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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

#201

Post by saagarjha »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #180
asdff wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screw that. If you work hard people take notice, that's it. You can go to a CC, grind hard through your classes, transfer into a school with a better network, continue to grind hard, and land the job because anyone who sees your CV will see that you are a fighter who gives a shit. Some of the richest kids in my high school paid full tuition to ivy league schools, didn't come to play school, and ended up with a scrapp…

I think there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program (SAT score, etc) that I simply don't have. That doesn't help matters at all.

> there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an elite program

Yeah, the ability to be accepted into an elite program. This often has little bearing in real life (honestly, how much do you really care about the ability to get a good SAT score anymore?).

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

#202

Post by CydeWeys »

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…

Using an analogy to murder isn't going to be very convincing when the thing you're comparing murder with isn't remotely as close to as bad as murder itself. It's a poor argument that trivially be rebutted by pointing out that the other thing isn't nearly as bad as murder, so the conclusions don't follow.

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

#203

Post by kjdndisneinj »

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

If you think a small amount of affirmative action compensates in any way for the massive systemic barriers facing poor people or black/indigenous people in this country you should give away your money so your kids can give it a shot.

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

#204

Post by CydeWeys »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #182
saagarjha wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 graduated from a state school over a decade ago. I'm working at a good company now doing things that some people would consider "cool". And I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head what university a single one of my coworkers went to.

I think to some degree that you're using the school you did go to as a facile excuse to explain why you "haven't done cool stuff", when it's quite possible that that's not the reason at all, and that even if you had gone to that school you still wouldn't be "doing cool stuff".

And the farther out you are from college, the less and less it matters. In programming, past a certain number of years out, it may not even matter if you have a degree at all.

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

#205

Post by awad »

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…

Not sure where you are getting that wild number. There are 4,206,862 people in SF Bay Area on LinkedIn and 28,676 have USC listed on their profile. That's....not 1 in 4.

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

#206

Post by CydeWeys »

slg wrote: post #95
pasquinelli wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the people accepting bribes have mouths to feed at home? They're just stretching their morals for their kids too.

Coaches and administrators of D1 sports programs are already well compensated. Plus no one needs $400k payments to feed their kids unless they have made some horrible financial mistakes.

Really? You think that the coach of, say, a D1 rowing team is going to be well-compensated? I doubt it. They'll certainly be less well-compensated than all of the FAANG engineers they're competing against in the housing market.

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

#207

Post by povertyworld »

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.

If you want to feel that condemned for life by the capitalist caste system feeling, read the part in The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz where people are trying to stop them from hiring Mark Cranney, even though he is apparently the best sales exec they have ever seen, because he went to "a weak school". They even admit he could be the CEO of IBM instead of a sales guy at a floundering startup if he didn't have "those things wrong with him".

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

#208

Post by CydeWeys »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #78
lotsofpulp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with giving, but there is something wrong with giving and calling it a donation, when in reality it's a quid pro quo transaction. Which is illegal, but unprovable. Matt Levine's comment quoted elsewhere in this thread is describes the only difference in the scenarios.

What law is broken by an explicit quid pro quo for admission? I'm pretty sure there's nothing illegal about that, it just is avoided because it doesn't look good.

The problem comes down to taxes. Donations to universities are tax deductible, but if it's an explicit quid pro quo for admission, then it's no longer eligible. So any quid pro quo donations that are written off on taxes are tax fraud.

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

#209

Post by CydeWeys »

prawn wrote: post #75
bradleyjg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? A private university has no obligation to run its admissions program they way you think it should. The reason there is a crime here is because the universities were the victims of fraud, not because the law mandates fairness in admissions.

Do US universities receive public funding? If they did, would that influence the discussion?

Are you aware of any laws on the books saying that public universities can't give preferential admission to people who pay a lot of money?

I mean, said laws might well exist, but if they don't, then it's all perfectly above-board.

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

#210

Post by mochomocha »

olliej wrote: post #54
munk-a wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think building purchasing should even be allowed, remove all of the slippery slope and put students on equal footing.

You still get the wondrous private institution problem of hereditary entry (which is a great example of something that isn't explicitly racist still resulting in a fundamentally and uncorrectable racist result)

Unless you change your admission process to be based on competitive entrance exams everyone has to take, with an anonymous review process. This is mostly the norm in France.
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