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

nytimes.com

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

#151

Post by saagarjha »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #121
manfredo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these "elite" colleges are one of the best avenues to eliminate inequality. Many of them have significant (at least double digit) percentages of the student population that are first generation college students. Elite universities often have the greatest degree of racial diversity.

You shouldn’t be condemned for life for not being elite material when you were 18. Disclaimer - I was not elite material when I was 18 and feel like I’m condemned for life when I read these posts.

What makes you feel "condemned for life"?

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

#152

Post by wahern »

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…

> We'd get way more bang for our buck socially and scientifically by spreading those billion dollar endowments around, and properly funding state institutions like most other sensible countries.

The Obamacare fiasco has proven to me that such approaches are impossible in the near term. The 2017 tax cut really drove it home. How are people not seeing this?

A principally public approach is not viable. It could be, as amply demonstrated around the world. But roughly 50% of the American population rejects these schemes when they're forced to reckon with the costs. It's been this way since before Roosevelt. Social Security was a watered down, private labor market-focused program for the precisely the same political reasons Obamacare was.

The exceptions are clearly and demonstrably anomalous. For example, the heyday of public universities come from a time when only a fraction of the population went to college, much of the land and capital assets were donated, labor was relatively cheap, and the burden on the public purse was negligible.

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

#154

Post by yumraj »

dvt wrote: post #68
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…

USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast ( especially in Southern California). It's obviously not on the same academic level as UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford/Caltech, but it's still very much an exclusive brand. You don't get it because you don't live here and aren't surrounded by wealthy 16-year olds that yearn to go to USC (often times over UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford). (Disclaimer: I'm a UCLA alum.)

I don't know how common it is, but once a person I knew had referred to USC as University of Spoiled Children.

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

#155

Post by sizzle »

willio58 wrote: post #108
rhegart wrote: post #49

Affirmative action on one side, cheaters on the other. At least a dozen people cheated on the SAT in my school and had the audacity to brag about it. Financial aid if you poor, paid for if you rich. Middle class honest kids hurt the most. Had top 1% scores, no ivies or UCLA for me (got UCB at least) and I’m Asian. My little cousin, same scores and rejected from UCSC 10 years later...much worse now than before

Two people in my high school told me they cheated on the SAT. They got _perfect_ scores and the high school actually bragged about them during graduation. They also happened to live across the street from each other in a relatively large town. I’ve always wondered what they did to cheat, I wonder if they’d be as open about it now since they’re both graduating at MIT and Harvard soon.

Why haven't you reported them already? They didn't earn that spot and took it from someone that studied their ass off.

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

#156

Post by saagarjha »

barry-cotter wrote: post #143
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 g…

> the whole math competition system is incredibly valuable because it's the last bastion of truly meritocratic examination systems in the country. (The other Olympiads are as well, but they're not even 10% as large.) Test prep services for it barely do anything.

This is false, speaking from my experience at a top high school in the Bay Area (I was never +4 standard deviations, but did come close in some isolated cases). 90+% of the people who did well in math competitions were on Art of Problem Solving at some point. It's entirely possible to coach for these, it just requires coaching from people who are extremely talented (and expensive!)

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

#157

Post by TonyGonzalez »

dvt wrote: post #107
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...

Just so you know, no one takes USNWR rankings seriously -- it's well-known that public schools are dinged due to lower endowments and higher student counts. To wit, the idea that Berkeley is academically comparable to USC is a joke.

Maybe at the graduate level Berkeley should be ranked higher but how are public schools dinged? UCLA has an endowment almost as high as USC’s with comparable student body size. Thinking public schools are dinged because they’re poor is factually wrong.

Also, Berkeley is about where it would be given its acceptance standards and standardized scores outside of EECS are among the lowest in the top 25. The only school where it’s actually getting easier to be accepted year after year.

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

#158

Post by ska »

leftyted wrote: post #150
ska wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

  The middle ground is understanding that the institutions aren't perfect and constantly working to shore them up.
I think you are rejecting the idea of a middle ground completely. Holding institutions to their stated values is table stakes for me.

I don't think you have to reject the ideals in order to recognize that the world is not meeting them. For example, a university could be quite open about the pressure to allow lower merit students from privileged backgrounds. What if they said "look, we can't completely withstand the political and other pressure put on us. So we're going to allow 5% enrollment of students who do not meet our regular thresholds, so long as they pay 5x (10x?) full tuition. This extra tuition will be used to create N full scholarships and M partial scholarships for students that meet the academic requirements but do not have the financial ability to attend. All students will be treated equally academically throughout their programs"

To some degree you cannot stop this from happening (see prep schools, etc.) but you can bring it out in the light.

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

#159

Post by wahern »

darawk wrote: post #148
glangdale wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> The point of an elite school is that it's meant to be 'elite', i.e. selective. The more dumb rich kids get in, the more the value of the school's degree declines. If that had any truth to it then affirmative action wouldn't work.

Has it? At the margins, but I don't think it's even come close to achieving the type of societal transformations envisioned.

The percentage of African Americans at Harvard this past year was only 15%, roughly comparable to the overall population demographics (~%12 black, ~14% mixed). I suspect Harvard is average or above average in this regard. It's not saying much that the rich are okay with going to historically elite schools with the same demographic ratio as the country-wide general population.

And before anybody brings up Asians as the exception, don't forget that smaller liberal arts colleges and less well known tier-1 private universities (e.g. George Washington) are still very popular with the wealthy, and those colleges are much whiter and richer. Even on HN you still see the trope about how Americans are more "creative" than the Chinese, and someone who claims that such sentiments don't at least partially reflect prejudices against American Asians and don't color college preferences are fooling themselves. I mean, if you don't get into Berkeley you can just wave it off with the observation that it's mostly Asian anyhow--i.e. you didn't really have a fair chance to get in and/or it's somehow less desirable than historically.

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

#160

Post by saagarjha »

yumraj wrote: post #154
dvt wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast ( especially in Southern California). It's obviously not on the same academic level as UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford/Caltech, but it's still very much an exclusive brand. You don't get it because you don't live here and aren't surrounded by wealthy 16-year olds that yearn to go to USC (often times over UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford). (Disclaimer: I'm a UCLA alum.)

I don't know how common it is, but once a person I knew had referred to USC as University of Spoiled Children.

It's a pretty common saying among Californians, AFAIK.
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