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)
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? ;)