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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

#251

Post by com2kid »

pauljurczak wrote: post #244
com2kid wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

Thank you for clogging the patent pipeline for the rest of us! ;-)

No problem! If you are willing, for only a few thousand I'm willing to sit down and write a 1 page draft on a variety of topics!

Semi-seriously, my team did solve a lot of very hard problems in a very resource constrained environment, and we didn't competitors sueing us to oblivion, so... patent everything!

:/

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

#252

Post by toomanyrichies »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #241
tntn wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not as far as I know, but there’s only 1 real chance to be a “Harvard man” or an “MIT man”.

If having the “Harvard man” label is your one metric of success vs. failure, and if that isn’t likely to change, then so be it. But if you measure yourself by your level of achievement (or even just your level of fulfillment and enjoyment) in your chosen field, take comfort in a quick Google search, which will reveal many examples of people who have been successful quite late in life (many at double your age, and a few even triple). And some of the world’s most successful people have built their reputations despite not attending any college whatsoever. Quite a few “Harvard men” actually go on to work for the people who had the confidence to skip college and go build cool things because they had a growth mindset and knew they could “learn by doing”.

Also, being admitted to an elite school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I myself am actually an alumni of one of the “elite” schools more prominently featured in the middle of this admissions scandal. I took my $200,000 education and had two completely different but equally miserable careers (one as a travel agent and another as an overseas ESL teacher) before attending a coding bootcamp and landing in a field I love. I had no idea what I wanted my career or my life in general to look like when I was a high school senior, ended up using very little of what I learned in college, and could have saved my parents a lot of money and financial worry by attending a JC instead.

That’s not to say my classmates didn’t achieve a lot- of course they did. But that’s more a function of who they were when they entered college than who college made them into.

A lucky few people are precocious enough at that age to already know where they’re headed in life. Most people aren’t. That’s no one’s fault, least of all theirs.

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

#253

Post by killjoywashere »

p1esk wrote: post #247
shaklee3 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.

Are you suggesting they let in people who failed the standardized exam just to improve racial diversity?

Perhaps you're not from the US? There is a strong current of sentiment in some quarters of the US that this is exactly what should happen if society's playing field is every going to be leveled.

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

#254

Post by acct1771 »

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."

None of them do....hahahaha

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

#255

Post by caprese »

jaredklewis wrote: post #249
shaklee3 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.

What ratio of the races can be said to be diverse? At a minimum, wouldn't one need to know the racial breakdown of the applicant pool before being able to conclude that Stuyvesant is not racially diverse? I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian…

Yes race is arbitrary but it is easy to catch on to what a society is referring to.

Its the lack of black people that people worry about with regard to Stuyvesant. There is a lot of literature on how this comes to be. Fawn over “Pure meritocracy” if you like, the outcome in NYC wasnt expected and isnt leveraging the potential of its society.

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

#256

Post by infiniteseeker »

shaklee3 wrote: post #238
noego wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.

Is there such a thing as race or is there not? For years, scientists have told us there is no such thing as race.

Also, if one is of mixed race, say white and Asian, are they considered to be from a racially diverse group or are they not?

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

#257

Post by shaklee3 »

jaredklewis wrote: post #249
shaklee3 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.

What ratio of the races can be said to be diverse? At a minimum, wouldn't one need to know the racial breakdown of the applicant pool before being able to conclude that Stuyvesant is not racially diverse? I also don't understand why a three person class with one ethnically Chinese person, one ethnically Arab person, and one ethnically Indian person would be considered to have no racial diversity at all. Why is "Asian…

I don't know the answer, so I was just pointing that out since the word diversity rarely comes with with economics. However, I think that since OP pointed out it's a meritocracy you get kids whose parents really care, and not poor kids whose parents are working all the time. That tends to be cultural to some extent.

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

#258

Post by strikelaserclaw »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #235
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…

I’ve met some mothers that place huge value on status signals based on school that their kids attended. I don’t understand it in the least, but I know it definitely exists. It doesn’t matter at all how the school ranks objectively, it’s entirely related to the status among the specific individuals that the mother wants to impress. Often, it’s other mothers whose kids went there. Fathers might do this too, but I haven…

A lot of parents see their kids as younger manifestations of themselves, so they take the kids achievements such as getting into a good school as validation for themselves (Good genetics, great parenting etc...) and feel the opposite if their kids fail to do so. This is the only explanation for going so out of the way to essentially "fake" achievement for the kids so you can look better.

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

#259

Post by websterisk »

shaklee3 wrote: post #238
noego wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Economic diversity, yes. But Stuyvesant is 92% white and Asian, which is not racially diverse.

I'm glad this distinction got teased out. I find that it rarely does.

When people discuss the merits of Diversity (capital D), the implication is that they are referring to the value of bringing in people from a variety of walks of life that might bring with them a variety and breadth of unique/disparate experiences to bear and to share. That is not often the case. People want to SEE photographic diversity. Unfortunately, varieties of experiences do not always correlate with varieties of skin color or ethnicity (though, they certainly can).

For example, my undergrad institution (a private, competitive engineering school) had a diversity policy that manifested itself in the student body. We had very few "under-represented minorities." The ones we did have were overwhelmingly international and wealthy.

It's important to point out that these folks DID bring diversity to the cohort, but it was because they were international, not because they had a certain color of skin. Their wealth actually made them the opposite of diverse economically-speaking. Still, they would always get photographed for the website, brochures, and other marketing material... The brochure would make you think that our school was a bustling melting pot of kids from Philadelphia, Compton, or the south side of Chicago when in fact these folks were kids of Latin American oligarchs and African quasi-royalty.

The school needed ACTUAL kids from the south side of Chicago to be able to REALLY check the economic diversity box (and poor white trash like me, of course).

In short, economic diversity is no less important than racial diversity. At least for issues where the sharing of experiences and perspectives is the goal, I think it represents a higher bar than brochure-diversity.

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

#260

Post by acct1771 »

throwawaymath wrote: post #228
mochomocha wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What kind of issues usually arise with choosing based on merit?
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