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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

#221

Post by com2kid »

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!

You have to seek out the cool stuff.

The cool stuff projects are never the right career move, the work/life balance doesn't exist, and even then you have to be on constant lookout for the right team to join.

"I'm willing to put up with insanity" is a more important criteria for working on cool projects than what school you went to.

Source: I've been on those cool projects, I've hired for them as well. End of the day, the questions "want to write an OS, work 70hrs+ a week and live under constant fear of not having a job when you come in tomorrow?" get asked, alma mater, not so much.

Of course at the end of the day, you get some great stories out of it. You also get literal grey hair, potential lost friendships (I lucked out there! Saw plenty of it around me though.), and an ongoing base level of stress that is very unhealthy.

But hey, great stories.

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

#222

Post by com2kid »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #215
saagarjha wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you've still got quite a lot of time to do cool things?

Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). Never had any of that or knew how to do it.

I helped design/write an embedded runtime when I was ~29. Got a lot of patents out of it.

If I'd done it at 22, it'd have been a crappy OS.

Getting software patents is easy. I used to take time to file one whenever I had a 6 hour or more flight. Boredom and all that. Also my employer's patent bonus paid for my airfare.

You have decades of life left. One of my mentors had the time of his life programming in his 50s, putting his mark as a leader on multiple amazing products that sold in numbers ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions upon millions.

Up until then? Rather uneventful. If I remember, lots of years working on test equipment.

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

#223

Post by whyenot »

sgustard wrote: post #96
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.

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."

Likely true, at least in a direct sense, but Stanford does give a nearly three-fold preference to legacy applicants. Alumni are more likely to donate to Stanford than non-alumni.

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-takes

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

#224

Post by FiddlyPack »

jtbayly wrote: post #146
munk-a wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Gotta find some way to keep the population occupied with something “meaningful” as you automate away their jobs while providing longer lifespans!

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

#225

Post by tntn »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #215
saagarjha wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you've still got quite a lot of time to do cool things?

Not...really? I'm 22, turning 23. I know a bunch of people that got patents in high school, competed in math/informatics olympiads and have multiple published papers (of varying quality, but nonetheless). Never had any of that or knew how to do it.

Are you dying soon? If not, there's no deadline. If the people you know did a cool thing at 20 or 21, and you do a cool thing at 24 or 25 (or 45 or 55 or 65 or ...), it is still cool, is it not?

It seems clear that you aren't actually interested primarily in sound the cool things, but doing more cool things earlier than peers.

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

#226

Post by ikeyany »

gnicholas wrote: post #167
AbdulMohammad wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m from the Bay Area and I can tell you that as far as “status” goes, USC and UCLA don’t carry much status at all, if any. Berkeley is considered far more prestigious here. And of course, Stanford.

I grew up in norcal and live in the bay area. Plenty of my high school classmates chose UCLA over Berkeley because they wanted to get farther away from home. Some of them are now med school professors. The difference between these two UCs is not as great as you might think. Neither has the elite status of ivy league schools, but most people I've run across on hiring committees viewed the two ad fairly comparable. Not…

I think they meant that Berkeley and Stanford are the hardest to get into, not that they are necessarily the 'best'. I would assume that anyone who got into Stanford or Berkeley could get into any other school in California.

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

#227

Post by ikeyany »

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.

Or "U$C", which ages very well.

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

#228

Post by throwawaymath »

mochomocha wrote: post #210
olliej wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does that system come with any notable drawbacks of its own?

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

saagarjha wrote: post #156
barry-cotter wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 case…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by noego »

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…

The problem with elite colleges like Harvard, has nothing to do with meritocracy. In fact, it's the opposite. They use opaque and subjective criteria in their admissions process, in order to favor those born into privilege.

For a better example of a meritocracy, take a look at New York's elite magnet schools like Stuyvesant. Their admissions process is a pure meritocracy - based entirely on a standardized exam that is taken by all applicants. The end result - Stuyvesant has far more economic diversity than any elite university. Almost half the students come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches. Harvard would do the nation a tremendous service if it became more meritocratic, not less

https://outlookzen.com/2017/03/24/481/

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