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L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

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Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#141

Post by gbrown »

darawk wrote: post #94
mochomocha wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. No amount of money should get you a way to get into an "elite" school if you don't deserve it. Unless we're ready to admit that these schools aren't really elite if any billionaire's dumb dumb kid can get in with enough money thrown at the institution. The issue with trying to solve every single problem with money is that capitalism isn't designed to solve problems where a moral compass is needed.

> No. No amount of money should get you a way to get into an "elite" school if you don't deserve it. Why? What's so precious about elite schooling that you're willing to sacrifice 10 kids getting a free education just to prevent one billionaire's kid from going to an elite school? > The issue with trying to solve every single problem with money is that capitalism isn't designed to solve problems where a moral compass…

Elite schools are a great mechanism to entrench privelege. Paying to get your slacker kid a middling GPA at an elite school is a great way to connect them to a business network of other wealthy people, and fast track them for high paying jobs at the top of the corporate ladder. Also some poorer kids get a good education, while not quite being able to tap into those same connections.

In terms of research output, it's true that elite institutions are at the top... but not if you adjust for their revenue and assets. We'd get way more bang for our buck socially and scientifically by spreading those billion dollar endowments around, and properly funding state institutions like most other sensible countries.

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#142

Post by WillPostForFood »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #110
WillPostForFood wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These three are clearly at the same academic level. Way below Stanford and Caltech though. 19: UCLA 22: Berkeley (tie) 22: USC (tie) https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...

As far as ranking the quality of colleges, USNews is about as garbage as you can get. Anybody with any shred of awareness of what those three schools are would not rank them anywhere near each other.

I love posts like this, "I don't like your data, it is bad, and I have none"

All lists are lame, do you like Niche? UCLA is 29, USC is 20. UCLA has an acceptance rate of 16%, USC 17%. USC SAT range is 1300-1500, UCLA is 1220-1450

I was responding to the poster who said the schools weren't academically comparable. they obviously are shockingly similar. Don't know or care which is "better". But only a radical partisan would argue they aren't similar.

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#143

Post by barry-cotter »

olliej wrote: post #29

I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school. If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.

Apparently academic talent is not reliably enough to get into a UC anymore, due to the vagaries of yield management and going to a school full of high achievers making it difficult to stand out when you’d walk it if you went to a school with less gifted average students. This is obviously only a problem for a very small segment of the population but if getting an academic publication in high school is not enough to get into an elite college the system is broken.

> In my local public schools, the average SAT is 1470, higher than half of the Ivy League (this pretty much tells you where I live). A lot of that is due to selection of middle class Bay Area professionals, but much of it is due to focussed test prep. Local test prep (which is ridiculously intense) can add 200 points, if you commit to doing it. As a result, all those people who have near straight As can increase their score until their SATs (or ACTs) are near perfect. This leaves a huge pool.

...

> Can you get into one of these schools by being academically brilliant? Essentially no. The professors have no power to help a student get accepted. There is just no way for them to intervene. People joke saying a first author paper in Nature would do the job, but as no teen has published a paper in Nature as first author in time for admissions (the paper needs to be accepted by November of your senior year, 6 months of review time would be fast, a high schooler is unlikely to get a straight accept, so most likely will need to revise and resubmit. Realistically, submitting your ground breaking research by the end of your sophmore year would be in time. This does not happen.) I know of cases where students have had published papers by admission time. Harvard, Yale and MIT have a way to upload published papers in the admission process, but in the case I am familiar with, the papers were not reviewed by professors. How do I know this? The student was in email contact with the relevant professors (in all three colleges), as about 80% of college professors will get back to high school students who send them papers, with marked up comments (professors are wonderful). They told the child the admission committee did not contact them, and said they would admit the child to graduate school, but had no power over undergraduate admissions. At least one child with one publication in Analytic Philosophy do not get admitted to these schools.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bdpv1f/comm...

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#144

Post by jwilbs »

HighValuation wrote: post #102
cletus wrote: post #56

Honestly, I really don't understand the motivations for some of these parents. Take Lori Loughlin. $500,000? For USC? For two daughters, one of whom clearly isn't that interested, isn't particularly academic and isn't particularly athletic? Like... why? I can understand if someone bribes their kid into, say, Harvard or Yale Law School. There's a career where going to a good school matters. But this? It just makes no…

If you aren’t familiar with the US education system, it’s a school ranked in the top 20 with an 11% acceptance rate, only twice as high as Stanford’s with a body 4x as large. It's a large school with a massively beneficial and incestuous network. Based on LinkedIn numbers, 1 out of 4 people in SV that didn't graduate from Stanford went to USC. Go around talking misinformation about that school in particular and see w…

Google says the acceptance rate is 17%. Would love to see your source on 25% of non-Stanford alumni SV people being from USC. Anecdotally, I’ve met one.

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#145

Post by ska »

leftyted wrote: post #116
darawk wrote: post #57

The actual problem here is not the bribery. The problem is that those bribes are being captured by random 3rd parties, rather than by the school itself. The correct way to implement college admissions is this: Charge a sliding scale fee based on application quality, and then use the excess revenue generated to subsidize poor kids tuition. Your kid has a 2.5 GPA and wants to go to Harvard? Great, that'll be a million…

I'd urge you to think more about this. You can imagine the same thing for murder trials: 10 million per victim or you go to jail. You can use the money to make the world better! I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty wil…

The narratives aren’t superfluous, but they are at best aspirational.

Universities are not certainly not meritocracies, and the justice system certainly does not treat everyone equally. So I think it is by all means good to support moves towards the ideals that these institutions make, but there may be a practical middle ground where in recognition that they do not in fact meet these ideals, resources could be captured and used in ways that address this imbalance somewhat?

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#146

Post by jtbayly »

munk-a wrote: post #44
ForrestN wrote: post #40

I'm surprised that this scandal doesn't seem to be causing anyone to think one step further and realize that the entire premise of "elite" colleges with competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards. I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or deat…

Back a while high school was the sort of "standard education" things have changed and now college is considered the default level people should have in the workforce, back when college was rare I think private colleges made sense, they were more of a final specialty training step at the end of your education - now that has shifted over to PhDs - let PhD programs remain privatized for whatever reasons, but we should e…

So that college can have the same drop in quality that high schools have had, and PHD’s can be the next bachelors degree and we can continue pouring more and more of the GDP and percent of people’s lives into “education”? Why?

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#147

Post by darawk »

gbrown wrote: post #141
darawk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. No amount of money should get you a way to get into an "elite" school if you don't deserve it. Why? What's so precious about elite schooling that you're willing to sacrifice 10 kids getting a free education just to prevent one billionaire's kid from going to an elite school? > The issue with trying to solve every single problem with money is that capitalism isn't designed to solve problems where a moral compass…

Elite schools are a great mechanism to entrench privelege. Paying to get your slacker kid a middling GPA at an elite school is a great way to connect them to a business network of other wealthy people, and fast track them for high paying jobs at the top of the corporate ladder. Also some poorer kids get a good education, while not quite being able to tap into those same connections. In terms of research output, it's…

> Elite schools are a great mechanism to entrench privelege. Paying to get your slacker kid a middling GPA at an elite school is a great way to connect them to a business network of other wealthy people, and fast track them for high paying jobs at the top of the corporate ladder. Also some poorer kids get a good education, while not quite being able to tap into those same connections.

The children of the wealthy already have connections. You know who doesn't? Poor kids. The poor kids they'd be subsidizing.

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#148

Post by darawk »

glangdale wrote: post #136
darawk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. No amount of money should get you a way to get into an "elite" school if you don't deserve it. Why? What's so precious about elite schooling that you're willing to sacrifice 10 kids getting a free education just to prevent one billionaire's kid from going to an elite school? > The issue with trying to solve every single problem with money is that capitalism isn't designed to solve problems where a moral compass…

The point of an elite school is that it's meant to be 'elite', i.e. selective. The more dumb rich kids get in, the more the value of the school's degree declines. This deal has always been bent at the high end ('buy us a new library wing and we'll ignore that little Timmy has a room temp IQ') but not overtly broken, which is what this proposal (and the behavior that people are being prosecuted for) amounts to.

> The point of an elite school is that it's meant to be 'elite', i.e. selective. The more dumb rich kids get in, the more the value of the school's degree declines.

If that had any truth to it then affirmative action wouldn't work.

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#149

Post by darawk »

leftyted wrote: post #116
darawk wrote: post #57

The actual problem here is not the bribery. The problem is that those bribes are being captured by random 3rd parties, rather than by the school itself. The correct way to implement college admissions is this: Charge a sliding scale fee based on application quality, and then use the excess revenue generated to subsidize poor kids tuition. Your kid has a 2.5 GPA and wants to go to Harvard? Great, that'll be a million…

I'd urge you to think more about this. You can imagine the same thing for murder trials: 10 million per victim or you go to jail. You can use the money to make the world better! I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty wil…

> I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty will be punished.

Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action, which is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria. We are already a long ways from pure meritocracy.

> I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's naive to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the narratives end up serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can exist without those ideals.

Two things:

1. I think you're overindexing on the importance of these narratives a bit, but you're right, they're important.

2. More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by the eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules, they're just tempered by money.

Re: L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal

#150

Post by leftyted »

ska wrote: post #145
leftyted wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd urge you to think more about this. You can imagine the same thing for murder trials: 10 million per victim or you go to jail. You can use the money to make the world better! I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law and the guilty wil…

The narratives aren’t superfluous, but they are at best aspirational. Universities are not certainly not meritocracies, and the justice system certainly does not treat everyone equally. So I think it is by all means good to support moves towards the ideals that these institutions make, but there may be a practical middle ground where in recognition that they do not in fact meet these ideals, resources could be captur…

> The narratives aren’t superfluous, but they are at best aspirational.

This a paraphrase of what I wrote.

> Universities are not certainly not meritocracies, and the justice system certainly does not treat everyone equally.

Neither is perfect. But it's not like they're random. In universities there is correlation between "being smart" and "getting in/excelling at universities" and in the justice system there is a correlation between "killing someone" and "going to jail".

> So I think it is by all means good to support moves towards the ideals that these institutions make, but there may be a practical middle ground where in recognition that they do not in fact meet these ideals, resources could be captured and used in ways that address this imbalance somewhat?

The middle ground is understanding that the institutions aren't perfect and constantly working to shore them up.

But my feeling is that if we go from understanding that the institutions aren't perfect to throwing out the ideals completely then the institutions will crumble. My sense is that we can't do without the ideals. People aren't rational agents.

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