I am curious if any of this would happen in my own country — The Netherlands. I would think not, but then again, neither did I know about US universities.
It's been a few years since university, but there are only a few numerus fixus studies in The Netherlands AFAIK.
For those, bribing yourself in would make sense, but I also doubt it happens and you would be found out soon I suppose.
Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.
Not being able to survive the vacuum of space is a basic human condition, too. Yet we developed space suits that allow ourselves to operate in there.
>> Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.
Over the past 20 centuries we saw enough events that implied literally killing those who were abusing their positions of power, and I am pretty sure poor people are absolutely capable of doing so again today.
History is periodic, but lack of ethics isn't a basic human condition.
Nobody is killing anybody. We need a peaceful, sustainable solution to let those who abuse power fall and those who have the good interests of people at heart to rise.
That's what they want you to do so they can maintain power. The threat of violence is what keeps people in line. Don't like it? Go talk to the police about it (you know... those people who use the threat of violence)
True. But the university-as-a-business, alumni-as-donors, and non-grades-based-admissions are famously strong at US universities.
A university that was government-funded well enough that it didn't have to solicit rich alumni could employ traditional anti-corruption/anti-cheating mechanisms, like blind admissions based on grades alone.
Blind admissions based on grades alone sounds like a terrible way to prevent cheating or select college applicant in general.
But that’s because I believe strongly in the power of outliers and that systems need to support and foster those outliers to achieve the best outcomes.
The smartest and most qualified applicants often don’t have the best grades. In fact I think a purely grades based system would be far from optimal, select for the wrong strengths, and miss many of the best applicants.
Of the top 10 universities ranked by number of Nobel prizes, the US holds 8 spots. US is doing something right.
When this story first broke, I wondered if there are much bigger occurrences in Asian countries where getting into the "right" school is ultra competitive?
Educational corruption used to be much worse in Asian and African colleges (I don't know if it still is. I have been out of the loop for a long time.); it was a near-continuous source of amusement at the department level when new grad students arrived expecting to continue to get by on money or contacts.
On the other hand, most of those students didn't take up an excessive amount of faculty and TA time. Instead, they kept their heads down. Most of the class time I saw wasted was due to fully-qualified students who wanted to argue with the instructor or who thought they should be teaching the class.
I guess I'm part of academia in the Netherlands, doing a PhD and teaching students. I have seen students who 'game' the system, but our job is not on the line if we refuse to play ball. This is likely only so because our universities are publicly funded, and don't require rich students and alumni for funds.
In the case of disputes on grades and extracurriculars, the commission of exams will nearly exclusively side with the teacher. Except when it can be shown that the teacher dropped the ball severely. Another factor in this matter is that once you have reached your second year, you can do your coursework for as long as you like, so there is little consequence in failing a course other than extending study time.
That being said, I work in a field that is not as sexy as some others (medicine, psychology), and I would guess the issues are bigger there, due to the kind of students that are attracted to these types of majors.
Yes, in Holland students know they can simply fail an exam and usually know that’s on them.
In the US, students can literally complain to the dean who then puts pressure on the professor. And they do, so professors know to err on the lenient side.
In fact: the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless.
> the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless.
I won't deny grade inflation, but Harvard allows students to drop classes very late in the semester. For "hard" classes, it wasn't uncommon for less than 25% of the students present in the second week of class to still be around to take the final. I never saw anything like that at the public university I went to as an undergrad.
Some amount of the high average grade is because the students not doing so well in the course drop with little to no penalty.
This matches my experiences teaching at non-elite schools. Entitlement is high and professors are hired either for research (among TT faculty) or as adjuncts; the former realize that their research is important and one student making a stink can jeopardize their TT work. The latter realize that one student making a stink can jeopardize their contracts. See also https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe.... So the incentive is to give the students what they want.
In addition, in most schools no one knows what a given set of admins will do or whether admins will back faculty. So what are professors incentivized to do? What are admins incentivized to do? Particularly in an age where accusations of impropriety are common and can also sink or stymie careers. The number of tools students have is large; the number faculty have, small.
Trigger warning - it has clips of students attacking professors and acting in ways that are completely delusional. I found it almost physically hard to watch and from the comments, seems I wasn't the only one.
In a scene where a professor is literally surrounded by students yelling at him and having meltdowns, it's shown that one of the adults at the back of the group is an actual university administrator: he watches passively and does nothing to intervene. The presenter argues the problem is that the administrators are often just as extreme as the students and benefit from cowtowing to almost any level of immature nonsense because the students demands inevitably translate into growth of administrative departments.
Who is more guilty? The parents bribing their way in, or the schools for not sufficiently policing the gate keepers?
The author claims that blowing the whistle is not an option faculty is ready to take due to the risk it brings to their career, but I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.
>I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.
How do you know they didn't? Six months ago, would anyone have listened to them? The answer is no, because we all already knew about the sports and 'legacy' students.
Sports and legacies are different. They bring money, and lots of it. New buildings, better facilities, better equipment, etc. Thousands of other students benefit if I admit the daughter of a philanthropic billionaire.
These "lesser nobles" who just give some women's sports coach a bribe, or pay to get a higher SAT score are doing nothing for any of the other thousands of students. It literally ONLY gives THEIR kid a leg up.
For that matter, the "greater nobles" would just as soon bribe their way in over paying millions in "philanthropic" gifts. The only way you could ever get these incentivized donations would be if bribery is not an option or too risky of an option.
If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal practice of exchanging a service for money.
As AdverseAffect pointed out, this is already happening to some extent with the scholarship plus extreme tuition system. If it went a little further in that direction, getting a scholarship would be the new "getting in."
> If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal practice of exchanging a service for money.
As a European outsider, this has already happened. The fact that Americans aren't outraged about the ridiculously high price of a US university degree is mind boggling
Americans are outraged at student loans instead of tuition because you don't notice the price you paid until you have to start paying off the loan. In an ideally rational world student loans would not be a problem because students would only take them on rationally, but as it turns out extending credit is just asking them to make decisions they never would otherwise.
As an older Millennial (with no student loans) I don’t think that’s quite accurate.
I distinctly remember a student seminar at high school where they talked about college and how to pay for it. What was drilled into us, over and over, was “not to make a decision based on sticker shock” and that “student debt is the best debt; better than a mortgage even!” And that career earnings with a college degree would melt any debt away without much fuss.
I sure hope Gen-Z Americans aren’t getting fed the same misinformation.
It feels weird to agree with this, but it is really important that people understand the distinction between "bribing" a school with billions, and literally bribing an admissions official with 20K or whatever.
How dare they to demand students to actually do some studying!
Honestly, it is refreshing to see someone from an elite university to face the same issues that we at the lower universities complained about for decades. Admitting everyone and their cat to universities destroys them. But I think this is a lost cause. Popular culture has completely lost the idea that you have to work (hard) to improve yourself. Everything nowadays is about "equal this" and "equal that", no one recognizes that opportunities do not automatically lead to outcome.
The real problem is that society is more and more treating universities like companies that sell a product instead of educational institutions. The idea that "I paid for this, so I deserve it" is toxic.
The public transit in my city is plastered with advertisements that have headlines reading, "Get a career in X!" These campaigns are being run by every one of the local universities, and quite a few ones that are further afield, too. It seems like the only ones still advertising an education rather than an income boost are the city colleges.
Like it or not, incoming students' perception of the nature of their college education is going to be driven by the admissions office's hijinks. Faculty don't get to talk to them until later.
Well, on the other hand many employers value degree more than actual skills, thus converting universities from learning institutions into work permission dispensers.
Are they wrong to? Inequality is increasing and universities are a gateway to the upper part of the distribution. When the costs of failure are so high it's expected that a bunch of people will enter and fight to make it to the finish line however they can.
Yes, when universities started marketing themselves as an "investment" is it any wonder their investors want a return. Almost no one holds this attitude about community colleges, where tuition is a few hundred dollars a semester. But somehow universities feel they are different. They charge many thousands of dollars in tuition and yet are unconcerned with the outcome. As a tuition paying student I'd be demanding a ton of shit too.
I think if educators had the resources to teach students who are not top performers this could get a lot better. I resent the idea that education is something you earn by being a good child, there is no way right now to judge children that wouldn't give families with means all the advantages.
It's insulting to compare students whose parents have committed criminal fraud in exchange for university admission to political movements for equal rights for groups that have seen even their most capable members discriminated against.
Uh, I'm going to need some clarification on what this means? Because one interpretation could be, "letting minorities into university has ruined it." And that way, there be dragons.
Some people believe that we're all equal and therefore should expect equal outcomes (regardless of how hard you work). Eg, they expect that everyone gets paid the same, without necessarily putting the work in.
Others believe that we're all equal in the sense that we should be given the same opportunities, but what you do with them, is up to you. If you get the same opportunities to me, but you work on and capitalise on them and gain some beneficial outcome from it, but I don't capitalise on them, don't put the work in etc, then I can't complain that I didn't get the same things you did.
I think GP is talking about that and not at all about letting minorities into university.
Although, I've also heard stories of discrimination due to not being under-represented, that is, not getting a place despite having excellent grades in order to make space for minorities. That's not fair either. Its a difficult thing to solve fairly, someone will always be unfairly rejected when places are contended. (I do think the minority-person should get the place in this case, since the other person likely has other options that the minority may not). I think most reasonable people would agree that giving minorities more opportunities is a good thing.
I'm a supporter of equalty outcomes, versus equality of opportunity, and I don't believe we're "all equal" in the sense you make it look like. This is a strawman. I believe we should distribute ressources depending on each people's needs, and not "merit", for instance. But that's not on the basis of the idea that "we're all equal". Btw in a world in which opportunities are bound to be dependant on ressources and social/cultural capital, reaching an actual equality of opportunity would require everyone to have "equal" social/cutlural/material capital in the begining smh. And if you let people accumulate said capitals, then the next generation... won't have equal opportunity once again.
Whenever someone says this, I become very leary of what they say next...to achieve "equal outcomes" you're gonna have to meddle in somebody's personal business at some point to achieve the desired "leveling"...this is bad news
Letting minorities into universities and thinking "case closed" has ruined them. The current (leftist) propaganda is in the form of "if you build it, they will come". Its proponents focus solely on some measurable metrics (grades, degrees, salaries) without noticing that it originally was, at least to some degree, about capabilities. It's much easier to demand better grades/more degrees/higher salaries for minorities instead of actually making sure that they gain the same professional capabilities. Hence many people simply game the system by lowering the requirements. In consequence, achieving academic success through hard work becomes a liability for your personal career plan and then capabilities are simply lost.
Exhibit a: how many CS graduates over the last 20years could explain how a OS context switch works.
Exhibit b: how many graduates of med school know how to integrate a simple polynomial.
A "Gentleman C" is a already a long-established concept among the so-called "elite" universities. Here's one quote, which I easily found via a Google Scholar search. In this case from 1992 (p146 of doi:10.1177/0002716292523001013 ):
> It is charged that, at elite colleges, mediocre minority students are patronized and suffer anxiety and self-doubt they would not feel at less selective colleges and that lowered standards stigmatize able minority students who do not require them.
> Advocates of affirmative admissions respond that they prefer favorable to unfavorable discrimination. There have been special admission standards for the children of alumni, faculty, donors, politicians, celebrities, athletes, and local residents, and easy degrees for students who buy term papers, cheat on exams, and take a gentleman's C with little study and much beer. Why not for blacks and Hispanics?
Things haven't changed much in 30 years, no? And I bet I could find similar comments from 30 years before that if I tried.
> Everything nowadays is about "equal this" and "equal that", no one recognizes that opportunities do not automatically lead to outcome.
You seem to suggest that the fight for equal opportunity and individual responsibility are at odds of each other, or maybe that equal opportunity is not a valid concern, but if you had to bet on either of two identical humans with exceptional work ethic, with the only variable being access to education, you'd go with the one that has more access.
Can’t the labor market do anything about this? I wouldn’t mind implementing changes to resume review that deprioritize degrees from “elite” universities. I’m sure I’d miss some legitimate candidates, but how much of a problem can that really be considering the cheating that pervades these schools?
The labour market has already responded to this, at least in computer science: you need to do coding challenges in many / most job interviews in parts because a degree, even a good degree from a top school is no longer strongly predictive of your coding ability.
True, but that’s still a surprisingly progressive stance. Not 18 months ago I got rejected after crushing the interview because “no one at this firm would vouch for someone without a college degree”. This still happens to me now as often as when I began my career in the early 00s.
Unfortunately, this also happens, but I think it is an orthogonal issue.
Degree / No-Degree is not a filter I apply personally, but I can see why some companies use it. When you get 2000+ applications for a position, you need to filter out almost all extremely quickly. Just because there are many charlatans with a degree, doesn't mean no-degrees are perfect ...
Just take every candidate from Stanford and throw their résumé in the trash. Send your recruiters to spend a week at Georgia Tech. Hire philosophers. Your recruiting pipeline is whatever you want it to be.
This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted.
Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair.
Sure, there's things like sports scholarships or the super rich kids whose parents donated a building, etc, but that's a small percentage. The school can just admit those admissions are unfair and be honest about it.
> This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted.
>
> Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair.
That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.
Fair point. But surely somewhere out there is some metric that can calculate a students likelihood of succeeding at University but also isn't easy to cheat at.
Something other than a human evaluation of a student's entire resume, which is what we have now? No, it's not at all obvious to me that such a thing is possible. That's basically tantamount to fortune-telling.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The grade/score threshold itself is easy to game, which is a big part of why universities generally use a rubric that encourages the admissions department to look at other things as well.
For example, because of a quirk in how the grade point system in one of the high schools I went to worked, it was very nearly a mathematical impossibility for kids who took an extra class instead of a study hall period to make it to the top echelons of the honor roll. Creating a strategy where, for example, helicopter parents who wanted to see their kid named valedictorian would forbid them from taking that extra class, since doing so would have knocked them out of the running.
Similarly, the college admissions exams are well-known to be poor predictors of academic aptitude. A big chunk of what they measure is simply how much money your parents spent on prep programs and tutors.
This is even before we start digging into the muddy waters about the extent to which grades and test scores unintentionally measure factors related to socioeconomic background rather than academic aptitude, though there does seem to be a pretty robust body of research around that morass as well.
The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining). Anyone who's ever taken a class with one of these professors should know what I'm talking about. Watching them teach is like watching an expert tradesman craft some product and finely adjust their inputs and technique as they go in order to get the desired result. They seem to be able to teach their selected content to the student equivalent of a brick.
It's the professors who are interested in doing all the other things professors do but regard teaching as a chore that have problems with under-performing students. They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) and it shows when the lower quality students fall through. That doesn't mean they're not good professors, they just aren't good teachers. I've known some really great professors that I would never want to take any class from because they didn't prioritize good teaching and likewise sucked at it. Undergrads and these professors would probably be happier if schools relaxed the teaching requirements for this group but that has other trade-offs.
As the price of college has increased the amount of extra work (office hours, Q/A sessions before major tests, etc.) professors are expected to do to prevent the customer from failing and having to spend thousands to go around again has increased with it. This is independent of student quality. The author sounds like he/she is annoyed with the new normal and is blaming it on the few people who bribed their way in. In reality student performance in any given class is going to depend mostly on how much they care. If you're teaching some elective that checks a certain box for a large group of undergrads and sounds like it's easy but is really a lot of work you're gonna have a lot of students barely passing, even the smart ones because your class simply isn't a priority for them.
These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.
> They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them)
To be clear, it's not just less important to the professors, it's less important to the school as well. Just look at the tenure guidelines to see this: Publications and grants are by and large the biggest part of your tenure portfolio. At a good school, you can get tenure while being a mediocre lecturer, but you will never get tenure being a mediocre researcher. So can we really blame professors for reacting to the incentives they are given?
That's because tenure is a tool for research, it exists to ensure a certain level of freedom of research. For every n researchers who use tenure for slacking off or pursuing a crackpot idea (those two are indistinguishable from the outside) there will be one who makes a valuable contribution that would have been impossible without the freedom granted by tenure.
Granting tenure has many downsides, but there is also possible upside which is why tenure exist. But that upside is exclusive to research, it simply does not exist in teaching. Don't get me wrong, it's great when tenured positions are held by people who are also good teachers and many are, but it would be wasteful to base selection on teaching. If you want to improve teaching, create better teaching positions outside of tenure.
I'm confused by your expert tradesman analogy. Surely the first step to hand-carving a beautiful wooden chess set is to throw away parts that have knots and cracks and won't carve well?
Even if they prefer working with nice material the people who are the best in their craft can still build pretty nice stuff out of crap material if that's what's in front of them.
But you can't force a piece of knobbly wood into a straight line. You work with what you've got. If the wood is twisted and knotty you have to play with that, you can't say "I make little identical figurines and I can do it with any wood" no matter how skilled you are.
That's the point, you work with what is in front of you. That doesn't mean you'll have an identical outcome.
Nobody is expected to do their best work every day in any conditions with any inputs. You're expected have a "good enough" outcome the overwhelming majority of the time which is also the goal when it comes to teaching.
With a good teacher all but maybe the bottom few percent should at least be learning enough to be regarded as passing and most should be passing comfortably. A not so good teacher will go through the same basic motions using the same inputs but without that hard to quantify expert touch that comes from skill compounded with experience they will not produce the same result and they may not understand why because you don't know what you don't know. This generalizes to other skilled professions.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect every college professor to be a great teacher. But the ones that aren't and don't want to be shouldn't be complaining that teaching is a chore and that some students are harder than others. That chore is what keeps the lights on.
Given infinite resources and any tool I want, even you or I could create a life size stone sculpture. Software and software run stone cutting machines make it easy.
But let's see what kind of a sculpture we can make with nothing but an 8 foot block of limestone and some chisels.
No matter how good or enthusiastic the teacher is, under-performing students simply require more time. Time is a precious commodity, and if the class size is large and professors have other (non-teaching) responsibilities then something has to give.
Unless you're advocating that "good professors will just put in the 90 hours a week to make it happen"?
Universities are places of higher learning, not higher teaching. Professors are there to do smart things, teaching is not an important part of their job.
> These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.
You say that, but in the rest of your entire post, you're putting the blame squarely on the professors.
I was a professor, and I put a crazy amount of time and effort into my students. Copious office hours, refining and reworking every single class I taught every time I taught it, rewriting every test and assignment, doing extracurricular homework reviews and test prep, etc, etc. All this to say, I was very interested in being a good teacher, and this
> The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining).
is bullshit.
It's not that it's wrong. It's disingenuous. The under-performing students are not the issue. They've never been the issue. Even students admitted based on academic merit have weaknesses and struggle in certain areas. That's part of being human. Good students, regardless of performance, will work to overcome these weaknesses and deserve attention and work on the part of the professor in return.
The problem is the non-performing students. The ones who tell you that their daddy paid good money for them to pass your class, and they've never once turned in a homework assignment or passed a quiz. Those students leach time and effort and attention that rightfully belongs to the under-performing students. Those students will offer you money and sex before they do a lick of work, and I have been offered both, multiple times. They do not belong in universities.
From the article:
> Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade Gianulli, whose parents bought her a place at the University of Southern California, and who announced last August to her huge YouTube following that “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend. But I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying … I don’t really care about school.”
I think you have greatly misunderstood the problem and fail to grasp the realities of the situation. Yes, there exist professors that don't give a crap about teaching, but your post is a slap in the face to those of us who care deeply and spend (or used to spend) 60 - 80 hours a week doing it.
I really enjoyed this article, but I want to point out something:
> to regard themselves as customers who are always right
I encountered a lot of awful professors in college. (A private, 2nd tier school.) Some were outright incompetent, and others adversarial towards their students. The admissions process also portrayed the school as career prep, not education for the sake of pursuing knowledge. The disconnect at times between how the experience was marketed, versus what the professors wanted to do, was shocking.
The reality is that a college education is expensive, and ultimately funded by a customer, either the student or the student's parents. Quality must be demanded by the paying customer.
Or, to put it mildly, when every student is a customer paying a quarter million dollars, they need to be treated as such. That doesn't mean fabricating grades, but that does mean going the extra mile to please someone who ultimately is funding your paycheck.
I'm in my 40s and went to one of them Ivy schools. There were legacies. There were affirm action kids that clearly weren't at the same level as others.
But I didn't mind. They all studied hard, and harder than others because they knew. They knew how they got it, and they knew that even smart kids flunk out.
IMHO, this is more of a broader trend that has more to do with poor parenting.
I went through schooling systems in HK, Korea, America at very different ages. Parents didn't dare meddling with how teachers taught. Teachers were the rule of law.
Got B+? Well, tough shit. Did you take advantage of all the professor and teacher assistant office hours? Yes? Sorry but maybe you're just not as good as others taking the same course. (My own experience taking Comp sci 100)
You'd think a 1500+, 4.0+, 12+ AP course student coming from an elite magnet school, with a parental income of $250,000+ is smarter than the poor kid from rural Idaho that lacked such opportunities.
The poor rural kid from Idaho may not be admitted to MIT, Duke, Berkeley, ivies and may not look as good as that 1500+ kid, but you surely will miss kids like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller that would have been successful at an MIT or Caltech. While the 1500+ kid might have gotten that score due to SAT prep, they may not actually be that smart. The Idaho kid could be much more intelligent, but since they're coming in with fewer AP courses and fewer ECs, they wouldn't pass the sniff test.
First, lots of kids get 1500+. Even the kids getting special consideration would have such an SAT score. So if you can't match that score, I'd strongly urge you to give serious consideration to some "safety" schools.
Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union. Which means the easiest way into a lot of these schools is not a wicked three point shot, but rather to graduate high school in Wyoming.
Third, if you're from Idaho and are not admitted, it means there were better candidates that these schools selected in lieu of yourself. (Remember, a lot of schools have a mandate, so they definitely admitted someone.) So introspection is in order. What did the other Idaho candidates have that you did not?
>Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union.
That may be true. But to tell a kid from rural Idaho she has a shot at MIT, when her parents never graduated from high school, may not be something she'd believe, even if she could get into MIT. Even if she'd get a full ride, her parents may encourage her not to apply, since they'd tell her it's too expensive, and she may believe that over reality. Just because a university tries to help such people, she may never get the message. It isn't like rural America is where Harvard is sending their representatives to educate poor rural kids their opportunities. A talented poor person may not realize they could actually get into Harvard, so why waste an application fee? Being poor effects you in ways most non-poor people cannot begin to understand. It effects your mindset, attitude and outlook on life. It can artificially lower your goals and scope.
But none of that is specific to being from Idaho. None of it is specific to being rural. And none of it is specific even to being poor.
There can be poor, minority kids in North Little Rock, Arkansas equally unaware of these opportunities. And believe it or not, even a middle class kid from Lincoln, Nebraska can be unaware of the fact that they can get into Harvard.
My point is, no one is really special in this regard.
So it’s not clear that the Idaho kid isn’t better than the average MIT admit, but it’s also not clear that he’d do better at MIT than going to his state or Montana state or something. (I mention this not to throw out state schools in the west but because one of the best texts on my area of research is by a guy from Montana State)
It was a while ago, but it was a study out of ... Michigan State (?) that looked at the bottom 10% of students that got into the elite colleges. Not the legacies and the athletes, they controlled for that. But, based on selection criteria like ACT, SAT, GPA, etc. Kids that got in, basically, on the strengths of their essays.
The press article talked about a kid that was in Stanford. He was from Arizona, and his grads were iffy and his scores were okay-ish.
But, the kid was SUPER passionate about the local state park that he hiked in all the time. He managed to raise a bunch of money for the park to keep it open through the 2008 downturn, he went to the state capital and lobbied legislators, all that jazz. The kid essentially applied to Stanford on a lark and wrote about his efforts with the park. He got in.
The conclusion of the study of these kinds of kids was that they were really spiky and not well rounded. And, they really didn't need Stanford and all the others, Stanford needed them.
Sorry for the years later recollections and likely misremembering. If anyone else knows the source for this, I'd love to know as well.
1500 (out of 1600) on the SAT, 4.0 out of 4.0 grade point average (GPA), took 12 Advanced Placement (AP) courses, akin to foundational college-level courses, while in high school. Generally just getting the highest possible marks on every typical academic metric.
1500: SAT Score of 1500 (of 1600, puts them in the 99%-ile)
4.0+: 4.0+ Grade Point Average (D=1 grade point A=4, Advanced Placement courses [AP] are +1 on the grade point so you can be over 4.0 on a 4 point scale.)
12+ AP: is they've taken 12 or more Advanced Placement courses, which are in theory equal in rigor and difficulty to college level courses.
Basically means they spent their entire high school taking as many of the hardest classes they can, and earning an A in all courses.
> They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well.
I assume this means 'do well in class', however I think the article itself points out the real, genuinely valuable, thing the students learn:
> In comparing stories, we have also found that such students strive to “work the system”, using university procedures to get the grades they desire
Like it or not, this is how many people find success. Rich, poor or in between.
I think that a lot of this behaviour is deplorable, but I can't deny that it requires some type of intelligence and work. It's just not the type of smarts or ethic that most people value.
Perhaps after hundreds of years of this 'privileged kid games the system' dynamic, it's time to embrace that and use it as leverage to encourage the students towards more generally accepted modes of effort.
Or maybe not... the school's are already teaching them to be successful. Maybe this is a question of ethics, not education?
I wouldn't call that success, unless parasites are successful. At the end of the day, we need people to do real work and produce real results. You can't "game the system" into building a good road or writing a good operating system or growing healthy food. These people leech off of others who are doing the real work and they drag down everyone by accumulating resources without providing real value in return. Like any parasite, they should be removed.
We are dealing with the path of least resistance and the natural flow of entropy.
It seems naive to believe these institutions are not businesses at the end of the day.
To change people wanting a degree for degrees sake due to the institution, then you have to add weight to the knowledge that comes with the degree (or detection of it).
I have an assumption that won't scale and you will question if it's as big a problem as it feels and what change can be controlled on a weak-link biased system.
Impeccable timing. Haven't read the article, but want to say something. i was watching a regional film 2 days ago. The plot starts with a doctor doing wrong surgery to hero's father and so he loses his father. The doctor, apparently, bribed himself into the university for studying even though he never gets any qualifying results in the entrance exams.The story goes on and questions the audience in the end, will you risk with your own life or your loved ones in the hands of them?
Don't know if there is any governance or other controls in U.S. uni's but that's not how it should work. Isn't it discouraging one way for a student who earned it after hard work, compared to the one who simply enters a uni just because he was happens to be born to a rich father. Don't want to question the morality or ethical side, but it just doesn't feel right and should be handled in someway. may be more stricter exams etc. But I don't think that's practical either as they can easily workaround the system same way.
If someone wants to donate $70 million and maybe their kid gets a free pass into the university, I think that’s a win-win.
Presumably that $70 million is being used to provide a tremendous amount of resources for everyone who attends the goal. A lot of kids get full ride scholarships on the back of that $70 million, or a pretty sweet new building gets built on the campus.
Obviously there’s a trade-off in fairness and at some point ($7 million? $700k? $70k?) you look at it and say, no that’s not worth taking a spot away from another student.
Bribery obviously is a different matter, because the gains aren’t going to the university and therefore the students in any form.
Well there isn’t a meritocracy to begin with, so that’s not the choice we actually have here. But no, I’m not a purist, I think as a practical matter the majority of choices we make have externalities or trade-offs and sometimes you weigh the good versus the bad.
Society is certainly worse off as a whole by not taking the $70 million donation and maybe there’s one rich kid who doesn’t get in.
Obviously this approach has its limits and can go terribly wrong. Would you let one die to save a billion? Would you shoot down a plane that’s been hijacked?
I don’t think it makes sense to be moral absolutists when the world is filled with practical choices that have to be made that will save some people and hurt others.
Is it really ethical to fail to provide full scholarships to let’s say 1,000 students because 1 student’s application got fast tracked?
My two cents are that “legacy” students are real (probably pervasive), and so is the benefit to pocketing their big fat donations.
I am a highschooler who is interested higher-level theoretical computer science and math. I am motivated to get into a good college because I want to have good educational foundations and the opportunity to meet professors involved in the research areas that I am interested in.
Seeing the college admissions bribery scandal outraged me. Society pressures people my age into getting into a good college as an indicator of worth. Before the controversy, I had already felt cynical about the whole culture of test prep and ungenuine ECs. I feel as though society pressures other teenagers and me into not being true to ourselves, and living our own lives, but instead doing things just for the grades or the attractiveness to college admissions officers. When the bribery became known, it bolstered my belief that elite colleges are places of classism, dishonesty, and phoniness. The girl mentioned in the article who said that she was going to party instead of study is especially a slap in the face for me.
Therefore, I have a conflicting view of elite colleges. On one hand, I greatly admire the professors who work at the colleges, and respect the colleges as places of research. On the other hand, I have a cynical view that elite colleges are a place for social prestige. I had wondered if there was a conflict between the interests of the professors, who would like passionate students, and the interests of the admissions officers, who, according to the scandal, maintain a class barrier by taking bribes instead of admitting students egalitarianly.
This article solidified my thoughts that there is a conflict between the interests of professors and admissions officers.
As I see there is no governance or other controls in U.S. and that's very upset. Look like rich kids can buy whatever they wanna and I suppose rules must be chagnged anyway. No expensive services, just available for anyone. Paperell looks like it so I also wanna add that goverment should prevent such situations in the future and that's all..
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadBut it could..
>> Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.
Over the past 20 centuries we saw enough events that implied literally killing those who were abusing their positions of power, and I am pretty sure poor people are absolutely capable of doing so again today.
History is periodic, but lack of ethics isn't a basic human condition.
A university that was government-funded well enough that it didn't have to solicit rich alumni could employ traditional anti-corruption/anti-cheating mechanisms, like blind admissions based on grades alone.
But that’s because I believe strongly in the power of outliers and that systems need to support and foster those outliers to achieve the best outcomes.
The smartest and most qualified applicants often don’t have the best grades. In fact I think a purely grades based system would be far from optimal, select for the wrong strengths, and miss many of the best applicants.
Of the top 10 universities ranked by number of Nobel prizes, the US holds 8 spots. US is doing something right.
On the other hand, most of those students didn't take up an excessive amount of faculty and TA time. Instead, they kept their heads down. Most of the class time I saw wasted was due to fully-qualified students who wanted to argue with the instructor or who thought they should be teaching the class.
That being said, I work in a field that is not as sexy as some others (medicine, psychology), and I would guess the issues are bigger there, due to the kind of students that are attracted to these types of majors.
In the US, students can literally complain to the dean who then puts pressure on the professor. And they do, so professors know to err on the lenient side.
In fact: the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless.
I won't deny grade inflation, but Harvard allows students to drop classes very late in the semester. For "hard" classes, it wasn't uncommon for less than 25% of the students present in the second week of class to still be around to take the final. I never saw anything like that at the public university I went to as an undergrad.
Some amount of the high average grade is because the students not doing so well in the course drop with little to no penalty.
In addition, in most schools no one knows what a given set of admins will do or whether admins will back faculty. So what are professors incentivized to do? What are admins incentivized to do? Particularly in an age where accusations of impropriety are common and can also sink or stymie careers. The number of tools students have is large; the number faculty have, small.
All this is also compatible with The Case Against Education: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
There's a good short video here that explores what's been happening at Yale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM
Trigger warning - it has clips of students attacking professors and acting in ways that are completely delusional. I found it almost physically hard to watch and from the comments, seems I wasn't the only one.
In a scene where a professor is literally surrounded by students yelling at him and having meltdowns, it's shown that one of the adults at the back of the group is an actual university administrator: he watches passively and does nothing to intervene. The presenter argues the problem is that the administrators are often just as extreme as the students and benefit from cowtowing to almost any level of immature nonsense because the students demands inevitably translate into growth of administrative departments.
The author claims that blowing the whistle is not an option faculty is ready to take due to the risk it brings to their career, but I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.
How do you know they didn't? Six months ago, would anyone have listened to them? The answer is no, because we all already knew about the sports and 'legacy' students.
These "lesser nobles" who just give some women's sports coach a bribe, or pay to get a higher SAT score are doing nothing for any of the other thousands of students. It literally ONLY gives THEIR kid a leg up.
If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal practice of exchanging a service for money.
Precisely.
The entire reason we have to crush this practice is because it puts philanthropy at risk.
>If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in."...
The politicians won't let them. Especially not at the state schools.
As a European outsider, this has already happened. The fact that Americans aren't outraged about the ridiculously high price of a US university degree is mind boggling
I distinctly remember a student seminar at high school where they talked about college and how to pay for it. What was drilled into us, over and over, was “not to make a decision based on sticker shock” and that “student debt is the best debt; better than a mortgage even!” And that career earnings with a college degree would melt any debt away without much fuss.
I sure hope Gen-Z Americans aren’t getting fed the same misinformation.
Honestly, it is refreshing to see someone from an elite university to face the same issues that we at the lower universities complained about for decades. Admitting everyone and their cat to universities destroys them. But I think this is a lost cause. Popular culture has completely lost the idea that you have to work (hard) to improve yourself. Everything nowadays is about "equal this" and "equal that", no one recognizes that opportunities do not automatically lead to outcome.
The public transit in my city is plastered with advertisements that have headlines reading, "Get a career in X!" These campaigns are being run by every one of the local universities, and quite a few ones that are further afield, too. It seems like the only ones still advertising an education rather than an income boost are the city colleges.
Like it or not, incoming students' perception of the nature of their college education is going to be driven by the admissions office's hijinks. Faculty don't get to talk to them until later.
Beautifully said. Favourited!
Uh, I'm going to need some clarification on what this means? Because one interpretation could be, "letting minorities into university has ruined it." And that way, there be dragons.
Some people believe that we're all equal and therefore should expect equal outcomes (regardless of how hard you work). Eg, they expect that everyone gets paid the same, without necessarily putting the work in.
Others believe that we're all equal in the sense that we should be given the same opportunities, but what you do with them, is up to you. If you get the same opportunities to me, but you work on and capitalise on them and gain some beneficial outcome from it, but I don't capitalise on them, don't put the work in etc, then I can't complain that I didn't get the same things you did.
I think GP is talking about that and not at all about letting minorities into university.
Although, I've also heard stories of discrimination due to not being under-represented, that is, not getting a place despite having excellent grades in order to make space for minorities. That's not fair either. Its a difficult thing to solve fairly, someone will always be unfairly rejected when places are contended. (I do think the minority-person should get the place in this case, since the other person likely has other options that the minority may not). I think most reasonable people would agree that giving minorities more opportunities is a good thing.
Whenever someone says this, I become very leary of what they say next...to achieve "equal outcomes" you're gonna have to meddle in somebody's personal business at some point to achieve the desired "leveling"...this is bad news
Exhibit a: how many CS graduates over the last 20years could explain how a OS context switch works.
Exhibit b: how many graduates of med school know how to integrate a simple polynomial.
A "Gentleman C" is a already a long-established concept among the so-called "elite" universities. Here's one quote, which I easily found via a Google Scholar search. In this case from 1992 (p146 of doi:10.1177/0002716292523001013 ):
> It is charged that, at elite colleges, mediocre minority students are patronized and suffer anxiety and self-doubt they would not feel at less selective colleges and that lowered standards stigmatize able minority students who do not require them.
> Advocates of affirmative admissions respond that they prefer favorable to unfavorable discrimination. There have been special admission standards for the children of alumni, faculty, donors, politicians, celebrities, athletes, and local residents, and easy degrees for students who buy term papers, cheat on exams, and take a gentleman's C with little study and much beer. Why not for blacks and Hispanics?
Things haven't changed much in 30 years, no? And I bet I could find similar comments from 30 years before that if I tried.
You seem to suggest that the fight for equal opportunity and individual responsibility are at odds of each other, or maybe that equal opportunity is not a valid concern, but if you had to bet on either of two identical humans with exceptional work ethic, with the only variable being access to education, you'd go with the one that has more access.
Degree / No-Degree is not a filter I apply personally, but I can see why some companies use it. When you get 2000+ applications for a position, you need to filter out almost all extremely quickly. Just because there are many charlatans with a degree, doesn't mean no-degrees are perfect ...
Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair.
Sure, there's things like sports scholarships or the super rich kids whose parents donated a building, etc, but that's a small percentage. The school can just admit those admissions are unfair and be honest about it.
That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.
For example, because of a quirk in how the grade point system in one of the high schools I went to worked, it was very nearly a mathematical impossibility for kids who took an extra class instead of a study hall period to make it to the top echelons of the honor roll. Creating a strategy where, for example, helicopter parents who wanted to see their kid named valedictorian would forbid them from taking that extra class, since doing so would have knocked them out of the running.
Similarly, the college admissions exams are well-known to be poor predictors of academic aptitude. A big chunk of what they measure is simply how much money your parents spent on prep programs and tutors.
This is even before we start digging into the muddy waters about the extent to which grades and test scores unintentionally measure factors related to socioeconomic background rather than academic aptitude, though there does seem to be a pretty robust body of research around that morass as well.
It's the professors who are interested in doing all the other things professors do but regard teaching as a chore that have problems with under-performing students. They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) and it shows when the lower quality students fall through. That doesn't mean they're not good professors, they just aren't good teachers. I've known some really great professors that I would never want to take any class from because they didn't prioritize good teaching and likewise sucked at it. Undergrads and these professors would probably be happier if schools relaxed the teaching requirements for this group but that has other trade-offs.
As the price of college has increased the amount of extra work (office hours, Q/A sessions before major tests, etc.) professors are expected to do to prevent the customer from failing and having to spend thousands to go around again has increased with it. This is independent of student quality. The author sounds like he/she is annoyed with the new normal and is blaming it on the few people who bribed their way in. In reality student performance in any given class is going to depend mostly on how much they care. If you're teaching some elective that checks a certain box for a large group of undergrads and sounds like it's easy but is really a lot of work you're gonna have a lot of students barely passing, even the smart ones because your class simply isn't a priority for them.
These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.
To be clear, it's not just less important to the professors, it's less important to the school as well. Just look at the tenure guidelines to see this: Publications and grants are by and large the biggest part of your tenure portfolio. At a good school, you can get tenure while being a mediocre lecturer, but you will never get tenure being a mediocre researcher. So can we really blame professors for reacting to the incentives they are given?
Granting tenure has many downsides, but there is also possible upside which is why tenure exist. But that upside is exclusive to research, it simply does not exist in teaching. Don't get me wrong, it's great when tenured positions are held by people who are also good teachers and many are, but it would be wasteful to base selection on teaching. If you want to improve teaching, create better teaching positions outside of tenure.
That's the point, you work with what is in front of you. That doesn't mean you'll have an identical outcome.
With a good teacher all but maybe the bottom few percent should at least be learning enough to be regarded as passing and most should be passing comfortably. A not so good teacher will go through the same basic motions using the same inputs but without that hard to quantify expert touch that comes from skill compounded with experience they will not produce the same result and they may not understand why because you don't know what you don't know. This generalizes to other skilled professions.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect every college professor to be a great teacher. But the ones that aren't and don't want to be shouldn't be complaining that teaching is a chore and that some students are harder than others. That chore is what keeps the lights on.
Given infinite resources and any tool I want, even you or I could create a life size stone sculpture. Software and software run stone cutting machines make it easy.
But let's see what kind of a sculpture we can make with nothing but an 8 foot block of limestone and some chisels.
Unless you're advocating that "good professors will just put in the 90 hours a week to make it happen"?
You say that, but in the rest of your entire post, you're putting the blame squarely on the professors.
I was a professor, and I put a crazy amount of time and effort into my students. Copious office hours, refining and reworking every single class I taught every time I taught it, rewriting every test and assignment, doing extracurricular homework reviews and test prep, etc, etc. All this to say, I was very interested in being a good teacher, and this
> The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining).
is bullshit.
It's not that it's wrong. It's disingenuous. The under-performing students are not the issue. They've never been the issue. Even students admitted based on academic merit have weaknesses and struggle in certain areas. That's part of being human. Good students, regardless of performance, will work to overcome these weaknesses and deserve attention and work on the part of the professor in return.
The problem is the non-performing students. The ones who tell you that their daddy paid good money for them to pass your class, and they've never once turned in a homework assignment or passed a quiz. Those students leach time and effort and attention that rightfully belongs to the under-performing students. Those students will offer you money and sex before they do a lick of work, and I have been offered both, multiple times. They do not belong in universities.
From the article:
> Exhibit A from the recent admissions corruption scandal is “social media celebrity” Olivia Jade Gianulli, whose parents bought her a place at the University of Southern California, and who announced last August to her huge YouTube following that “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend. But I do want the experience of, like, game days, partying … I don’t really care about school.”
I think you have greatly misunderstood the problem and fail to grasp the realities of the situation. Yes, there exist professors that don't give a crap about teaching, but your post is a slap in the face to those of us who care deeply and spend (or used to spend) 60 - 80 hours a week doing it.
> to regard themselves as customers who are always right
I encountered a lot of awful professors in college. (A private, 2nd tier school.) Some were outright incompetent, and others adversarial towards their students. The admissions process also portrayed the school as career prep, not education for the sake of pursuing knowledge. The disconnect at times between how the experience was marketed, versus what the professors wanted to do, was shocking.
The reality is that a college education is expensive, and ultimately funded by a customer, either the student or the student's parents. Quality must be demanded by the paying customer.
Or, to put it mildly, when every student is a customer paying a quarter million dollars, they need to be treated as such. That doesn't mean fabricating grades, but that does mean going the extra mile to please someone who ultimately is funding your paycheck.
But I didn't mind. They all studied hard, and harder than others because they knew. They knew how they got it, and they knew that even smart kids flunk out.
IMHO, this is more of a broader trend that has more to do with poor parenting.
I went through schooling systems in HK, Korea, America at very different ages. Parents didn't dare meddling with how teachers taught. Teachers were the rule of law.
Got B+? Well, tough shit. Did you take advantage of all the professor and teacher assistant office hours? Yes? Sorry but maybe you're just not as good as others taking the same course. (My own experience taking Comp sci 100)
The poor rural kid from Idaho may not be admitted to MIT, Duke, Berkeley, ivies and may not look as good as that 1500+ kid, but you surely will miss kids like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller that would have been successful at an MIT or Caltech. While the 1500+ kid might have gotten that score due to SAT prep, they may not actually be that smart. The Idaho kid could be much more intelligent, but since they're coming in with fewer AP courses and fewer ECs, they wouldn't pass the sniff test.
Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union. Which means the easiest way into a lot of these schools is not a wicked three point shot, but rather to graduate high school in Wyoming.
Third, if you're from Idaho and are not admitted, it means there were better candidates that these schools selected in lieu of yourself. (Remember, a lot of schools have a mandate, so they definitely admitted someone.) So introspection is in order. What did the other Idaho candidates have that you did not?
That may be true. But to tell a kid from rural Idaho she has a shot at MIT, when her parents never graduated from high school, may not be something she'd believe, even if she could get into MIT. Even if she'd get a full ride, her parents may encourage her not to apply, since they'd tell her it's too expensive, and she may believe that over reality. Just because a university tries to help such people, she may never get the message. It isn't like rural America is where Harvard is sending their representatives to educate poor rural kids their opportunities. A talented poor person may not realize they could actually get into Harvard, so why waste an application fee? Being poor effects you in ways most non-poor people cannot begin to understand. It effects your mindset, attitude and outlook on life. It can artificially lower your goals and scope.
There can be poor, minority kids in North Little Rock, Arkansas equally unaware of these opportunities. And believe it or not, even a middle class kid from Lincoln, Nebraska can be unaware of the fact that they can get into Harvard.
My point is, no one is really special in this regard.
It was a while ago, but it was a study out of ... Michigan State (?) that looked at the bottom 10% of students that got into the elite colleges. Not the legacies and the athletes, they controlled for that. But, based on selection criteria like ACT, SAT, GPA, etc. Kids that got in, basically, on the strengths of their essays.
The press article talked about a kid that was in Stanford. He was from Arizona, and his grads were iffy and his scores were okay-ish.
But, the kid was SUPER passionate about the local state park that he hiked in all the time. He managed to raise a bunch of money for the park to keep it open through the 2008 downturn, he went to the state capital and lobbied legislators, all that jazz. The kid essentially applied to Stanford on a lark and wrote about his efforts with the park. He got in.
The conclusion of the study of these kinds of kids was that they were really spiky and not well rounded. And, they really didn't need Stanford and all the others, Stanford needed them.
Sorry for the years later recollections and likely misremembering. If anyone else knows the source for this, I'd love to know as well.
What does that mean for people unfamiliar with US school system?
4.0+: 4.0+ Grade Point Average (D=1 grade point A=4, Advanced Placement courses [AP] are +1 on the grade point so you can be over 4.0 on a 4 point scale.)
12+ AP: is they've taken 12 or more Advanced Placement courses, which are in theory equal in rigor and difficulty to college level courses.
Basically means they spent their entire high school taking as many of the hardest classes they can, and earning an A in all courses.
I assume this means 'do well in class', however I think the article itself points out the real, genuinely valuable, thing the students learn:
> In comparing stories, we have also found that such students strive to “work the system”, using university procedures to get the grades they desire
Like it or not, this is how many people find success. Rich, poor or in between.
I think that a lot of this behaviour is deplorable, but I can't deny that it requires some type of intelligence and work. It's just not the type of smarts or ethic that most people value.
Perhaps after hundreds of years of this 'privileged kid games the system' dynamic, it's time to embrace that and use it as leverage to encourage the students towards more generally accepted modes of effort.
Or maybe not... the school's are already teaching them to be successful. Maybe this is a question of ethics, not education?
It seems naive to believe these institutions are not businesses at the end of the day.
To change people wanting a degree for degrees sake due to the institution, then you have to add weight to the knowledge that comes with the degree (or detection of it).
I have an assumption that won't scale and you will question if it's as big a problem as it feels and what change can be controlled on a weak-link biased system.
And the professors have the worst attitudes. "This is how it is, deal with it".
Don't know if there is any governance or other controls in U.S. uni's but that's not how it should work. Isn't it discouraging one way for a student who earned it after hard work, compared to the one who simply enters a uni just because he was happens to be born to a rich father. Don't want to question the morality or ethical side, but it just doesn't feel right and should be handled in someway. may be more stricter exams etc. But I don't think that's practical either as they can easily workaround the system same way.
Presumably that $70 million is being used to provide a tremendous amount of resources for everyone who attends the goal. A lot of kids get full ride scholarships on the back of that $70 million, or a pretty sweet new building gets built on the campus.
Obviously there’s a trade-off in fairness and at some point ($7 million? $700k? $70k?) you look at it and say, no that’s not worth taking a spot away from another student.
Bribery obviously is a different matter, because the gains aren’t going to the university and therefore the students in any form.
Society is certainly worse off as a whole by not taking the $70 million donation and maybe there’s one rich kid who doesn’t get in.
Obviously this approach has its limits and can go terribly wrong. Would you let one die to save a billion? Would you shoot down a plane that’s been hijacked?
I don’t think it makes sense to be moral absolutists when the world is filled with practical choices that have to be made that will save some people and hurt others.
Is it really ethical to fail to provide full scholarships to let’s say 1,000 students because 1 student’s application got fast tracked?
My two cents are that “legacy” students are real (probably pervasive), and so is the benefit to pocketing their big fat donations.
Seeing the college admissions bribery scandal outraged me. Society pressures people my age into getting into a good college as an indicator of worth. Before the controversy, I had already felt cynical about the whole culture of test prep and ungenuine ECs. I feel as though society pressures other teenagers and me into not being true to ourselves, and living our own lives, but instead doing things just for the grades or the attractiveness to college admissions officers. When the bribery became known, it bolstered my belief that elite colleges are places of classism, dishonesty, and phoniness. The girl mentioned in the article who said that she was going to party instead of study is especially a slap in the face for me.
Therefore, I have a conflicting view of elite colleges. On one hand, I greatly admire the professors who work at the colleges, and respect the colleges as places of research. On the other hand, I have a cynical view that elite colleges are a place for social prestige. I had wondered if there was a conflict between the interests of the professors, who would like passionate students, and the interests of the admissions officers, who, according to the scandal, maintain a class barrier by taking bribes instead of admitting students egalitarianly.
This article solidified my thoughts that there is a conflict between the interests of professors and admissions officers.