>I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school. Or maybe the solution should be to stop accepting bribes. I really am surprised that almost all of the public outrage is being directed at the parents and more of it isn't being directed at the people who actually received the cash. I think lots of parents are willing to stretch their morals in order to give their kid every possible advan…
What if the people accepting bribes have mouths to feed at home? They're just stretching their morals for their kids too.
I know I’ll never be able to match the accomplishments of people that got into Duke the year I didn’t, for example.
Why not? The relationship between colleges and the accomplishments of the people attending them is tenuous at best. There are thousands of people at good universities that do essentially nothing, and wherever you are you have the opportunity to do better than them.
No, not really. People that get into Stanford or MIT did cool stuff when they were younger to get there. I still haven't done cool stuff!
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.
Stanford has explicitly said they do not accept donations in return for admission, for what that's worth. Source: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/14/admission-case-info/ "A donation does not purchase a place at Stanford, and we work very hard to ensure that prospective donors understand this. Stanford does not accept gifts if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the admission process."
Reading between the lines: donate the building while your kid is in diapers and get that dividend 18 years later.
If the school would benefit from that building why should it be dependent on a rich kid needing to get in to secure that funding? If that rich family didn't end up having a kid that needed to get into that school then the building would never be built - but the family is certainly able to afford funding the construction of that building. I think that's unfair in it's own way on all parties involved.
People rarely give stuff away for free. Philanthropy often serves as a political tool, and a means to increase one's social status. University donations are no different. Families are more willing to donate if they believe that it improves the chances of their kids getting admitted to university.
In most cases philanthropy is for the tax benefit, everything else is just dressing.
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.
Google cites the rate from 3 years ago. From the horses mouth on the 11%:
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…
What the above poster is describing is effectively how the status quo works, but more explicit and with transparency. Universities are not purely meritocratic. They factor in race, gender, and VIP status into the application. Donating money is one way of obtaining VIP status.
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…
If you want to get into data then at least cite the most recent numbers. I'm not going to bother doing the due diligence you should have done on your numbers, but at least for the USC acceptance rank, the most recent figure is 11%.
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…
WRONG.
Murder is a negative to society.
A loser going to Harvard is not, may even improve society if they study well.
People rarely give stuff away for free. Philanthropy often serves as a political tool, and a means to increase one's social status. University donations are no different. Families are more willing to donate if they believe that it improves the chances of their kids getting admitted to university.
In most cases philanthropy is for the tax benefit, everything else is just dressing.
Is there some tax benefit beyond the deduction, or do these people not understand how marginal tax brackets work?