelmingly more likely to not end up in that scenario in the first place.
Yeah, it's a pretty common HS sport on the west coast and in states that don't freeze. Any school with a pool nearby may have a team. My HS shared the pool with three other HS teams during after-school practice.
I'll echo this. Most HSs that I know of in CA have pools. But I can't find any info online about percentages or breakdowns (urban, rural, suburban, etc). I'd say west-coast states and those that don't freeze have an easier time with pool upkeep and year round usage.
Yeah, I don't have hard information on this either, but I get the impression that it's a much different calculation if you're in a climate where the pool has to be indoors.
This is bad, but 64 students isn't all that much. It pales in comparison to private colleges. For example, Harvard accepts about 1/3 of its students as "legacy". If you believe the lawsuits about Harvard's anti-Asian discrimination, that also affects hundreds of potential Harvard students every year. Once you consider that UC Berkeley is about five times larger than Harvard, and that there are at least a dozen top-tier private schools with similar policies to Harvard, this seems like a much smaller problem.
Read the article. 64 students (from the tiny audited sample) met the highest bar (direct email evidence of connection to donations etc.), to say nothing of other "strongly suspect" students, and the rest outside of the audited sample.
Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.
How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.
The idea of privilege first entered the public sphere in the prelude to the French Revolution. "Privilege" in Old French literally means "private law".[1] It was the idea that a different set of rules for each of the Estates (Clergy, Nobles, and Commoners) was both fair and natural.
Are we are starting to see similarly different sets of rules for each class in the United States? Is such privilege in accordance with our ideals of liberty and justice for all?
Before the 18th century most people could not read. Literacy rates began rising dramatically starting in the 17th century with the invention of the printing press and the proliferation of reading materials that it spawned. By the third quarter of the 18th century, an extraordinary milestone was passed in France. For the first time in history more people could read than could not. The commoners of Paris were obsessed with the plays, novels and essays of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. The satire and wit of these thinkers inspired a new form of popular discourse we now call critical thinking. Commoners from rich merchants to petty artisans started examining and discovering the contradictions and injustices endemic to their lot in life. The idea of privilege came from this tempest of new ideas. While the hierarchy of power and its unequal treatment are as old as time, this newly educated population was for the first time able to see this hierarchy of power for what it is: an inherited system of control based on fraudulent claims to divinity that is inherently unfair and unjust.
1 for 1 isn't worth it, and the UC system already plays that game with international students where one international pays for 3 in-states. Make the buy-in price pay for 10 and I'm in support.
1 for 10 seems reasonable, assuming there is also a strict academic requirement for that privileged student. Even more points if it supports their housing and food plan.
If you fail out Timmy, he has to pay for tuition again thus paying for even more students. Or just charge the 10x upfront + normal tuition/year after that.
Further points if rich kids do household chores, cleaning, cooking etc for less privileged folks. Just strict academic requirement is not sufficient. Rich kids also have to remain in 95 percentile in academics. A further investigation committee need to be setup to investigate every year if rich kids are not using their influence to be among top students in their classes.
You obviously have to balance the legitimate cost against the illegitimate costs people will incur to get kids admitted. I don't know if 3x or 10x is the right value, but it's definitely not "more is better." If you make it cost a billion dollars to legitimately buy your kid into the school, there will still be millionaires utilizing these sorts of bribes.
This isn't tenable at this price. Double or triple it, and maybe.
The limiting factor for elite universities usually isn't dollars, but the quantity of qualified tenure-track faculty and physical space. Not at the university, but overall. The number of postdocs and graduating PhD students each year with the credentials that Cal wants to accept isn't huge. Similarly, the number of rooms that the university has is limited, and both of those numbers take time to change.
A certain ticket for 4x the price of Harvard is still a really, really good deal for lots of wealthy people.
This is already the way education works. You’ve heard of “needs-blind” admissions? Anywhere they don’t say that, it means the ability of students to pay full price is part of the admission process.
The economy travellers make it possible to travel first class. First class travel is for the moderately wealthy. The very wealthy have their own transport.
The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory.
As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).
a) It's not uncommon these days for the term "Marxism" to be used as a brush to paint anyone "too left wing" (despite not being close to actual Marxists)
Plus, yes there are still some people in the world who believe in Marxism, although often just in a broad sense rather than thinking everything about it is right. But I doubt many on HN.
And while complaining about downvoted may be against the rules, personally I think it's completely fine in the context of wanting to understand something like your question, rather than "this shouldn't be downvoted".
There was a study suggesting the strongest social mobility influence granted by an university education is really just the proximity and opportunity to network with the wealthy on even grounds more than the education itself.
So by having a guaranteed ratio of very wealthy mixed into your student pool, it's hugely beneficial to everyone else. It's practically the reason people chase after prestigious MBA educations.
The practice might be distasteful philosophically, but the results are apparently great.
Well no, that's not really what rule of law means. It would be perfectly within the rule of law to allow people to pay for admissions. If this wasn't a public institution, it would be perfectly legal, and I'm not even sure it's illegal here.
Rule of law is not sufficient, power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes.
> It would be perfectly within the rule of law to allow people to pay for admissions
Not if a law exists to the contrary. And that was the point I was agreeing with -- the solution should be to write a law if one doesn't already exist; or to enforce it if it does.
> power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes
Agreed, though distribution isn't the word I'd use, as it implies the existence of another human authority to determine how it should be distributed (thus granting that person or group of people improper power).
But if the placement of power is determined by duly enacted law, that's acceptable.
It's a fine view that nobody should be denied great education, but if an entire country's annual cohort of high school diploma recipients all applies to the public college considered to be the best one they obviously couldn't all attend that one.
I didn't look at the page header, only the domain (.ca.gov) and skimmed the illustrations and was wondering why a Canadian govt body is researching an American university. I didn't know California had its own domain.
Don't know if I'm just jaded -- but I'm seriously not bothered by people making large donations to a university to have their kid admitted. It's a transaction which benefits the university and the student. Granted -- it should be above board and there should be formal policies. Not justifying the specific actions in this case just curious at the outrage.
Yeah, if one family donates millions to have their child admitted, those millions of dollars can help subsidize the university's costs for other students or it could be used for special projects like libraries. This is probably why many schools have buildings named after people who usually tend to be donors.
The problem is that if we normalize it, then they will get addicted to the money and ONLY let in people who's parents can make a large donation. Finally what will be considered a large donation, will go up rapidly.
I argue that this isn't going to go away 100%, so I propose we make a more honest rule. "No more than 1% of students" or "No more than 10% of students" can get in this way and the rest have to be through normal means.
It can be fraud against other students. Applicants are told that admissions decisions are based on qualifications. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for that qualification. They pay $50-100 to apply. Then it turns out that the qualification isn’t real... That admission can simply be purchased. If admissions can be purchased, the the degrees can likely be purchased too. Fraud is a crime.
Making a donation to a university is certainly a direct way to apply money to the process, but we already see that through additional factors.
You’ve got private K-12 schools that give many people a leg up, but even the best public schools have a similar effect through zoning. You want to get your child into a better public school, you move to a home that’s zoned for it. The homes zoned for the best schools? Well they are more expensive.
That’s not even factoring in tutors, SAT prep or even just well educated parents who give their children additional support at home.
I tend to agree with the idea that it’s happening no matter what. It’s just a matter of whether we choose to acknowledge it and let it benefit others.
I don't think public institutions like Cal engage in legacy admissions, but I'm not sure?
Many schools give a general boost for legacy, but it is not always so tit-for-tat as the transactions that occurred here with Cal. They'll often have a different non-legacy pipeline for large donor -> admission.
For instance, at Harvard, there is the legacy SCEA process, but there is also the "z-list" process which is the more direct "children of billionaires" route.
There are some universities and colleges that choose openly or non-openly consider. However, the policy of the UC System Board of Regents expressly forbids legacy and donor preference. Additionally, as a public institution there are due process concerns with not evaluating applications in accordance with the published factors and criteria, which in this case do not include legacy.
> Additionally, as a public institution there are due process concerns with not evaluating applications in accordance with the published factors and criteria, which in this case do not include legacy.
Those would simply be fraud considerations in a private institution that charges an application fee.
Of course, a private institution also has Equal Protection / (Substantive) Due Process considerations at play as to what the published factors and criteria can be, as well as (Procedural) Due Process considerations as to whether it actually follows them.
No, legacy admissions are at least to some extent rule based, rather than outright cheating which what this stuff is - people don't go to jail over legacy admissions, for instance. UC Berkeley doesn't have legacy admissions to begin with.
If one considers a university as a hedge fund with an education and research division, then it is rather sensible to have policies designed to increase the likelihood of wealthy individuals providing incoming capital.
I was in graduate school when I first learned that writing good grant proposals (and other skills related to acquiring large quantities of money) was arguably more valuable than doing good science.
Rather than claim that students are admitted based on test scores and grades alone, why don't universities simply say that admissions are also based on factors such as how influential or wealthy the parents are? Doing so would not be a problem, the only problem is not being transparent about it. Stanford is very clear about the fact that "legacy" applicants (meaning their parents or siblings are at Stanford and presumably the family will be active donors) get priority.
> Rather than claim that students are admitted based on test scores and grades alone, why don't universities simply say that admissions are also based on factors such as how influential or wealthy the parents are? Doing so would not be a problem
For public universities like those in the University of California system, to whom the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution (and, often, similar and sometimes more expansive provisions of state constitutions) apply, it probably would be a problem.
At least one reason: universities are overwhelmingly funded by public money. Perhaps (/perhaps/) private institutions should be allowed to explicitly advantage wealthy applicants, but forcing all of us fund institutions that advantage the wealthy is perverse.
Note, even "private" universities (eg not the UC school discussed here) receive tremendous amounts of public money, as well as tax-exempt status. See, for e.x. [1]: the Ivy league received >$40B in public money and benefits from 2010-2015.
IIRC, research at MIT is >66% funded by federal grants.
> meaning their parents or siblings are at Stanford and presumably the family will be active donors
Not going out to bat for legacy admissions, but it's not always tit-for-tat related to donations and there are other reasons schools do it other than just $$$ from donations.
The uber-rich aren't getting in through a generic legacy boost.
In France to get into an elite STEM university ("engineering school") students all take the same maths/physics/CS exams and the overall grade is the only factor deciding admission. Everything is state funded.
It's not perfect, but it levels the playing field a lot more than other systems. And it's good at making sure talented but poor students have access to the best programs. At those the level is high, for example the best math program probably has the highest Fields medal per student ratio of any university in the world.
The downside is that universities and engineering schools are small and underfunded so they don't stand out in worldwide rankings.
How do rich people game the system? They can to some extent game it earlier, putting their kids in better high schools. But the kids will still have to take the same exams. So generally they just avoid this system and put their kids into business schools, which are not state funded and where admission is based on much softer and game-able criteria. Or they send them to US universities.
Same in Belgium and Netherlands. There is no reason to send your kids to private schools, since the state funded schooling system is already good enough.
Same goes for universities (don't know about the impact on research though, just talking about education here)
And I also highly doubt that graduating a "prestige" university really makes much difference here. If you want to make more money, start your own business.
In my opinion, a lot of problems in US come from the fact that they don't offer proper education to the lower class. In Europe it's great to share a class with kids from all kinds of backgrounds.
1/3 of them were admitted as student athletes. Everyone knows that it is official policy at most schools to accept people with athletic ability who would not qualify academically. Why? Because those athletic programs make the university a lot of money!
How is admitting someone because their family gave a lot of money any different in principle? It is just a question of reducing how many steps there are to making a profit for the school.
If you read the report, a lot of the student athletes aren't actually athletes, but have been designated as such to overcome poor scores in the admissions process.
In any case, it might be negatively impacting the school's athletic program because real athletes have spots taken by opportunists.
If I hadn't read the report, how could I have known that 1/3 of the students involved were designated as student athletes?
My point remains. Once you've opened the door to accepting students for non-academic reasons, you've opened it to accepting them for other non-academic reasons.
(In this case I don't care about the impact on "real athletes" because I don't think that athletic programs are important to the university's core mission.)
Interesting. You accuse that guy of not having read the report but his comment doesn't make sense unless he's aware of the idea described in it. Ironically, if you had read his comment you would not have needed to have said "if you read the report".
Totally false that athletics makes the school money. The exceptional cases are the top 10 division 1 basketball/football programs that people talk about. The vast majority of college athletics programs do not make money. Just think about it, you think a UC school is making money from a student golf or tennis player?
Also these students admitted as "athletics" did not actually qualify and were never part of the team.
My understanding is that participating in a range of athletics programs is required to be a member of an organization like the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which is required to participate in the most profitable sports (primarily football).
Therefore the fact that individual sports and athletes do not make money doesn't mean that money isn't a reason for student athletic programs.
That's an excellent point. I'd be perfectly fine with eliminating both legacy admissions and athletic scholarships at public universities.
It reminds me of the Lori Loughlin case, where she was arrested not because bribing a university to admit your child is unfair to other applicants and sullies the ideal of an academic meritocracy, but because she didn't follow the university's established process for bribery. (Matt Levine expounds on this with his usual hilarity at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...)
But why? What if one {football player|kid-with-rich-parents} can subsidize 10 other need-based students who otherwise would not have been offered a premier education? In terms of reputation, imposters tend to fade into obscurity in time while those 10 will go on to build the schools brand.
Seems like they identified 108 (2+64+42) students. During the 6 years examined the 4 universities admitted over 200,000 students, if my calculations are right [1]. It's definitely a serious problem that needs to be fixed, especially since there may be more not yet identified. But the problem is not large relative to class sizes.
I went to a Marianist university in the US. This was right after 9/11 when it had suddenly become a lot harder for international students to come in. I had no problems.
Why? Because I also went to a Marianist high school in Italy, and it so happens that the principal of that school had in the meantime (I worked for a few years between high school and university) become procurator-general for the Marianists in Rome. He was also my Latin teacher.
So he basically told the president of the university "This person is a good student, got 99% on their maturity exam, let them in, tell your USCIS liaison to sort it out". I was given a provisional visa, took the SAT, got a nearly perfect score, and they let me in. For whatever reason, I always got enhanced screening and questioning whenever I got on an airplane or went through US customs, after that, until I got my green card, but they let me in.
Was this abuse of power? Not being sarcastic or rhetorical; I'm asking if what my principal did at the time was an abuse of power/authority.
It seems like a different scenario with a religious school vs. a public, state-sponsored school. Even with other, secular private schools, I feel the issue is different.
Sigh, this again. This is a solved issue. Many countries, large countries, with lots of rich people and smart kids have figured this out. Standardized tests for every single student at the same time. Once per year, no exceptions. Best graded students have first pick, nationwide, to all universities in the country. No other factor in place.
Yes, rich kids will on average have the advantage because they are more likely to afford good studying conditions and a tutor, nothing to do about this, rich kids will always have some advantage on average. This system motivates everyone, rich or poor, that what matters most to climb the social ladder (or just not fall) is effective studying.
It really is a great system, you can see what were the grades the previous year for your dream university and course, and give it your all with knowledge that it is solely in your hands, and not depending on alumni, quotas, distance, wealth, etc.
The college admissions process is actually moving away from weighing the SAT or ACT as heavily as it has in the past -- for this year's admissions cycle, most schools are going test-optional. The best correlation for American standardized testing scores isn't study habits, but zip code.
I personally don't believe that moving to a system like China's gaokao would solve any of the issues to do with wealth, because the American university system is more than an academic system. It can't simply test for academics (although GPA is the #1 factor considered in admissions across the board), because the strength of American universities is also in community and intellectual diversity. Most applicants to top schools are academically qualified to attend.
Upon close examination I think we would find the ALL schools do this.
This is just a symptom of the underlying problem with our education system in the US. It’s no longer about educating but about $. When the almighty dolla gets in the way judgment is clouded.
Come to think of it... maybe this happens in politics and medicine too? ;)
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead with JUST 64 students admitted on the basis of connections and donations.
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead letting external auditors look at this stuff.
* MIT wouldn't be caught. None of this would be public for MIT. That's what NDAs and non-disparage agreements are for.
I'm sorry, but all schools don't do this. Most are smart enough to stay out of this kind of trouble. For Harvard, it took a lawsuit and subpoenas to get in trouble over this.
Having external auditors, standards, and accountability is probably completely unique to UC/Berkeley. Admitting just 64 applicants based on graft and corruption is also unique within the top-20 schools.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a world of greys and putting things in black and white terms doesn't do any good. MIT doesn't get money from selling spots, but they misstep and get money from other even less savoury places. You gotta get your money somehow.
If MIT did let in some legacy admissions due to donations, could it be said that the donations department would have been more discerning about not taking money from someone like Jeff Epstein? It's impossible to revisit history, but nobody is clean in this higher ed game.
I feel less bad about MIT taking money from Epstein, than the cover-up around it. People and institutions make mistakes. That's okay. It's a question of what you do about them. MIT has a history of hiding stuff like this, and of intimidating anyone who would talk about it openly.
MIT shut down the entire CSAIL mailing list -- whose legacy dates back to the old AI Lab days -- because someone had the nerve to raise the question of Epstein, asking what MIT's attitude should be towards a faculty member who visited the island. The list had been through horrible flamewars, thick and thin, over it's many-decade existence, and it finally took the whole Epstein cover-up to shut it down. MIT did the equivalent of a shadowban, collecting all emails sent to the list, but not forwarding them to the community for two days, to see what people send BEFORE announcing it was shut down. A lot of people sent a lot of stuff they wanted to share with the community but not the leadership.
To give a slight bit more context, the question was about a faculty member who had visited Epstein's island. We were promised that'd be answered in MIT's so-called fact-finding report. Naturally, it wasn't. It got shut down before anyone publicly put 2 and 2 together.
I absolutely agree. Did you know if you have an NSF GRF as a grad student at MIT it costs a PI more to employ you than if you were on TA support? MIT takes more overhead and assumes the PI will just suck it up as he/she/they is "riding off MIT's brand" anyway. Numerous complaints to NSF run into the brick wall of "<sigh> MIT"
Yes but TAing might take 30 hours a week. Anyway, MIT professors should be the best in their field, if they can’t support the small amount more it takes for the grad student with the NSF grants that sounds like a problem
MIT students are a bit ahead of students at other schools. Faculty hiring is such that there are no substantial differences in faculty quality. The difference between an MIT professor and a state school professor is mostly random chance. Oh, and the MIT professor has a lower teaching load, a great brand stamp, and a huge PR department.
MIT overhead is roughly 2/3 of the money which comes into NSF. Perhaps this might not be a problem to raise (it's generally not), but that doesn't make it okay. The bigger problem is your tax payer dollar passing through overhead into graft. Your taxes are contributing to the MIT yacht club ("MIT Sailing"), million-dollar salaries, buildings costing a significant fraction of a billion dollars (MIT Stata Center), fancy faculty clubs, etc.
Is that good use of taxpayer dollars? Of tuition? Of donor dollars? That's ultimately where all this excess comes from.
I appreciate your zealousness for MIT but your response doesn't mean that it hasn't happened at MIT nor other revered places of higher learning in the past, just that it hasn't been made widely known. The people I associated with at Cal I thought were above this kind of behavior as well, but apparently not. I would be sad to hear about this for MIT or any other college. However there's a lot of deals that happen behind closed doors, and sadly, it could be more than we think given all the press we've heard about college admissions these last few years.
That's the huge difference between private schools like MIT (Ivy League and Stanford too) and public schools like UC Berkley. Public schools receive a lot of funding from the state and they should be audited by the state and have some transparency in their admissions process. California clamped down on the UC schools years ago for admitting too many out of state students, and they had the authority to do that. I don't think it's unique to Berkley at all, all state schools have to answer to the state they serve.
I would be careful about following this line of thinking too much. Like a few politicians are corrupt, they're all corrupt. It's no longer useful to vote. Or some Hacker News commenters made up stuff on the spot. So all Hacker News comments are garbage. It dismisses the vast majority of people who are doing the right thing.
The vast majority of people are doing the right thing.
The vast majority of people in highly-competitive positions are not doing the right thing.
* A statement like "all politicians are corrupt" is to a first order accurate. You can't get elected without money, and you can't get money without doing donor bidding.
* A statement like "all executives are psychopaths" is not accurate, but becomes pretty close to accurate as you look at organizations with more than 1000-people who are no longer led by founders. You don't make it to the top of the corporate ladder without outcompeting people fighting dirty. People who are clean don't make it to the top.
* Not all academics fabricate data, but a growing number of academics at elite schools do. MIT has 1000 applicants for each faculty slot at CSAIL. You don't make it through that level of competition without cheating at least a little bit, and that makes it into the culture.
* Not all universities are corrupt, but by similar logic, most universities with massive endowments are. Dirty money goes to institutions willing to accept it.
Same thing goes across the board. Most religious leaders are deeply ethical people. Televangelists tend to be corrupt. Most lawyers who make partner tend to be a little bit unethical. Etc.
Anytime you get high enough on the ladders, bad behavior goes up.
It's been analyzed in much greater depth. Pfeffer's "Power" and de Mesquita's "Dictators Handbook" are treatments from a psychological and game-theoretic point of view, respectively. Both are well-researched scholarly tracts from top professors in the field. Pfeffer is controversial, while de Mesquita is pretty accepted organizational psychology.
Where we run into problems is that most people from any demographic are basically good, and people extrapolate from that. But power isn't a demographic; there's a selection process.
I didn't think what I posted was overly controversial, but as of now, it's a -3, with no one posting why they disagree. The only time that's happened before was the (now many times) I hit a nerve with the Google astroturf crowd. And I don't even dislike Google. But them's the taboos.
> Come to think of it... maybe this happens in politics and medicine too? ;)
indeed, the USA has made a business-marketplace out of anything, including things which should never be driven by profit driven competition (e.g. jails)
And then we have google which likes to only hire from 'top tier schools' and then everyone else follows along. Believe me I've noticed how THAT has changed tech culture in the bay area.
Lots of arguments can be and have been made in favor of racially discriminating policies. I believe the response must always be "no, that's morally wrong".
A good "Church of Satan" reaction to these policies in California would be a university that set the bar higher for Black applicants, with the justification that other policies have in fact over-corrected for past injustices, and now the injustice of that over-correction must be righted.
The thing to keep in mind is that the justification for some of the worst racism in history has been injustice or past injustices. We should learn from history and pre-commit as a society to react hyper-negatively to any policy that involves racial discrimination. Get it the hell out of the Overton window.
Is that the only result of affirmative action admissions, or are there a few you are leaving out?
Do you have a better plan for dealing with systemic racism[1], that does not have the drawback you cite? Do you believe that systemic racism doesn't exist? Or do you believe that it does exist, but we shouldn't do anything about it?
Which of those three options are you championing?
[1] I understand that the mere mention of this concept is a dogwhistle for negative karma.
> Do you have a better plan for dealing with systemic racism
Get rid of all the bullshit administrators to lower the cost of college back to what it was 50 years ago so that poor people can go without getting into a lot of debt.
> so it was legal until then but didn’t make a dent in inequality?
It did make a dent in inequality.
It didn't end it, but then it wasn't around nearly as long as the structural disadvantages that entrenched inequality, and it was a much gentler push than those it sought to mitigate the effects of.
I think you also have to determine the purpose of a university.
It's either to take the top students, bar none, or it is to educate and uplift poorer students (economically and educationally). Mixing these two doesn't work.
Or you can choose to define "top students" as those who performed best, relative to their starting conditions. You could make an argument that such student are most efficient at using the opportunities they are given, and thus would benefit most from the education.
That would work, if the last measure taken was immediately prior to admission.
Alas, university doesn't work that way: students continue to be measured throughout their tenure, and those measures are an important component of the next phase of their life, be it work or further education.
The evidence is unequivocal: lowering the admissions standards for some section of the student body, results in those students doing poorly relative to students who were subject to the full standards.
This shouldn't be surprising, and no, it doesn't seem to matter why the standards were lowered, affirmative action, legacy preference, or otherwise.
Why can't you mix the two? Admit 1/2 your class as top students, and the other 1/2 as people who are being uplifted.
That is in fact exactly how admissions at the UC schools work. The first 1/2 of the class is admitted on test scores and grades alone, the second 1/2 is admitted via reading of their essays and considering other factors, such as extracurriculars, economic circumstance, and, until the 90s, race.
Totally the fallacy of the excluded middle. There are many ways to work the two goals together. And understanding it in these very limited dimensions is a complete mistake.
The very definition of what a "top student" is varies a great deal.
Because universities such as Berkeley claim they are a bastion of "diverse admission policies" as opposed to meritocracy which they call "a tyranny" which make them hypocrites as they have corrupt admission policies and practice cronyism.
Of course it wasn't meritocracy since it was cronyism and nepotism like what happens at Berkeley. But neither is "affirmative action", a racist policy which isn't going to end nepotism and cronyism, just make things even more arbitrary. No need to be an "athlete" now, just put "latino" or "black" on your registration form and don't forget the bribes. That's the system you are rooting for.
Obviously "just putting latino or black on your registration" form does not in fact automatically get you into any university, you know you are exaggerating.
Then you add "and don't forget the bribes" -- you think most bribes come from Black and Latino people, or most people who are Black and Latino also bribe schools to get in? I don't think you actually think this, because it would be insane?
I find it disturbing that when confronted with information about how wealthy and socially connected people have long been able to use their wealth and social connections to get into universities -- you are less concerned about doing something about this, than you are concerned about programs meant to give some advantage to less wealthy and socially-connected people. It's like, you see bribery and special favors from the wealthy and socially-connected, and you somehow still find a way to blame the poor and not socially connected for this problem, to focus the discussion away from the misdeeds of the wealthy and socially-connected!
It really says something that this whole discussion is full of people saying "I don't see the problem with that, it seems fine" for wealthy and socially-connected people (who are mostly but not entirely white) to have advantages, and also comments like yours complaining about perceived advantages they think not white people have.
The US university system is completely broken and ready for reformation. The endowments of so many of these schools are driving flawed behaviors that encourage these backdoor admissions. University athletics are in the same camp. These supposed money makers are just giant distractions from the universities missions to educate.
Admissions is a rat race, where you have to run as fast as you can just to keep up. You may have a 4.0 GPA, and 1550 on your SAT, and are the quarterback of the hockey team, but you'll be passed over for someone with a 4.0 GPA and a 1550 SAT, who is both the quarterback of the hockey team, AND spent three weeks building orphanages in East Oblastan.
Once you're admitted, you no longer need to participate in the rat race. You just need to meet the criteria for passing your classes, which do not scale up, just because the person sitting next to you in lecture is an orphanage-builder.
i guarantee you there are a number of people every year who get rejected from Berkeley but accepted to Stanford (or equivalent) -- just a lot of noise in the process and after a certain point it becomes pretty arbitrary.
i bet this fact is how the admissions officials rationalized this corruption -- if the line between acceptance and rejection is arbitrary anyway, how much worse could it be to try to get some money out of it? (a lot worse)
Agreed. I was accepted to a top-5 school and rejected from more than one school ranked 25+ (one was >50). I know someone for grad school applied to 5 schools: they got rejected from all 5 schools, reapplied the next year, and got accepted to 3/5.
One of my kids applied to Cal a few years back...at Cal you apply to the individual college (such as the college of engineering) when you apply. Some colleges are much easier to get into than others and it's very difficult to change colleges once you are admitted, it's like applying to get into the school all over again. Obviously getting into the CS or Engineering programs at Cal is very hard but many of the other programs are much less competitive. I don't know if that's how all the UC schools are or not, but the difficulty of admissions seems like a mixed bag at UC Berkley.
If they can manage to make "student athletes" pass classes they’ve never been to (and who they pay tuition for) then how hard do you think it would be for someone that’s actually paying to go there?
The admissions criteria for universities don't make a lot of sense. The standardized tests select for students that are good at writing those tests.
Malcolm Gladwell (yeah, yeah, I know) did a podcast series about the admissions process for law schools and the role that test taking speed plays in the admission process.
FTA: an example: """In regard to this engineering applicant, the associate dean stated that he was concerned that the applicant’s math test scores were low, but when he considered those scores together with the applicant’s holistic rating and GPA, he believed that the applicant would be successful as an engineering major and admitted the applicant. """
Colleges rarely if ever fail students. There’s a known phenomenon of grade curving (adding +x% to exams if it was difficult for some students) which I never understood during my time in higher education.
Yet it makes sense because universities want to lessen liabilities and have rich alum give back (esp. the case with the children of wealthy donors).
I went to Berkeley and this wasn’t true for Berkeley. Popular majors were very competitive and were designed to filter students out of majors. Many classes were based on a curve such that effectively 1/3 of people ended up at least leaving the major. Sample popular majors: computer science, chemical engineering, molecular cell biology. I knew of at least one person who effectively failed out after one semester and of community college transfers in danger of failing out.
Same experience at my UC. Popular/impacted major courses aren't even allowed to curve up (only down). The universities will defend the reputation of their top majors by aggressively filtering out people not meeting the bar. It's not unheard of for a majority of a class to be given non-passing marks, and it's in their financial interest to do so since the student will have to retake the class, thus pay more in tuition. They'd just rather you waste your time and money in an non-impacted major (and so it doesn't impact their graduation rate stat used for major rankings).
Definitely have my share of friends that did 6-8 year stints at the UC for a 4-year degree from constantly failing out of classes, but never forced out.
Can’t wait to bring this up whenever they call for alumni donations!
Never giving a penny.
(In all seriousness, the people who call are usually just students working a job, so be respectful of you plan to do the same. Just ask to mark that as the reason for no donation).
I know I'm out of sync with the mainstream here but I think it should be fine to buy your way in to a school like UCB. The price tag should be so high that it would support say 10 or even 20 low income, highly talented students. Say 1M/year. If a family can pay, fine.
If they cant, well, they can get in line like everyone else.
This really just makes the process transparent and put a price tag on it. And now, if a professor or dean takes a lower donation for admittance, they're stealing from the school and would be put in jail, not given some wrist slap or administrative leave.
At the end of the day, why would I care what the rich waste their money on? If they want to pay twice as much for half the education, eh its their dollar. I'm pretty sure college is a business, and asking businesses to leave paying customers on the table is the kind of anti-market thinking that leads to situations like this.
If you incentivize "anti-social behavior" (this seemed like a reasonable middle ground word), what else does anyone expect to happen?
For every purchased admission there are two parties, the rich person spending their money and the academically qualified candidate that loses out on the admission.
I don't care what the rich person spends their money on, but I do care about the student that worked hard, played by the rules, and deserved to be admitted but because of corruption was denied their spot.
UC is not a business, it's a public institution. Every Californian tax-payer pays for this institution, the administrators are there to be stewards of the public funds for the public good.
As a Californian tax-payer, I care about the mismanagement of the institution that my tax dollars fund.
Umm.. hmm.. well I thought this was obvious and think there is benefit to the students who don't come from elite backgrounds. The point of these universities is to not only give an education but socially connect students. If you are a student without a family that has powerful connections you could potentially meet one of these students and become friends, thus increasing your social power. Going to a top notch University is not just about learning. I learned more and had better instructors at city college, because they cared more and were more available. Speaking with busy TAs at a top notch school weren't nearly as helpful. Going to a top notch school is about socially enriching yourself with others who are ambitious and connected. It's about synergy and having a diverse student body only increases that synergy.
Does a donation to the school that helps improve the quality of the school and the research need to come without strings attached?
Should the rich be required to have such purity of intention? Or should they only donate to private schools where they can legally have influence?
By being the child of a wealth donor, does the person being admitted (through this side channel) not have more potential impact on the world and thus more reason to be admitted?
On the other side, does the education have the most impact on the person who was denied entrance (bottom of the applicant pool), assuming they would get through to graduation. (utility of education)
I think the person writing this report clearly has an agenda, as can bee seen in the level of sensationalism in the clip art.
There is and there should be. Affirmative action has already been help up by the US supreme court.
> Does a donation to the school that helps improve the quality of the school and the research need to come without strings attached?
Yes.
> Should the rich be required to have such purity of intention? Or should they only donate to private schools where they can legally have influence?
A donation should not be used as a way to get one's child into a university. That's not a donation. That's an entrance fee.
> On the other side, does the education have the most impact on the person who was denied entrance (bottom of the applicant pool), assuming they would get through to graduation.
That seems reasonably true, though I have no source to back this up.
The audit itself leaves plenty of room for circumstance. For example:
"BOARS’s guidance provides recommended reasons for considering an applicant for admission by exception. These include the applicants having overcome personal challenges, having had limited or nontraditional educational opportunities, having special talents, or having academic achievements equivalent to the eligibility requirements."
The report takes no issue with such a system, just the one where people pay for their special exception.
Here's the real problem: Universities are expensive places to run and need huge resources to build buildings, hire and retain faculty, and other costly endeavors. Hence, the need for donors. Once you have donors, it is VERY hard to avoid this sort of tit-for-tat deal.
The best way to get around the funny business: have a system where students are classified into bins. Be very clear with donors: if a student isn't in the "top bin", they will not get in. However, in that bin, allow the "donor connection" to influence admission.
Is this perfect? No, of course not. But it accepts the reality of the world without perverting it too much. And honestly: can you really predict if one student is going to do better than another because of 1pt on some standardized test?
I can't speak for Cal schools, but for most private schools, this is already what happens. If you're not already competitive, the required donation is truly immense (think "Kenneth C Griffin Department of Economics" big).
Most donation-influenced admits are borderline to begin with - it just eliminates the randomness of the admissions process. The issue here is that Cal is public, and so more laws apply.
Im pretty sure universities only became expensive once student loans got subsidized and every 18 year old kid in America could jump 100k in debt at the taxpayers expense.
Many other universities are clear that there are classes of applicants who get special consideration based on non-academic factors, such as: geographically desirable (including out-of-state tuition payers), demographically desirable, athletes, extracurricular stars, children of alumni (=donors), children of faculty and staff (=laborers), and children of donors.
Moreover, universities want students with a wide variety of academic (and other) interests.
Is the issue that Berkeley has to comply with state laws and regulations that mandate that admissions be based solely on academics rather than other considerations? Or is it that they put on a facade of solely considering academics without acknowledging the (many) non-academic considerations that may override admissions decisions?
From a utilitarian point of view, I'm wondering if this could actually be beneficial. The extra revenue from donations could sponsor students with less income.
I suppose the real problem is that UCs are no longer financed fully by the state. If they were, there would be no excuse for this.
I don't think it's inappropriate and also not unexpected. It is inappropriate to pretend to have an impartial process when money drives the admission process for as long as the American universities (either public or private alike) have existed.
It's a part of the nature of these schools that money/donors get kids into school. That's the way it's always been, and it's worth saying it up front. That's the first step.
And face it, this is the reason UC Berkely, etc are so great. It's because there are donors supplying a huge stream of funding dollars. Without these kinds of favours, UC Berkeley will be a 4th or 5th rate school.
You want that new lab or that new library wing? Accept some kids with rich families. That's how it works.
It violated the policy of the Board of Regents which is the democratic governing board of the taxpayer funded UC System.
If they want to establish a policy of selling seats to raise money, there's nothing inherently unconstitutional about that. But, they need to change the policies, and if necessary, state law to allow this to happen legally and with the consent of the taxpaying citizens.
“Applicant babysat for a colleague of the former director of undergraduate admissions”
I understand how donations or children of prominent alumni got around admissions...but babysitting can get someone entry over others? That seems like a bit of a stretch.
If a rich guy's willing to pay a lot of money to get his dumb kid into a university, enough to fund scholarships for two or three smart-but-poor kids, what's the ethical problem?
I see no problem with universities having an admission tier for rich people that's like 10x as expensive as normal tuition, but completely bypasses the application process.
Or maybe they auction off 5% of their seats and let the market set the price for those no-qualifications-required seats.
This should be considered tax fraud for the donors. The donations they made are charitable contributions, which they surely deducted from their income taxes. When you donate to charity you can only deduct the amount in excess of the benefit provided to you. For instance if you buy a $50 ticket to a charity dinner where they give you $50 of food and drinks, you can't deduct that at all.
So these people donated and then got admission to UC Berkeley in exchange. Surely that has some value! I don't know how you determine that figure, but it's >>$0
I'm not familiar with the American tax system, but couldn't they just not claim that charitable donation when filing their tax returns? Surely it's not illegal not to tell the IRS about a charitable donation you made, and therefore not get any tax deduction for it, regardless of whether or not you received benefits from the organisation you donated to?
(Of course, that wouldn't mean that nobody ever does report this sort of thing to make tax savings, in which cases I would assume you're right it would be tax fraud but again I'm not the person to answer that.)
I truly can't imagine someone donating a large sum in the US and not reporting it on their taxes. The tax preference for donations in America is the primary driver of large individual donations.
I'm somewhat surprised at how many commenters here are shrugging off or even supporting this blatant corruption by these wealth-defiled crooks.
I wonder how this comment section would look if it was revealed that people from a low income background had hacked the admissions system to gain entry. I expect the tone would be much more critical, calling for prosecutions and sanctions, and lamenting the sheer unfairness of it. I'm pretty sure it would be in stark contrast to all the bribery apologism we can see in these threads.
I get that this is offensive to everyone. I’m not saying that world should work this way.
But I’m not remotely surprised. Didn’t everyone in this thread, or basically everyone everywhere, kind of assume that donors get some sort of perks? Even if it is corrupt, isn’t it the most obvious and predictable corruption? Would donations drop without this corruption? Are the donations vital to the school’s budget? Should we do away with donations to Universities somehow?
We should do away with legacy admissions and quid pro quo. If people still want to donate, great, otherwise universities will have to find a different funding model.
When it's private schools doing it, or coaches at private schools doing it as a side hustle, I really didn't mind--private schools can do what they want, and if they want a rigged system, go for it. There's a reason Jack on 30 Rock called USC "the last bastion of the incompetent rich."
When a public school does this, it's a violation of the public trust and taking advantage of taxpayers.
I am uncertain why this is such a travesty. Everything else is free market. If these folks want to pay more for school... so be it. If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline, and maybe schools with standards will excel and the free market schools will... have nicer buildings? Whatever.
That sucks. As a (recent) alumnus I was always proud of the fact that no one at my school was a legacy admit or bought their way in.
Both of my parents went to Cal, which at an Ivy might guarantee admission but in my case didn't affect my chances at all (which is a good thing!). I hope this doesn't taint the school's reputation too much.
Surprised to see that they disclosed the race of the perpetrators. California typically goes to such length to not include such details when crimes are committed.
Which has a storied history, being the primary means of governance of China for millennia.
But to call it meritocracy, we must do two things: elide the correlation between tested excellence and academic performance, which correlation is strong but not perfect, and then conflate academic merit with meritoriousness generally, which I firmly reject.
Call it what it is: testocracy. A quick search shows that the word is not unknown. I'd accept a better one, so long as it doesn't involve pretending that grinding ones life away for a chance at the top is equal to merit.
College is an academic pursuit. What other type of "merit" besides academic merit could possibly be relevant when we're talking about college admissions? I mean maybe alcohol tolerance, but...
You're affirming the consequent. If college were a merely academic pursuit, and if standardized testing were a perfect proxy for academic achievement, then yes, we could collapse testing into academic merit, and academic merit into merit, and voila! Meritocracy.
But college is not merely an academic pursuit. I would argue it isn't even centrally an academic pursuit. Instead, it is a gatekeeper to the higher echelons of society. The -cracy refers to ruling, let us keep in mind.
You propose rule by those who are best at standardized testing, and wish to pass that off as some sort of merit. Basta.
I reject any sort of one-size-fits-all criterion for admission. If a college wishes to be testocratic, as CalTech is, so be it. If they wish to strongly favor black people, as the historically black colleges do, fine. This sort of localism is more robust and flexible, and I think this leads to better outcomes.
I saw one donor give a few thousand and one person get admitted for babysitting. Almost all the donations in the report went directly to athletic departments, which would only seem to help student athletes and not academically qualified students that were bumped.
You've got to admire the kid that got in for babysitting for the director of undergraduate admissions...maybe they are smarter than most of the other applicants or they just happened to live next door.
This is well known and won't change. A couple months ago there was a scandal where celebrities were arrested for bribing college officials for their kids acceptance. How come the college officials weren't named and fined and arrested?
These appear to be for donations to "campuses", "the university" or "the athletic department". I don't see any allegations that payments were made directly to individuals. It's likely that the staff generally (and probably correctly!) thought they were acting in the university's interests.
There have been other scandals in the last few years where officials were bribed directly, and that looked worse.
Colleges and universities are corrupt dinosaur institutions that indoctrinate students in subjects that working devs basically never use, like calculus, Java, and recursion. COVID can't kill them off fast enough. People like Haseeb Qureshi[1] amply demonstrate that you don't need a fancy degree to break into the top echelons of FAANG. It's 2020, not 1920: just do a bootcamp, self-study using one of the free open-source curricula,[2] and projects/a high-quality portfolio are all you actually need!
> subjects that working devs basically never use, like calculus, Java, and recursion
I don't know about you, but I've used all of those in real software. Additionally, I'm happy teaching myself skills needed for programming that I wasn't taught in college, but I'd much rather learn something like calculus from a teacher than on my own.
Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game.
I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admissions into two pots: people who pay their way in and the other who earns it. And they announce ahead of time what the size of each bucket is. When you apply, you chose which path you will take and that's it, you're stuck.
The people who choose the merit path take the standard entry exams, have their grades review, etc. And the ones who do the best get in. Those who choose to pay for admission participate in a silent auction, and those willing to pay the most are admitted.
This system isn't "fair", but the outcome is effectively the same as our current setup. With the most notable difference being that, at least this system is transparent and acknowledges that X% of incoming students paid for their post.