I am uncertain why this is such a travesty. Everything else is free market. If these folks want to pay more for school... so be it. If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline, and maybe schools with standards will excel and the free market schools will... have nicer buildings? Whatever.
UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
231–240 of 456 posts
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better idea, let's outlaw legacy admissions.
Rich people can buy bigger houses than poor people. Should we also outlaw big houses?
College admissions play a central role in determining where you end up in our society, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that they should be regulated.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
And just in case anyone thinks the idea that an elite school won't help a rich kid, there have been studies indicating that is the case. The one that comes to mind was the study that compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend. Average future incomes were not statistically different. But the study did note that the starkest improvents…
I'm not going to shit on a study I haven't read, but it seems likely that if you come from a "rich" family capable of buying you into a college via back channels, you've probably already got a pretty solid leg up in the game. I can't imagine correcting for all of those variables in a manner which isn't going to leave at least a few questions. Either way, I'm sure having a diploma from Harvard would open some doors fo…
That's exactly what the study implies. (It doesn't try to correct for those variables; it doesn't have to.)
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#234I am uncertain why this is such a travesty. Everything else is free market. If these folks want to pay more for school... so be it. If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline, and maybe schools with standards will excel and the free market schools will... have nicer buildings? Whatever.
> I am uncertain why this is such a travesty
> If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline
I think you just answered your own question.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#235This is bad, but 64 students isn't all that much. It pales in comparison to private colleges. For example, Harvard accepts about 1/3 of its students as "legacy". If you believe the lawsuits about Harvard's anti-Asian discrimination, that also affects hundreds of potential Harvard students every year. Once you consider that UC Berkeley is about five times larger than Harvard, and that there are at least a dozen top-ti…
Read the article. 64 students (from the tiny audited sample) met the highest bar (direct email evidence of connection to donations etc.), to say nothing of other "strongly suspect" students, and the rest outside of the audited sample.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#236I went to a Marianist university in the US. This was right after 9/11 when it had suddenly become a lot harder for international students to come in. I had no problems.
Why? Because I also went to a Marianist high school in Italy, and it so happens that the principal of that school had in the meantime (I worked for a few years between high school and university) become procurator-general for the Marianists in Rome. He was also my Latin teacher.
So he basically told the president of the university "This person is a good student, got 99% on their maturity exam, let them in, tell your USCIS liaison to sort it out". I was given a provisional visa, took the SAT, got a nearly perfect score, and they let me in. For whatever reason, I always got enhanced screening and questioning whenever I got on an airplane or went through US customs, after that, until I got my green card, but they let me in.
Was this abuse of power? Not being sarcastic or rhetorical; I'm asking if what my principal did at the time was an abuse of power/authority.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#237People are always going to use their money to buy status. So as long as these college offer prestige & status, people with money are going to use it to get in. Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game. I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admis…
I'm generally opposed to this kind of acceptance-of-bad-things but in this case I kinda agree. If people are willing to pay millions to go to college, that's potentially a great advantage to students who otherwise have trouble affording it -- let the rich kids subsidize it for everyone else. By not funneling the donations through weird under-the-table transactions it can be more directly used for a net good for the s…
* allow people to pay millions to go to college; allow this to fund student aid for other students. Explicitly stop using it to build buildings
Most elite colleges (not the UCs though) offer 100% need-based aid to accepted students and are need blind in the admissions process. This comes directly from the endownment or the rich alumni and donors already.
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
I completely agree.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
They do have to do as well as everyone else. Grade inflation is a school-wide phenomenon, but GPA in general is a poor indicator of academic performance: all of the prospective med school students at my school are being advised to apply to colleges which practice grade inflation. The grading system at colleges is taken into account by graduate and preprofessional programs.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
The admissions office is somewhat decoupled from the rest of the institution, and receive fixed salaries -- this problem does not exist.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that you can only sell prestige if there is strategic ambiguity between the two categories.
And that ambiguity is an economy: the rich slackers are seen as smart by association with the achievements of (past) students admitted by merit, and the rabble students acquire aristocratic social cache by the same token. I'm not an economist, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a self-powering machine.
Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. You don’t even need to admit any rich slackers. Just let some of the qualified substitute money for luck.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#239People are always going to use their money to buy status. So as long as these college offer prestige & status, people with money are going to use it to get in. Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game. I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admis…
This seems like a natural solution to me, since it's not all that different from merit-based scholarships. At my school for example, the full tuition price was ~$40k, but a portion of admitted students were offered a $10k merit scholarship.
So we already had two categories of students, with somewhat different prices and somewhat different admission standards. I don't see a problem with adding adding more categories along the same lines, as long as some minimum academic standard is enforced.
If I'm in the middle category, I'm happy with my peers who pay more than me because they subsidize the other categories, and I'm happy with my peers who pay less because they elevate the school's reputation.
Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
#240I went to a Marianist university in the US. This was right after 9/11 when it had suddenly become a lot harder for international students to come in. I had no problems. Why? Because I also went to a Marianist high school in Italy, and it so happens that the principal of that school had in the meantime (I worked for a few years between high school and university) become procurator-general for the Marianists in Rome. H…
It seems like a different scenario with a religious school vs. a public, state-sponsored school. Even with other, secular private schools, I feel the issue is different.