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UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

auditor.ca.gov

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Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#291

Post by kmonsen »

_pd19 wrote: post #115
mywittyname wrote: post #89

People 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…

The problem is that you can only sell prestige if there is strategic ambiguity between the two categories.

It’s like all the silly mobile games, you need a pool of cheap players so the rich people can feel accomplished when they spend money.

This is similar, there needs to be enough for people being accepted to and graduating from a university so when the rich kids also does it people think that he is smart and accomplished.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#292

Post by Balgair »

teachrdan wrote: post #267
kevincrane wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, I don't dispute the history of pools in America in general of having a lot of racist gatekeeping behind them, that's absolutely true. I was just saying that swimming and water polo are super cheap sports to participate in as an athlete.

But to become a competitive student athlete accomplished enough to get into a school like Berkeley, you have to go to a high school with its own pool, coach, and roster of fellow competitive swimmers. When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it poss…

Not always true.

One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann

Their demographics are white, but not majority, with ~30% hispanic. I don't know the demo in 2006 though:

https://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasant-hill/466-Co...

Natural talent is still a thing. Though I do agree that more $$$ = better training.

David Epstein's Range talks a lot about training in your younger years. He has a much better argument than me, but the gist is that you have to have a 'trial' period before you commit (depending on sport conditions). In 'unkind' (his term) sports, if you overtrain early, you'll burn out. I'd say Water Polo and Volleyball are those kids of sports. Swimming, on the other hand, is a 'kind' sport where early identification and rigorsous training are beneficial.

It's a really good book: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#293

Post by brightball »

goodluckchuck wrote: post #162
60secz wrote: post #65

Don't know if I'm just jaded -- but I'm seriously not bothered by people making large donations to a university to have their kid admitted. It's a transaction which benefits the university and the student. Granted -- it should be above board and there should be formal policies. Not justifying the specific actions in this case just curious at the outrage.

It can be fraud against other students. Applicants are told that admissions decisions are based on qualifications. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for that qualification. They pay $50-100 to apply. Then it turns out that the qualification isn’t real... That admission can simply be purchased. If admissions can be purchased, the the degrees can likely be purchased too. Fraud is a crime.

I feel like this is being over thought.

Making a donation to a university is certainly a direct way to apply money to the process, but we already see that through additional factors.

You’ve got private K-12 schools that give many people a leg up, but even the best public schools have a similar effect through zoning. You want to get your child into a better public school, you move to a home that’s zoned for it. The homes zoned for the best schools? Well they are more expensive.

That’s not even factoring in tutors, SAT prep or even just well educated parents who give their children additional support at home.

I tend to agree with the idea that it’s happening no matter what. It’s just a matter of whether we choose to acknowledge it and let it benefit others.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#294

Post by kmonsen »

ajkjk wrote: post #225
anonAndOn wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let the rich kids subsidize it for everyone else The state schools already do this. It's called "out of state tuition". For example, UC Berkeley charges California residents $14k/yr tuition while everyone else pays $44k/yr. Not surprisingly, the number of out of state students admitted to the UC system is increasing every year. [0] [0] https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...

I am picturing the same thing but 14k vs, say, 500k.

The problem is at some point in the future the university only accepts the actually paying kind of students. This is already an issue for the UC system.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#295

Post by Balgair »

kevincrane wrote: post #207
oh_sigh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your public high school had a swimming pool?

In California (or at least my part of it) it's pretty common.

I'll echo this. Most HSs that I know of in CA have pools. But I can't find any info online about percentages or breakdowns (urban, rural, suburban, etc). I'd say west-coast states and those that don't freeze have an easier time with pool upkeep and year round usage.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#296

Post by awillen »

kevincrane wrote: post #161
awillen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where on earth do you think inner city kids are playing water polo and golf? Just because golf courses aren't that expensive to play on doesn't mean they're accessible to poor people (plus there's the cost of clubs, obviously). And water polo... even if there are public pools near you, they probably aren't dedicating space for competitive water polo.

I played water polo at my public high school and only had to buy a swimsuit?

But what public high school was it? Public is by no means equivalent to located in a poor area or underfunded.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#297

Post by tester756 »

ajkjk wrote: post #223
nradov wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is grade inflation for rich students really an issue at many colleges? Most majors at most colleges are honestly not that hard. Anyone who shows up and does a modicum of work can skate by with a gentleman's C. At D1 schools the football and basketball programs generate huge revenue, which is used to subsidize less popular sports (particularly women's teams under Title IX). For better or worse a lot of prospective stu…

Grade inflation for everyone is an issue at most colleges. Grades should reflect your credibility in a subject, and should be roughly normalized across subjects. But because they are so important for the rest of one's career, they end up being heavily pressured towards A's -- which results in careers not paying as much attention to them because they're widely understood to be not meaningful. A better world would see…

>But because they are so important for the rest of one's career

Seriously?

I'd never even thought about mentioning college grades _in my country_ and if somebody e.g during interview tried to use tham as strong argument then I'd consider it as a red flag

why anybody competent would need to brag about something unreliable as grades?

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#298

Post by tester756 »

samatman wrote: post #243
beervirus wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College is an academic pursuit. What other type of "merit" besides academic merit could possibly be relevant when we're talking about college admissions? I mean maybe alcohol tolerance, but...

You're affirming the consequent. If college were a merely academic pursuit, and if standardized testing were a perfect proxy for academic achievement, then yes, we could collapse testing into academic merit, and academic merit into merit, and voila! Meritocracy. But college is not merely an academic pursuit. I would argue it isn't even centrally an academic pursuit. Instead, it is a gatekeeper to the higher echelons…

Your "testocracy" is a good proxy for hardwork, determination and "domain" knowledge, so good enough, I guess?

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#299

Post by MiroF »

rkique wrote: post #237
ajkjk wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 100% need-based aid to accepted students

With the little weird caveat that poor students at top institutions have to work doing things like cleaning the bathrooms of the richer kids as part of their "term-time work expectation" for receiving financial aid.

Re: UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors

#300

Post by solveit »

strombofulous wrote: post #273
solveit wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sufficiently prestigious schools are drowning in perfect applicants. This is by design. There exist tests that can distinguish between the merely very good and the outstanding. Elite US universities go out of their ways to not use them, precisely so they can admit the merely very good legacies.

If you're talking about the SAT and ACT, I would challenge the idea that they can accurately distinguish between the good and outstanding. At most they provide a rough indication. I know this because I got a much higher score than I deserved to on the ACT because you can read the test pretty easily if you put yourself in the shoes of the people making it (I got a 31 overall and a near-perfect 35 on the science portio…

I'm specifically not talking about the SAT and ACT since they're widely used by elite universities. Those tests top out way too early and can't reliably distinguish between the top 1% and the top 0.1% (The fraction of perfect scorers is much smaller than 1% but the standard error of measurement is way too large). The exams I have in mind are those like the science olympiads and the Cambridge STEP. STEP in particular is basically used for this purpose (olympiads are a slightly different beast).
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