FTA: an example: """In regard to this engineering applicant, the associate dean stated that he was concerned that the applicant’s math test scores were low, but when he considered those scores together with the applicant’s holistic rating and GPA, he believed that the applicant would be successful as an engineering major and admitted the applicant. """
If they can manage to make "student athletes" pass classes they’ve never been to (and who they pay tuition for) then how hard do you think it would be for someone that’s actually paying to go there?
Colleges rarely if ever fail students. There’s a known phenomenon of grade curving (adding +x% to exams if it was difficult for some students) which I never understood during my time in higher education.
Yet it makes sense because universities want to lessen liabilities and have rich alum give back (esp. the case with the children of wealthy donors).
I went to Berkeley and this wasn’t true for Berkeley. Popular majors were very competitive and were designed to filter students out of majors. Many classes were based on a curve such that effectively 1/3 of people ended up at least leaving the major. Sample popular majors: computer science, chemical engineering, molecular cell biology. I knew of at least one person who effectively failed out after one semester and of community college transfers in danger of failing out.
Same experience at my UC. Popular/impacted major courses aren't even allowed to curve up (only down). The universities will defend the reputation of their top majors by aggressively filtering out people not meeting the bar. It's not unheard of for a majority of a class to be given non-passing marks, and it's in their financial interest to do so since the student will have to retake the class, thus pay more in tuition. They'd just rather you waste your time and money in an non-impacted major (and so it doesn't impact their graduation rate stat used for major rankings).
Definitely have my share of friends that did 6-8 year stints at the UC for a 4-year degree from constantly failing out of classes, but never forced out.
i guarantee you there are a number of people every year who get rejected from Berkeley but accepted to Stanford (or equivalent) -- just a lot of noise in the process and after a certain point it becomes pretty arbitrary.
i bet this fact is how the admissions officials rationalized this corruption -- if the line between acceptance and rejection is arbitrary anyway, how much worse could it be to try to get some money out of it? (a lot worse)
Agreed. I was accepted to a top-5 school and rejected from more than one school ranked 25+ (one was >50). I know someone for grad school applied to 5 schools: they got rejected from all 5 schools, reapplied the next year, and got accepted to 3/5.
The admissions criteria for universities don't make a lot of sense. The standardized tests select for students that are good at writing those tests.
Malcolm Gladwell (yeah, yeah, I know) did a podcast series about the admissions process for law schools and the role that test taking speed plays in the admission process.
One of my kids applied to Cal a few years back...at Cal you apply to the individual college (such as the college of engineering) when you apply. Some colleges are much easier to get into than others and it's very difficult to change colleges once you are admitted, it's like applying to get into the school all over again. Obviously getting into the CS or Engineering programs at Cal is very hard but many of the other programs are much less competitive. I don't know if that's how all the UC schools are or not, but the difficulty of admissions seems like a mixed bag at UC Berkley.
Admissions is a rat race, where you have to run as fast as you can just to keep up. You may have a 4.0 GPA, and 1550 on your SAT, and are the quarterback of the hockey team, but you'll be passed over for someone with a 4.0 GPA and a 1550 SAT, who is both the quarterback of the hockey team, AND spent three weeks building orphanages in East Oblastan.
Once you're admitted, you no longer need to participate in the rat race. You just need to meet the criteria for passing your classes, which do not scale up, just because the person sitting next to you in lecture is an orphanage-builder.
I didn't look at the page header, only the domain (.ca.gov) and skimmed the illustrations and was wondering why a Canadian govt body is researching an American university. I didn't know California had its own domain.
Upon close examination I think we would find the ALL schools do this.
This is just a symptom of the underlying problem with our education system in the US. It’s no longer about educating but about $. When the almighty dolla gets in the way judgment is clouded.
Come to think of it... maybe this happens in politics and medicine too? ;)
I would be careful about following this line of thinking too much. Like a few politicians are corrupt, they're all corrupt. It's no longer useful to vote. Or some Hacker News commenters made up stuff on the spot. So all Hacker News comments are garbage. It dismisses the vast majority of people who are doing the right thing.
The vast majority of people are doing the right thing.
The vast majority of people in highly-competitive positions are not doing the right thing.
* A statement like "all politicians are corrupt" is to a first order accurate. You can't get elected without money, and you can't get money without doing donor bidding.
* A statement like "all executives are psychopaths" is not accurate, but becomes pretty close to accurate as you look at organizations with more than 1000-people who are no longer led by founders. You don't make it to the top of the corporate ladder without outcompeting people fighting dirty. People who are clean don't make it to the top.
* Not all academics fabricate data, but a growing number of academics at elite schools do. MIT has 1000 applicants for each faculty slot at CSAIL. You don't make it through that level of competition without cheating at least a little bit, and that makes it into the culture.
* Not all universities are corrupt, but by similar logic, most universities with massive endowments are. Dirty money goes to institutions willing to accept it.
Same thing goes across the board. Most religious leaders are deeply ethical people. Televangelists tend to be corrupt. Most lawyers who make partner tend to be a little bit unethical. Etc.
Anytime you get high enough on the ladders, bad behavior goes up.
It's been analyzed in much greater depth. Pfeffer's "Power" and de Mesquita's "Dictators Handbook" are treatments from a psychological and game-theoretic point of view, respectively. Both are well-researched scholarly tracts from top professors in the field. Pfeffer is controversial, while de Mesquita is pretty accepted organizational psychology.
Where we run into problems is that most people from any demographic are basically good, and people extrapolate from that. But power isn't a demographic; there's a selection process.
I didn't think what I posted was overly controversial, but as of now, it's a -3, with no one posting why they disagree. The only time that's happened before was the (now many times) I hit a nerve with the Google astroturf crowd. And I don't even dislike Google. But them's the taboos.
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead with JUST 64 students admitted on the basis of connections and donations.
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead letting external auditors look at this stuff.
* MIT wouldn't be caught. None of this would be public for MIT. That's what NDAs and non-disparage agreements are for.
I'm sorry, but all schools don't do this. Most are smart enough to stay out of this kind of trouble. For Harvard, it took a lawsuit and subpoenas to get in trouble over this.
Having external auditors, standards, and accountability is probably completely unique to UC/Berkeley. Admitting just 64 applicants based on graft and corruption is also unique within the top-20 schools.
I absolutely agree. Did you know if you have an NSF GRF as a grad student at MIT it costs a PI more to employ you than if you were on TA support? MIT takes more overhead and assumes the PI will just suck it up as he/she/they is "riding off MIT's brand" anyway. Numerous complaints to NSF run into the brick wall of "<sigh> MIT"
Yes but TAing might take 30 hours a week. Anyway, MIT professors should be the best in their field, if they can’t support the small amount more it takes for the grad student with the NSF grants that sounds like a problem
MIT students are a bit ahead of students at other schools. Faculty hiring is such that there are no substantial differences in faculty quality. The difference between an MIT professor and a state school professor is mostly random chance. Oh, and the MIT professor has a lower teaching load, a great brand stamp, and a huge PR department.
MIT overhead is roughly 2/3 of the money which comes into NSF. Perhaps this might not be a problem to raise (it's generally not), but that doesn't make it okay. The bigger problem is your tax payer dollar passing through overhead into graft. Your taxes are contributing to the MIT yacht club ("MIT Sailing"), million-dollar salaries, buildings costing a significant fraction of a billion dollars (MIT Stata Center), fancy faculty clubs, etc.
Is that good use of taxpayer dollars? Of tuition? Of donor dollars? That's ultimately where all this excess comes from.
I appreciate your zealousness for MIT but your response doesn't mean that it hasn't happened at MIT nor other revered places of higher learning in the past, just that it hasn't been made widely known. The people I associated with at Cal I thought were above this kind of behavior as well, but apparently not. I would be sad to hear about this for MIT or any other college. However there's a lot of deals that happen behind closed doors, and sadly, it could be more than we think given all the press we've heard about college admissions these last few years.
That's the huge difference between private schools like MIT (Ivy League and Stanford too) and public schools like UC Berkley. Public schools receive a lot of funding from the state and they should be audited by the state and have some transparency in their admissions process. California clamped down on the UC schools years ago for admitting too many out of state students, and they had the authority to do that. I don't think it's unique to Berkley at all, all state schools have to answer to the state they serve.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a world of greys and putting things in black and white terms doesn't do any good. MIT doesn't get money from selling spots, but they misstep and get money from other even less savoury places. You gotta get your money somehow.
If MIT did let in some legacy admissions due to donations, could it be said that the donations department would have been more discerning about not taking money from someone like Jeff Epstein? It's impossible to revisit history, but nobody is clean in this higher ed game.
I feel less bad about MIT taking money from Epstein, than the cover-up around it. People and institutions make mistakes. That's okay. It's a question of what you do about them. MIT has a history of hiding stuff like this, and of intimidating anyone who would talk about it openly.
MIT shut down the entire CSAIL mailing list -- whose legacy dates back to the old AI Lab days -- because someone had the nerve to raise the question of Epstein, asking what MIT's attitude should be towards a faculty member who visited the island. The list had been through horrible flamewars, thick and thin, over it's many-decade existence, and it finally took the whole Epstein cover-up to shut it down. MIT did the equivalent of a shadowban, collecting all emails sent to the list, but not forwarding them to the community for two days, to see what people send BEFORE announcing it was shut down. A lot of people sent a lot of stuff they wanted to share with the community but not the leadership.
To give a slight bit more context, the question was about a faculty member who had visited Epstein's island. We were promised that'd be answered in MIT's so-called fact-finding report. Naturally, it wasn't. It got shut down before anyone publicly put 2 and 2 together.
> Come to think of it... maybe this happens in politics and medicine too? ;)
indeed, the USA has made a business-marketplace out of anything, including things which should never be driven by profit driven competition (e.g. jails)
If one considers a university as a hedge fund with an education and research division, then it is rather sensible to have policies designed to increase the likelihood of wealthy individuals providing incoming capital.
I was in graduate school when I first learned that writing good grant proposals (and other skills related to acquiring large quantities of money) was arguably more valuable than doing good science.
I don't think public institutions like Cal engage in legacy admissions, but I'm not sure?
Many schools give a general boost for legacy, but it is not always so tit-for-tat as the transactions that occurred here with Cal. They'll often have a different non-legacy pipeline for large donor -> admission.
For instance, at Harvard, there is the legacy SCEA process, but there is also the "z-list" process which is the more direct "children of billionaires" route.
No, legacy admissions are at least to some extent rule based, rather than outright cheating which what this stuff is - people don't go to jail over legacy admissions, for instance. UC Berkeley doesn't have legacy admissions to begin with.
There are some universities and colleges that choose openly or non-openly consider. However, the policy of the UC System Board of Regents expressly forbids legacy and donor preference. Additionally, as a public institution there are due process concerns with not evaluating applications in accordance with the published factors and criteria, which in this case do not include legacy.
> Additionally, as a public institution there are due process concerns with not evaluating applications in accordance with the published factors and criteria, which in this case do not include legacy.
Those would simply be fraud considerations in a private institution that charges an application fee.
Of course, a private institution also has Equal Protection / (Substantive) Due Process considerations at play as to what the published factors and criteria can be, as well as (Procedural) Due Process considerations as to whether it actually follows them.
Because universities such as Berkeley claim they are a bastion of "diverse admission policies" as opposed to meritocracy which they call "a tyranny" which make them hypocrites as they have corrupt admission policies and practice cronyism.
Of course it wasn't meritocracy since it was cronyism and nepotism like what happens at Berkeley. But neither is "affirmative action", a racist policy which isn't going to end nepotism and cronyism, just make things even more arbitrary. No need to be an "athlete" now, just put "latino" or "black" on your registration form and don't forget the bribes. That's the system you are rooting for.
Obviously "just putting latino or black on your registration" form does not in fact automatically get you into any university, you know you are exaggerating.
Then you add "and don't forget the bribes" -- you think most bribes come from Black and Latino people, or most people who are Black and Latino also bribe schools to get in? I don't think you actually think this, because it would be insane?
I find it disturbing that when confronted with information about how wealthy and socially connected people have long been able to use their wealth and social connections to get into universities -- you are less concerned about doing something about this, than you are concerned about programs meant to give some advantage to less wealthy and socially-connected people. It's like, you see bribery and special favors from the wealthy and socially-connected, and you somehow still find a way to blame the poor and not socially connected for this problem, to focus the discussion away from the misdeeds of the wealthy and socially-connected!
It really says something that this whole discussion is full of people saying "I don't see the problem with that, it seems fine" for wealthy and socially-connected people (who are mostly but not entirely white) to have advantages, and also comments like yours complaining about perceived advantages they think not white people have.
And then we have google which likes to only hire from 'top tier schools' and then everyone else follows along. Believe me I've noticed how THAT has changed tech culture in the bay area.
I think you also have to determine the purpose of a university.
It's either to take the top students, bar none, or it is to educate and uplift poorer students (economically and educationally). Mixing these two doesn't work.
Why can't you mix the two? Admit 1/2 your class as top students, and the other 1/2 as people who are being uplifted.
That is in fact exactly how admissions at the UC schools work. The first 1/2 of the class is admitted on test scores and grades alone, the second 1/2 is admitted via reading of their essays and considering other factors, such as extracurriculars, economic circumstance, and, until the 90s, race.
Or you can choose to define "top students" as those who performed best, relative to their starting conditions. You could make an argument that such student are most efficient at using the opportunities they are given, and thus would benefit most from the education.
That would work, if the last measure taken was immediately prior to admission.
Alas, university doesn't work that way: students continue to be measured throughout their tenure, and those measures are an important component of the next phase of their life, be it work or further education.
The evidence is unequivocal: lowering the admissions standards for some section of the student body, results in those students doing poorly relative to students who were subject to the full standards.
This shouldn't be surprising, and no, it doesn't seem to matter why the standards were lowered, affirmative action, legacy preference, or otherwise.
Totally the fallacy of the excluded middle. There are many ways to work the two goals together. And understanding it in these very limited dimensions is a complete mistake.
The very definition of what a "top student" is varies a great deal.
> so it was legal until then but didn’t make a dent in inequality?
It did make a dent in inequality.
It didn't end it, but then it wasn't around nearly as long as the structural disadvantages that entrenched inequality, and it was a much gentler push than those it sought to mitigate the effects of.
Is that the only result of affirmative action admissions, or are there a few you are leaving out?
Do you have a better plan for dealing with systemic racism[1], that does not have the drawback you cite? Do you believe that systemic racism doesn't exist? Or do you believe that it does exist, but we shouldn't do anything about it?
Which of those three options are you championing?
[1] I understand that the mere mention of this concept is a dogwhistle for negative karma.
> Do you have a better plan for dealing with systemic racism
Get rid of all the bullshit administrators to lower the cost of college back to what it was 50 years ago so that poor people can go without getting into a lot of debt.
Lots of arguments can be and have been made in favor of racially discriminating policies. I believe the response must always be "no, that's morally wrong".
A good "Church of Satan" reaction to these policies in California would be a university that set the bar higher for Black applicants, with the justification that other policies have in fact over-corrected for past injustices, and now the injustice of that over-correction must be righted.
The thing to keep in mind is that the justification for some of the worst racism in history has been injustice or past injustices. We should learn from history and pre-commit as a society to react hyper-negatively to any policy that involves racial discrimination. Get it the hell out of the Overton window.
From a utilitarian point of view, I'm wondering if this could actually be beneficial. The extra revenue from donations could sponsor students with less income.
I suppose the real problem is that UCs are no longer financed fully by the state. If they were, there would be no excuse for this.
1/3 of them were admitted as student athletes. Everyone knows that it is official policy at most schools to accept people with athletic ability who would not qualify academically. Why? Because those athletic programs make the university a lot of money!
How is admitting someone because their family gave a lot of money any different in principle? It is just a question of reducing how many steps there are to making a profit for the school.
That's an excellent point. I'd be perfectly fine with eliminating both legacy admissions and athletic scholarships at public universities.
It reminds me of the Lori Loughlin case, where she was arrested not because bribing a university to admit your child is unfair to other applicants and sullies the ideal of an academic meritocracy, but because she didn't follow the university's established process for bribery. (Matt Levine expounds on this with his usual hilarity at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...)
But why? What if one {football player|kid-with-rich-parents} can subsidize 10 other need-based students who otherwise would not have been offered a premier education? In terms of reputation, imposters tend to fade into obscurity in time while those 10 will go on to build the schools brand.
If you read the report, a lot of the student athletes aren't actually athletes, but have been designated as such to overcome poor scores in the admissions process.
In any case, it might be negatively impacting the school's athletic program because real athletes have spots taken by opportunists.
Interesting. You accuse that guy of not having read the report but his comment doesn't make sense unless he's aware of the idea described in it. Ironically, if you had read his comment you would not have needed to have said "if you read the report".
If I hadn't read the report, how could I have known that 1/3 of the students involved were designated as student athletes?
My point remains. Once you've opened the door to accepting students for non-academic reasons, you've opened it to accepting them for other non-academic reasons.
(In this case I don't care about the impact on "real athletes" because I don't think that athletic programs are important to the university's core mission.)
Totally false that athletics makes the school money. The exceptional cases are the top 10 division 1 basketball/football programs that people talk about. The vast majority of college athletics programs do not make money. Just think about it, you think a UC school is making money from a student golf or tennis player?
Also these students admitted as "athletics" did not actually qualify and were never part of the team.
My understanding is that participating in a range of athletics programs is required to be a member of an organization like the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which is required to participate in the most profitable sports (primarily football).
Therefore the fact that individual sports and athletes do not make money doesn't mean that money isn't a reason for student athletic programs.
These appear to be for donations to "campuses", "the university" or "the athletic department". I don't see any allegations that payments were made directly to individuals. It's likely that the staff generally (and probably correctly!) thought they were acting in the university's interests.
There have been other scandals in the last few years where officials were bribed directly, and that looked worse.
Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.
How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.
1 for 1 isn't worth it, and the UC system already plays that game with international students where one international pays for 3 in-states. Make the buy-in price pay for 10 and I'm in support.
1 for 10 seems reasonable, assuming there is also a strict academic requirement for that privileged student. Even more points if it supports their housing and food plan.
If you fail out Timmy, he has to pay for tuition again thus paying for even more students. Or just charge the 10x upfront + normal tuition/year after that.
Further points if rich kids do household chores, cleaning, cooking etc for less privileged folks. Just strict academic requirement is not sufficient. Rich kids also have to remain in 95 percentile in academics. A further investigation committee need to be setup to investigate every year if rich kids are not using their influence to be among top students in their classes.
You obviously have to balance the legitimate cost against the illegitimate costs people will incur to get kids admitted. I don't know if 3x or 10x is the right value, but it's definitely not "more is better." If you make it cost a billion dollars to legitimately buy your kid into the school, there will still be millionaires utilizing these sorts of bribes.
The idea of privilege first entered the public sphere in the prelude to the French Revolution. "Privilege" in Old French literally means "private law".[1] It was the idea that a different set of rules for each of the Estates (Clergy, Nobles, and Commoners) was both fair and natural.
Are we are starting to see similarly different sets of rules for each class in the United States? Is such privilege in accordance with our ideals of liberty and justice for all?
Before the 18th century most people could not read. Literacy rates began rising dramatically starting in the 17th century with the invention of the printing press and the proliferation of reading materials that it spawned. By the third quarter of the 18th century, an extraordinary milestone was passed in France. For the first time in history more people could read than could not. The commoners of Paris were obsessed with the plays, novels and essays of Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. The satire and wit of these thinkers inspired a new form of popular discourse we now call critical thinking. Commoners from rich merchants to petty artisans started examining and discovering the contradictions and injustices endemic to their lot in life. The idea of privilege came from this tempest of new ideas. While the hierarchy of power and its unequal treatment are as old as time, this newly educated population was for the first time able to see this hierarchy of power for what it is: an inherited system of control based on fraudulent claims to divinity that is inherently unfair and unjust.
The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory.
As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).
Well no, that's not really what rule of law means. It would be perfectly within the rule of law to allow people to pay for admissions. If this wasn't a public institution, it would be perfectly legal, and I'm not even sure it's illegal here.
Rule of law is not sufficient, power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes.
> It would be perfectly within the rule of law to allow people to pay for admissions
Not if a law exists to the contrary. And that was the point I was agreeing with -- the solution should be to write a law if one doesn't already exist; or to enforce it if it does.
> power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes
Agreed, though distribution isn't the word I'd use, as it implies the existence of another human authority to determine how it should be distributed (thus granting that person or group of people improper power).
But if the placement of power is determined by duly enacted law, that's acceptable.
There was a study suggesting the strongest social mobility influence granted by an university education is really just the proximity and opportunity to network with the wealthy on even grounds more than the education itself.
So by having a guaranteed ratio of very wealthy mixed into your student pool, it's hugely beneficial to everyone else. It's practically the reason people chase after prestigious MBA educations.
The practice might be distasteful philosophically, but the results are apparently great.
It's a fine view that nobody should be denied great education, but if an entire country's annual cohort of high school diploma recipients all applies to the public college considered to be the best one they obviously couldn't all attend that one.
a) It's not uncommon these days for the term "Marxism" to be used as a brush to paint anyone "too left wing" (despite not being close to actual Marxists)
Plus, yes there are still some people in the world who believe in Marxism, although often just in a broad sense rather than thinking everything about it is right. But I doubt many on HN.
And while complaining about downvoted may be against the rules, personally I think it's completely fine in the context of wanting to understand something like your question, rather than "this shouldn't be downvoted".
This isn't tenable at this price. Double or triple it, and maybe.
The limiting factor for elite universities usually isn't dollars, but the quantity of qualified tenure-track faculty and physical space. Not at the university, but overall. The number of postdocs and graduating PhD students each year with the credentials that Cal wants to accept isn't huge. Similarly, the number of rooms that the university has is limited, and both of those numbers take time to change.
A certain ticket for 4x the price of Harvard is still a really, really good deal for lots of wealthy people.
This is already the way education works. You’ve heard of “needs-blind” admissions? Anywhere they don’t say that, it means the ability of students to pay full price is part of the admission process.
The economy travellers make it possible to travel first class. First class travel is for the moderately wealthy. The very wealthy have their own transport.
Seems like they identified 108 (2+64+42) students. During the 6 years examined the 4 universities admitted over 200,000 students, if my calculations are right [1]. It's definitely a serious problem that needs to be fixed, especially since there may be more not yet identified. But the problem is not large relative to class sizes.
In this day and age, with all the fierce competition, it's a real problem that elite universities are admitting rich kids on such unfair and uneven grounds.
Going to the "correct" school can transform the life of some people, essentially pulling them up from the lower working classes, and opening up the doors to middle, or even upper-middle classes.
And what's even worse, a lot of these rich kids could go pretty much anywhere, without it affecting their future finances or lifestyle - if anything, it almost seems like a vanity project from their parents side, where they get the bragging rights that their kids are studying at HYPS or whatever.
And it's not that the kids of richer parents are necessarily worse, academically speaking - many of them get private tutors, go to private / prep schools, etc. from young age, but still the parents are so risk averse, that they feel the need to pour even more money, just to eliminate the stress of uncertainty. Even if it's illegal.
I know these cases encompass a broad range of controversy (for example that top-tier Asian-American students can't get into certain schools, because of some nonsensical "personality" assessments) - but in the end, it's just plain old classism. Doesn't mater what skin color you have, where you come from; As long as you have the cash, the odds are increasing in your favor.
Then you have rich folks like David E. Shaw. The guy spent literally tens of millions in donations, to all the top schools, just to increase the chance of his kids getting accepted (or rather - minimize the chances of their kids getting rejected)
And just in case anyone thinks the idea that an elite school won't help a rich kid, there have been studies indicating that is the case.
The one that comes to mind was the study that compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend.
Average future incomes were not statistically different.
But the study did note that the starkest improvents in future incomes were found in poor and minority students.
Do you have a cite for this? Not saying you're wrong as it's my prior that selection bias is the most important factor in any difference in educational outcomes. But I'd love to have something solid to point to.
I will say I don't totally understand how future income differences can be not statistically significant and also be "stark" between lower income students at the same time.
The no-difference in financial outcomes was based on comparing the average incomes of the two groups. So naturally, you will have outliers on both sides. They found that minority students tended to be the outliers.
Part of that probably has to do with the more prestigious school getting them a job they wouldn't have had. But also probably has to do with minority students getting access to the rich, well connected network that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise.
Environment and options, too. The Finance Path, Consulting Path, Tech Path, Startup Path - the implicit assumptions of school A to Company B to Grad School C to Company D is objectively super weird (why is I-Banking > MBA > Consulting so standard a path?), but often critical to making a certain salary.
I’ve previously read this study (and at least one follow on study) and what they said jibes with my recollection. I’ll see if I can find the exact citation
I'm not going to shit on a study I haven't read, but it seems likely that if you come from a "rich" family capable of buying you into a college via back channels, you've probably already got a pretty solid leg up in the game. I can't imagine correcting for all of those variables in a manner which isn't going to leave at least a few questions.
Either way, I'm sure having a diploma from Harvard would open some doors for pretty much anyone, and I'm not naïve enough to pretend otherwise, but I have serious doubts that a diploma from Harvard can truly tell you anything other than that person has the ability to make it through Harvards' admission filter, and do mindless homework for X number of years, like every other college.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you admit dummies, they are not
going to become a genius. The bigger issue for all of us is, now we are not supporting the students who could really move the needle. So the needle doesn't move.
> compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend.
I don’t know if this comparison controls for the confounders. Alice and Bob are both accepted to Harvard, and Alice decides to attend and Bob decides to chill out at the University of Maui for four years. That’s pretty indicative of Alice being more ambitious and achievement-oriented.
seeing this as an international student from a developing country, this is simply disheartening. It’s coming to the point where I’m starting to think hard about if it’s really worth applying to a US university at this point.
Why do you think high school marks should be the only factor? How is that fair more than other markers and signals? Is it fair that some Asian kids got parents who make them sit all day and study in order pass some not so indicative high school level tests while some other kid doesn't have this culture and environment? Why having a lot of money should not be a criteria? Why having great personality should not be a criteria, I don't want an elite of Asian semi autistic kids. I want some rich kids who can spend their time on pure research because they got no worries in the world and enough arrogance to discover new things and see life from a different perspective. Kids of big donors should certainly get a place because their family contribution help the institute over all. They should just make it formal rather than illegal or some back channels.
I looked at DE Shaw's "philanthropy", the dude just gave top colleges a million dollars a year for like 5-6 years, which according to Wikipedia represented "60% of the Fund's philanthropy"
It's probably true that generally rich kids could go to school pretty much anywhere and be okay, and that non-rich kids can have their lives transformed for the better by going to a reputable school. But isn't the latter due to the fact that people with power associate reputable schools with elite social status? Presumably if rich kids stopped going to a reputable school, it wouldn't take long for that school's reputation to diminish, even if the actual merit's of the education provided by the school didn't change.
The US university system is completely broken and ready for reformation. The endowments of so many of these schools are driving flawed behaviors that encourage these backdoor admissions. University athletics are in the same camp. These supposed money makers are just giant distractions from the universities missions to educate.
This is well known and won't change. A couple months ago there was a scandal where celebrities were arrested for bribing college officials for their kids acceptance. How come the college officials weren't named and fined and arrested?
This is bad, but 64 students isn't all that much. It pales in comparison to private colleges. For example, Harvard accepts about 1/3 of its students as "legacy". If you believe the lawsuits about Harvard's anti-Asian discrimination, that also affects hundreds of potential Harvard students every year. Once you consider that UC Berkeley is about five times larger than Harvard, and that there are at least a dozen top-tier private schools with similar policies to Harvard, this seems like a much smaller problem.
Read the article. 64 students (from the tiny audited sample) met the highest bar (direct email evidence of connection to donations etc.), to say nothing of other "strongly suspect" students, and the rest outside of the audited sample.
Rather than claim that students are admitted based on test scores and grades alone, why don't universities simply say that admissions are also based on factors such as how influential or wealthy the parents are? Doing so would not be a problem, the only problem is not being transparent about it. Stanford is very clear about the fact that "legacy" applicants (meaning their parents or siblings are at Stanford and presumably the family will be active donors) get priority.
> Rather than claim that students are admitted based on test scores and grades alone, why don't universities simply say that admissions are also based on factors such as how influential or wealthy the parents are? Doing so would not be a problem
For public universities like those in the University of California system, to whom the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution (and, often, similar and sometimes more expansive provisions of state constitutions) apply, it probably would be a problem.
> meaning their parents or siblings are at Stanford and presumably the family will be active donors
Not going out to bat for legacy admissions, but it's not always tit-for-tat related to donations and there are other reasons schools do it other than just $$$ from donations.
The uber-rich aren't getting in through a generic legacy boost.
At least one reason: universities are overwhelmingly funded by public money. Perhaps (/perhaps/) private institutions should be allowed to explicitly advantage wealthy applicants, but forcing all of us fund institutions that advantage the wealthy is perverse.
Note, even "private" universities (eg not the UC school discussed here) receive tremendous amounts of public money, as well as tax-exempt status. See, for e.x. [1]: the Ivy league received >$40B in public money and benefits from 2010-2015.
IIRC, research at MIT is >66% funded by federal grants.
At the end of the day, why would I care what the rich waste their money on? If they want to pay twice as much for half the education, eh its their dollar. I'm pretty sure college is a business, and asking businesses to leave paying customers on the table is the kind of anti-market thinking that leads to situations like this.
If you incentivize "anti-social behavior" (this seemed like a reasonable middle ground word), what else does anyone expect to happen?
For every purchased admission there are two parties, the rich person spending their money and the academically qualified candidate that loses out on the admission.
I don't care what the rich person spends their money on, but I do care about the student that worked hard, played by the rules, and deserved to be admitted but because of corruption was denied their spot.
UC is not a business, it's a public institution. Every Californian tax-payer pays for this institution, the administrators are there to be stewards of the public funds for the public good.
As a Californian tax-payer, I care about the mismanagement of the institution that my tax dollars fund.
That sucks. As a (recent) alumnus I was always proud of the fact that no one at my school was a legacy admit or bought their way in.
Both of my parents went to Cal, which at an Ivy might guarantee admission but in my case didn't affect my chances at all (which is a good thing!). I hope this doesn't taint the school's reputation too much.
Which has a storied history, being the primary means of governance of China for millennia.
But to call it meritocracy, we must do two things: elide the correlation between tested excellence and academic performance, which correlation is strong but not perfect, and then conflate academic merit with meritoriousness generally, which I firmly reject.
Call it what it is: testocracy. A quick search shows that the word is not unknown. I'd accept a better one, so long as it doesn't involve pretending that grinding ones life away for a chance at the top is equal to merit.
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 of society. The -cracy refers to ruling, let us keep in mind.
You propose rule by those who are best at standardized testing, and wish to pass that off as some sort of merit. Basta.
I reject any sort of one-size-fits-all criterion for admission. If a college wishes to be testocratic, as CalTech is, so be it. If they wish to strongly favor black people, as the historically black colleges do, fine. This sort of localism is more robust and flexible, and I think this leads to better outcomes.
“Applicant babysat for a colleague of the former director of undergraduate admissions”
I understand how donations or children of prominent alumni got around admissions...but babysitting can get someone entry over others? That seems like a bit of a stretch.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadIn this case, the students are alleged to have been less qualified which does not imply unqualified.
Yet it makes sense because universities want to lessen liabilities and have rich alum give back (esp. the case with the children of wealthy donors).
Definitely have my share of friends that did 6-8 year stints at the UC for a 4-year degree from constantly failing out of classes, but never forced out.
i bet this fact is how the admissions officials rationalized this corruption -- if the line between acceptance and rejection is arbitrary anyway, how much worse could it be to try to get some money out of it? (a lot worse)
Agreed. I was accepted to a top-5 school and rejected from more than one school ranked 25+ (one was >50). I know someone for grad school applied to 5 schools: they got rejected from all 5 schools, reapplied the next year, and got accepted to 3/5.
Malcolm Gladwell (yeah, yeah, I know) did a podcast series about the admissions process for law schools and the role that test taking speed plays in the admission process.
This is one of the papers he referenced:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Once you're admitted, you no longer need to participate in the rat race. You just need to meet the criteria for passing your classes, which do not scale up, just because the person sitting next to you in lecture is an orphanage-builder.
Welcome to the US. They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.
The Auditors of the State of California wrote it. A body of auditors who are officially part of the executive branch, but wholly independent of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Auditor
They are extremely professional.
I didn't look at the page header, only the domain (.ca.gov) and skimmed the illustrations and was wondering why a Canadian govt body is researching an American university. I didn't know California had its own domain.
This is just a symptom of the underlying problem with our education system in the US. It’s no longer about educating but about $. When the almighty dolla gets in the way judgment is clouded.
Come to think of it... maybe this happens in politics and medicine too? ;)
this isn't a controversial opinion
The vast majority of people in highly-competitive positions are not doing the right thing.
* A statement like "all politicians are corrupt" is to a first order accurate. You can't get elected without money, and you can't get money without doing donor bidding.
* A statement like "all executives are psychopaths" is not accurate, but becomes pretty close to accurate as you look at organizations with more than 1000-people who are no longer led by founders. You don't make it to the top of the corporate ladder without outcompeting people fighting dirty. People who are clean don't make it to the top.
* Not all academics fabricate data, but a growing number of academics at elite schools do. MIT has 1000 applicants for each faculty slot at CSAIL. You don't make it through that level of competition without cheating at least a little bit, and that makes it into the culture.
* Not all universities are corrupt, but by similar logic, most universities with massive endowments are. Dirty money goes to institutions willing to accept it.
Same thing goes across the board. Most religious leaders are deeply ethical people. Televangelists tend to be corrupt. Most lawyers who make partner tend to be a little bit unethical. Etc.
Anytime you get high enough on the ladders, bad behavior goes up.
Where we run into problems is that most people from any demographic are basically good, and people extrapolate from that. But power isn't a demographic; there's a selection process.
I didn't think what I posted was overly controversial, but as of now, it's a -3, with no one posting why they disagree. The only time that's happened before was the (now many times) I hit a nerve with the Google astroturf crowd. And I don't even dislike Google. But them's the taboos.
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead with JUST 64 students admitted on the basis of connections and donations.
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead letting external auditors look at this stuff.
* MIT wouldn't be caught. None of this would be public for MIT. That's what NDAs and non-disparage agreements are for.
I'm sorry, but all schools don't do this. Most are smart enough to stay out of this kind of trouble. For Harvard, it took a lawsuit and subpoenas to get in trouble over this.
Having external auditors, standards, and accountability is probably completely unique to UC/Berkeley. Admitting just 64 applicants based on graft and corruption is also unique within the top-20 schools.
MIT overhead is roughly 2/3 of the money which comes into NSF. Perhaps this might not be a problem to raise (it's generally not), but that doesn't make it okay. The bigger problem is your tax payer dollar passing through overhead into graft. Your taxes are contributing to the MIT yacht club ("MIT Sailing"), million-dollar salaries, buildings costing a significant fraction of a billion dollars (MIT Stata Center), fancy faculty clubs, etc.
Is that good use of taxpayer dollars? Of tuition? Of donor dollars? That's ultimately where all this excess comes from.
Read it again.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/23/jeffrey-epst...
What I'm trying to say is that it's a world of greys and putting things in black and white terms doesn't do any good. MIT doesn't get money from selling spots, but they misstep and get money from other even less savoury places. You gotta get your money somehow.
If MIT did let in some legacy admissions due to donations, could it be said that the donations department would have been more discerning about not taking money from someone like Jeff Epstein? It's impossible to revisit history, but nobody is clean in this higher ed game.
MIT shut down the entire CSAIL mailing list -- whose legacy dates back to the old AI Lab days -- because someone had the nerve to raise the question of Epstein, asking what MIT's attitude should be towards a faculty member who visited the island. The list had been through horrible flamewars, thick and thin, over it's many-decade existence, and it finally took the whole Epstein cover-up to shut it down. MIT did the equivalent of a shadowban, collecting all emails sent to the list, but not forwarding them to the community for two days, to see what people send BEFORE announcing it was shut down. A lot of people sent a lot of stuff they wanted to share with the community but not the leadership.
To give a slight bit more context, the question was about a faculty member who had visited Epstein's island. We were promised that'd be answered in MIT's so-called fact-finding report. Naturally, it wasn't. It got shut down before anyone publicly put 2 and 2 together.
indeed, the USA has made a business-marketplace out of anything, including things which should never be driven by profit driven competition (e.g. jails)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences
I was in graduate school when I first learned that writing good grant proposals (and other skills related to acquiring large quantities of money) was arguably more valuable than doing good science.
... I'm more surprised it was only 64 kids.
The real number is likely much, much higher, and they say so.
Many schools give a general boost for legacy, but it is not always so tit-for-tat as the transactions that occurred here with Cal. They'll often have a different non-legacy pipeline for large donor -> admission.
For instance, at Harvard, there is the legacy SCEA process, but there is also the "z-list" process which is the more direct "children of billionaires" route.
Those would simply be fraud considerations in a private institution that charges an application fee.
Of course, a private institution also has Equal Protection / (Substantive) Due Process considerations at play as to what the published factors and criteria can be, as well as (Procedural) Due Process considerations as to whether it actually follows them.
It was never a "meritocracy". Wealthy people and well-connected people have always had an advantage, and still do.
This seems to me an argument for things like affirmative action. To try to balance the scales a bit. Not sure why you see it as an argument against.
Of course it wasn't meritocracy since it was cronyism and nepotism like what happens at Berkeley. But neither is "affirmative action", a racist policy which isn't going to end nepotism and cronyism, just make things even more arbitrary. No need to be an "athlete" now, just put "latino" or "black" on your registration form and don't forget the bribes. That's the system you are rooting for.
Then you add "and don't forget the bribes" -- you think most bribes come from Black and Latino people, or most people who are Black and Latino also bribe schools to get in? I don't think you actually think this, because it would be insane?
I find it disturbing that when confronted with information about how wealthy and socially connected people have long been able to use their wealth and social connections to get into universities -- you are less concerned about doing something about this, than you are concerned about programs meant to give some advantage to less wealthy and socially-connected people. It's like, you see bribery and special favors from the wealthy and socially-connected, and you somehow still find a way to blame the poor and not socially connected for this problem, to focus the discussion away from the misdeeds of the wealthy and socially-connected!
It really says something that this whole discussion is full of people saying "I don't see the problem with that, it seems fine" for wealthy and socially-connected people (who are mostly but not entirely white) to have advantages, and also comments like yours complaining about perceived advantages they think not white people have.
America really has done a number on us.
There is an argument to be made that the race-based admissions help make up for prior injustices.
It's either to take the top students, bar none, or it is to educate and uplift poorer students (economically and educationally). Mixing these two doesn't work.
That is in fact exactly how admissions at the UC schools work. The first 1/2 of the class is admitted on test scores and grades alone, the second 1/2 is admitted via reading of their essays and considering other factors, such as extracurriculars, economic circumstance, and, until the 90s, race.
Alas, university doesn't work that way: students continue to be measured throughout their tenure, and those measures are an important component of the next phase of their life, be it work or further education.
The evidence is unequivocal: lowering the admissions standards for some section of the student body, results in those students doing poorly relative to students who were subject to the full standards.
This shouldn't be surprising, and no, it doesn't seem to matter why the standards were lowered, affirmative action, legacy preference, or otherwise.
The very definition of what a "top student" is varies a great deal.
so it was legal until then but didn’t make a dent in inequality? but i’m sure it’ll work this time!
It did make a dent in inequality.
It didn't end it, but then it wasn't around nearly as long as the structural disadvantages that entrenched inequality, and it was a much gentler push than those it sought to mitigate the effects of.
Do you have a better plan for dealing with systemic racism[1], that does not have the drawback you cite? Do you believe that systemic racism doesn't exist? Or do you believe that it does exist, but we shouldn't do anything about it?
Which of those three options are you championing?
[1] I understand that the mere mention of this concept is a dogwhistle for negative karma.
Get rid of all the bullshit administrators to lower the cost of college back to what it was 50 years ago so that poor people can go without getting into a lot of debt.
Which of these three options do you propose?
A good "Church of Satan" reaction to these policies in California would be a university that set the bar higher for Black applicants, with the justification that other policies have in fact over-corrected for past injustices, and now the injustice of that over-correction must be righted.
The thing to keep in mind is that the justification for some of the worst racism in history has been injustice or past injustices. We should learn from history and pre-commit as a society to react hyper-negatively to any policy that involves racial discrimination. Get it the hell out of the Overton window.
For example, how many movies or sitcoms have you heard a phrase a long the lines "My boy is going to ____ just like I did."
I suppose the real problem is that UCs are no longer financed fully by the state. If they were, there would be no excuse for this.
1/3 of them were admitted as student athletes. Everyone knows that it is official policy at most schools to accept people with athletic ability who would not qualify academically. Why? Because those athletic programs make the university a lot of money!
How is admitting someone because their family gave a lot of money any different in principle? It is just a question of reducing how many steps there are to making a profit for the school.
It reminds me of the Lori Loughlin case, where she was arrested not because bribing a university to admit your child is unfair to other applicants and sullies the ideal of an academic meritocracy, but because she didn't follow the university's established process for bribery. (Matt Levine expounds on this with his usual hilarity at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...)
In any case, it might be negatively impacting the school's athletic program because real athletes have spots taken by opportunists.
My point remains. Once you've opened the door to accepting students for non-academic reasons, you've opened it to accepting them for other non-academic reasons.
(In this case I don't care about the impact on "real athletes" because I don't think that athletic programs are important to the university's core mission.)
Also these students admitted as "athletics" did not actually qualify and were never part of the team.
Therefore the fact that individual sports and athletes do not make money doesn't mean that money isn't a reason for student athletic programs.
It is entirely legal (though morally problematic) to "donate" your way into a school with a donation to the school directly.
There have been other scandals in the last few years where officials were bribed directly, and that looked worse.
Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.
How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.
How can you fail out Timmy Upperclass, if 10 students lose their funding next year with him gone?
Are we are starting to see similarly different sets of rules for each class in the United States? Is such privilege in accordance with our ideals of liberty and justice for all?
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/privilege
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rend...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory.
As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).
That's the point -- rule of law means everyone is subject to the same rules, without partiality.
Rule of law is not sufficient, power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes.
Not if a law exists to the contrary. And that was the point I was agreeing with -- the solution should be to write a law if one doesn't already exist; or to enforce it if it does.
> power also needs to be distributed correctly for rule of law to lead to good outcomes
Agreed, though distribution isn't the word I'd use, as it implies the existence of another human authority to determine how it should be distributed (thus granting that person or group of people improper power).
But if the placement of power is determined by duly enacted law, that's acceptable.
So by having a guaranteed ratio of very wealthy mixed into your student pool, it's hugely beneficial to everyone else. It's practically the reason people chase after prestigious MBA educations.
The practice might be distasteful philosophically, but the results are apparently great.
It's a fine view that nobody should be denied great education, but if an entire country's annual cohort of high school diploma recipients all applies to the public college considered to be the best one they obviously couldn't all attend that one.
Do people really favor Marxism, or is something else wrong?
a) It's not uncommon these days for the term "Marxism" to be used as a brush to paint anyone "too left wing" (despite not being close to actual Marxists)
b) "Cultural Marxism" has become an antisemitic term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Plus, yes there are still some people in the world who believe in Marxism, although often just in a broad sense rather than thinking everything about it is right. But I doubt many on HN.
And while complaining about downvoted may be against the rules, personally I think it's completely fine in the context of wanting to understand something like your question, rather than "this shouldn't be downvoted".
The limiting factor for elite universities usually isn't dollars, but the quantity of qualified tenure-track faculty and physical space. Not at the university, but overall. The number of postdocs and graduating PhD students each year with the credentials that Cal wants to accept isn't huge. Similarly, the number of rooms that the university has is limited, and both of those numbers take time to change.
A certain ticket for 4x the price of Harvard is still a really, really good deal for lots of wealthy people.
The economy travellers make it possible to travel first class. First class travel is for the moderately wealthy. The very wealthy have their own transport.
Economist article on decline of 1st class travellers: http://archive.vn/OQPt2 (2019).
Imagine there are 10 students for 5 spots, and there is an objective ranking from most-qualified (#1) to least-qualified (#10).
Now let's assume student #10 can pay that $200k. That funds their spot plus another spot. So instead of admitting:
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
You can now admit:
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10}
Doesn't this seem unfair to candidates #7 to #9, who are more qualified than #10, but will end up with a less valuable credential?
The question you should ask is whether being able to admit #6 is worth it.
If #10 is some trust fund baby who couldn't study himself out of a wet paper bag, then probably not.
But if #10 is merely 'good' it might be worth it to be able to admit just-0.1-GPA-short-of-great #6.
If you admit #10, then they will beat out #7-#9 in the job market, increasing lifetime earnings at the expense of the others.
If you don't admit #10, then #6-#10 will compete on an equal footing.
The latter may be the outcome you want.
[1] Current admission numbers are available for each university here https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...
Going to the "correct" school can transform the life of some people, essentially pulling them up from the lower working classes, and opening up the doors to middle, or even upper-middle classes.
And what's even worse, a lot of these rich kids could go pretty much anywhere, without it affecting their future finances or lifestyle - if anything, it almost seems like a vanity project from their parents side, where they get the bragging rights that their kids are studying at HYPS or whatever.
And it's not that the kids of richer parents are necessarily worse, academically speaking - many of them get private tutors, go to private / prep schools, etc. from young age, but still the parents are so risk averse, that they feel the need to pour even more money, just to eliminate the stress of uncertainty. Even if it's illegal.
I know these cases encompass a broad range of controversy (for example that top-tier Asian-American students can't get into certain schools, because of some nonsensical "personality" assessments) - but in the end, it's just plain old classism. Doesn't mater what skin color you have, where you come from; As long as you have the cash, the odds are increasing in your favor.
Then you have rich folks like David E. Shaw. The guy spent literally tens of millions in donations, to all the top schools, just to increase the chance of his kids getting accepted (or rather - minimize the chances of their kids getting rejected)
The one that comes to mind was the study that compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend.
Average future incomes were not statistically different.
But the study did note that the starkest improvents in future incomes were found in poor and minority students.
I will say I don't totally understand how future income differences can be not statistically significant and also be "stark" between lower income students at the same time.
https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/...
The no-difference in financial outcomes was based on comparing the average incomes of the two groups. So naturally, you will have outliers on both sides. They found that minority students tended to be the outliers.
Part of that probably has to do with the more prestigious school getting them a job they wouldn't have had. But also probably has to do with minority students getting access to the rich, well connected network that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise.
Edit: I believe this is it: https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322
Either way, I'm sure having a diploma from Harvard would open some doors for pretty much anyone, and I'm not naïve enough to pretend otherwise, but I have serious doubts that a diploma from Harvard can truly tell you anything other than that person has the ability to make it through Harvards' admission filter, and do mindless homework for X number of years, like every other college.
I don’t know if this comparison controls for the confounders. Alice and Bob are both accepted to Harvard, and Alice decides to attend and Bob decides to chill out at the University of Maui for four years. That’s pretty indicative of Alice being more ambitious and achievement-oriented.
It's nice that this sort of due diligence and review is even possible with public institutions.
As it should. One student admitted in this fashion is too many for a public university.
For public universities like those in the University of California system, to whom the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution (and, often, similar and sometimes more expansive provisions of state constitutions) apply, it probably would be a problem.
Not going out to bat for legacy admissions, but it's not always tit-for-tat related to donations and there are other reasons schools do it other than just $$$ from donations.
The uber-rich aren't getting in through a generic legacy boost.
Note, even "private" universities (eg not the UC school discussed here) receive tremendous amounts of public money, as well as tax-exempt status. See, for e.x. [1]: the Ivy league received >$40B in public money and benefits from 2010-2015.
IIRC, research at MIT is >66% funded by federal grants.
[1] https://www.openthebooks.com/ivy_league_inc/
If you incentivize "anti-social behavior" (this seemed like a reasonable middle ground word), what else does anyone expect to happen?
I don't care what the rich person spends their money on, but I do care about the student that worked hard, played by the rules, and deserved to be admitted but because of corruption was denied their spot.
UC is not a business, it's a public institution. Every Californian tax-payer pays for this institution, the administrators are there to be stewards of the public funds for the public good.
As a Californian tax-payer, I care about the mismanagement of the institution that my tax dollars fund.
Both of my parents went to Cal, which at an Ivy might guarantee admission but in my case didn't affect my chances at all (which is a good thing!). I hope this doesn't taint the school's reputation too much.
Pure meritocracy.
And certain kinds of merit can come primarily/only from high caste individuals. How do you choose merit that isn't coloured in race or otherwise?
Academic merit, evaluated by testing.
Which has a storied history, being the primary means of governance of China for millennia.
But to call it meritocracy, we must do two things: elide the correlation between tested excellence and academic performance, which correlation is strong but not perfect, and then conflate academic merit with meritoriousness generally, which I firmly reject.
Call it what it is: testocracy. A quick search shows that the word is not unknown. I'd accept a better one, so long as it doesn't involve pretending that grinding ones life away for a chance at the top is equal to merit.
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 of society. The -cracy refers to ruling, let us keep in mind.
You propose rule by those who are best at standardized testing, and wish to pass that off as some sort of merit. Basta.
I reject any sort of one-size-fits-all criterion for admission. If a college wishes to be testocratic, as CalTech is, so be it. If they wish to strongly favor black people, as the historically black colleges do, fine. This sort of localism is more robust and flexible, and I think this leads to better outcomes.
I understand how donations or children of prominent alumni got around admissions...but babysitting can get someone entry over others? That seems like a bit of a stretch.