
L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal - petethomas
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/college-admissions-scandal.html
======
ForrestN
I'm surprised that this scandal doesn't seem to be causing anyone to think one
step further and realize that the entire premise of "elite" colleges with
competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We're
devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who
would already be successful reap even more rewards.

I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death
urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding
the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its
hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do
high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of
bribery.

As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-
positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.

~~~
manfredo
Many of these "elite" colleges are one of the best avenues to eliminate
inequality. Many of them have significant (at least double digit) percentages
of the student population that are first generation college students. Elite
universities often have the greatest degree of racial diversity.

~~~
akhilcacharya
You shouldn’t be condemned for life for not being elite material when you were
18.

Disclaimer - I was not elite material when I was 18 and feel like I’m
condemned for life when I read these posts.

~~~
saagarjha
What makes you feel "condemned for life"?

~~~
akhilcacharya
I know I’ll never be able to match the accomplishments of people that got into
Duke the year I didn’t, for example.

~~~
asdff
Screw that. If you work hard people take notice, that's it. You can go to a
CC, grind hard through your classes, transfer into a school with a better
network, continue to grind hard, and land the job because anyone who sees your
CV will see that you are a fighter who gives a shit.

Some of the richest kids in my high school paid full tuition to ivy league
schools, didn't come to play school, and ended up with a scrappy job anyone
could have gotten from just about any school. Work hard.

~~~
akhilcacharya
I think there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted
into an elite program (SAT score, etc) that I simply don't have. That doesn't
help matters at all.

~~~
saagarjha
> there's a lot of inherent ability tied within ability to be accepted into an
> elite program

Yeah, the ability to be accepted into an elite program. This often has little
bearing in real life (honestly, how much do you really care about the ability
to get a good SAT score anymore?).

------
olliej
I feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school.

If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to
publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let
them live off your money and power as is traditional.

~~~
sgustard
Stanford has explicitly said they do not accept donations in return for
admission, for what that's worth.

Source: [https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/14/admission-case-
info/](https://news.stanford.edu/2019/03/14/admission-case-info/)

"A donation does not purchase a place at Stanford, and we work very hard to
ensure that prospective donors understand this. Stanford does not accept gifts
if it knows a gift is being made with the intention of influencing the
admission process."

~~~
whyenot
Likely true, at least in a direct sense, but Stanford does give a nearly
three-fold preference to legacy applicants. Alumni are more likely to donate
to Stanford than non-alumni.

[https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-
takes](https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-it-takes)

------
cletus
Honestly, I really don't understand the motivations for some of these parents.
Take Lori Loughlin. $500,000? For USC? For two daughters, one of whom clearly
isn't that interested, isn't particularly academic and isn't particularly
athletic? Like... why?

I can understand if someone bribes their kid into, say, Harvard or Yale Law
School. There's a career where going to a good school matters. But this? It
just makes no sense to me.

Felicity Huffman may end up being sentenced to 10 months in jail (and, let's
face it, might serve only 5) but, still, that's a big deal for someone who
probably never expected to go to jail. It's also on the lighter end because of
her guilty plea and cooperation with the prosecution. What are these parents
who have plead not guilty going to get when they're found guilty?

Add to this the children have to live with the stigma of these actions. I
don't have a huge amount of sympathy here because at least some of them were
complicit. Posing for photos faking crew, that sort of thing. But still... why
would you want to risk your children having to live with that... to go to USC?

~~~
dvt
USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast ( _especially_ in Southern
California). It's obviously not on the same academic level as
UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford/Caltech, but it's still very much an exclusive brand.
You don't get it because you don't live here and aren't surrounded by wealthy
16-year olds that yearn to go to USC (often times over
UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford).

(Disclaimer: I'm a UCLA alum.)

~~~
yumraj
I don't know how common it is, but once a person I knew had referred to USC as
University of Spoiled Children.

~~~
saagarjha
It's a pretty common saying among Californians, AFAIK.

------
Blackthorn
They're not that elite if they're gonna get ensnared in this one. If you're
one of the elite you just donate a building, which is a completely legal way
to get your kids into a school of your choice.

~~~
coke_n_sympathy
At least donating a building gives value to the other attending students that
far outweighs the cost of their child going

~~~
munk-a
I reject this - if we want admission in the US to be entirely wealth based and
Oligarchic we should just buy that concept whole-hog. Many of us (I hope?)
believe that scholarships that allow smart people coming from bad backgrounds
to succeed are worth their cost[1] so clearly the ability to make use of your
education is part of our general societal motivation to give someone one.

[1] There are lots of scholarships, grants and other things out there, many go
to people who don't need them and there are issues with the system both on
that end and with regards to the cost for an education - please ignore those
and just focus on the concept of financial aide to an intelligent driven
student who genuinely needs it to pay fair value to get an education in terms
of reimbursing all expenses given to give this student an education and
nothing else.

~~~
beenBoutIT
In the US the public universities are the only schools that can't be bought
into at any cost.

~~~
azeotropic
Huh? UCLA is a public university. Or am I missing the joke?

~~~
azeotropic
You did miss something. The first guilty plea was from a couple who paid to
get their eldest daughter into UCLA and their next daughter into USC.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/first-
par...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/first-parents-
plead-guilty-in-college-admissions-scandal)

~~~
defen
Noted, thanks

------
darawk
The actual problem here is not the bribery. The problem is that those bribes
are being captured by random 3rd parties, rather than by the school itself.
The correct way to implement college admissions is this: Charge a sliding
scale fee based on application quality, and then use the excess revenue
generated to subsidize poor kids tuition. Your kid has a 2.5 GPA and wants to
go to Harvard? Great, that'll be a million dollars a year. You'll be funding
the tuition of 20-30 kids of lesser means and everybody wins.

~~~
leftyted
I'd urge you to think more about this. You can imagine the same thing for
murder trials: 10 million per victim or you go to jail. You can use the money
to make the world better!

I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For
universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc do
not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the law
and the guilty will be punished.

I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's naive
to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the narratives end up
serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can exist without those
ideals.

~~~
darawk
> I'm not so sure. These institutions have an embedded narrative. For
> universities it's that they are meritocracies, where class/race/gender/etc
> do not matter. For the justice system it's that everyone is equal before the
> law and the guilty will be punished.

Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action, which
is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria. We are
already a long ways from pure meritocracy.

> I don't think these institutional narratives are superfluous. While it's
> naive to expect the institutions to live up to the narratives, the
> narratives end up serving as ideals. And I don't think the institutions can
> exist without those ideals.

Two things:

1\. I think you're overindexing on the importance of these narratives a bit,
but you're right, they're important.

2\. More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can
make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your
average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by the
eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules, they're
just tempered by money.

~~~
leftyted
> Do they have that narrative though? We already have affirmative action,
> which is the explicit inclusion of race/gender/class in admissions criteria.
> We are already a long ways from pure meritocracy.

I think affirmative action is a bad idea for exactly this reason. It has
eroded the narrative. It's trendy for left-wing types to argue things like
"Harvard isn't a meritocracy" or to sneer at the idea of a meritocracy
altogether (don't get me started on the right-wing types).

> More importantly, this policy wouldn't destroy those narratives. You can
> make the scale very steep such that you have to pay quite a bit to get your
> average student in, and the steepness of that curve will be determined by
> the eliteness of the institution. You have the same meritocratic rules,
> they're just tempered by money.

I think doing this in the open would be a disaster. What won't destroy the
narratives is implementing your idea in the background. This has already
happened to some degree. Most students at Harvard don't pay very much. Their
education _is_ subsidized by rich families one way or another.

But I don't think that's a good thing. Somewhere along the line our
institutional narratives have become cliched in people's minds. Maybe this
will lead us to a wonderful new world where we can be perfectly rational and
implement ideas like yours. But I doubt it. I think if we lose the
institutional narratives we're going to lose the institutions. Maybe the new
institutions will be better, who knows? (I'm not optimistic).

~~~
CydeWeys
> I think doing this in the open would be a disaster.

Thought experiment: What would happen if it were public knowledge how much
each student was paying to attend school? If you were far down the sliding
scale and you were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to get
in, and that was public knowledge, would it hurt the school's reputation as
much? Then it would be clear _why_ this particular person got in, and their
intelligence (or lack thereof) wouldn't weigh against people who earned their
place by merit, which you could tell by seeing that their tuition cost is low
or zero.

------
munk-a
While we're all angry at this bribery program, can we please also be angry at
legacy admissions? Far more kids skate in on legacy than bribes and the school
doesn't even get a nice bit of cash for those sorts of admissions.

------
tedivm
That's really fantastic news.

------
yingw787
I think this is a really good opportunity to see just how white-collar fraud
falls in line with rational choice theory
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_\(criminology\))).

In the quoted article, Felicity Huffman pleaded guilty to pay a college
counselor $15,000 to arrange cheating on an SAT test. Hence, one data point on
the market price for cheating, as agreed upon by Ms. Huffman and college
counselor, is $15,000. One claim about Ms. Huffman's net worth is that she
earns $275,000 per episode of "Desperate Housewives", which airs weekly. This
fine is about half a day's work for her, if that. For half a day's worth of
work, she can doctor her daughter's SAT scores. This is assuming that the
episodes aren't recorded at once and take much less time than one week for
filming, freeing up time to invest in other income streams. So cheating in
this case is a very rational thing to do, given zero cost for broken morals or
ethics.

The only real "hard-power" argument I can think of for children who may
inherit great wealth to gain intelligence is to avoid a run-around by the
family lawyers after Mom and Dad croak. But even then, that doesn't take a
whole lot of intelligence (Donald Trump is smart enough to avoid that fate),
and it kind of doesn't make sense for a family lawyer to do that anyways. If
the kids are stupid and can't manage their money, just charge more in fees
instead of rocking the boat in order to pocket a greater portion of the pie.

Crime does pay, if we don't punish it. That's why people do it. It's
especially true in white-collar crime.

------
basicplus2
They should do something on the lines that politicians do in Australia..
property developers slip a property into a trust and slip that trust into the
polys superfund as a contribution

------
rhegart
Affirmative action on one side, cheaters on the other. At least a dozen people
cheated on the SAT in my school and had the audacity to brag about it.

Financial aid if you poor, paid for if you rich. Middle class honest kids hurt
the most. Had top 1% scores, no ivies or UCLA for me (got UCB at least) and
I’m Asian. My little cousin, same scores and rejected from UCSC 10 years
later...much worse now than before

~~~
willio58
Two people in my high school told me they cheated on the SAT. They got
_perfect_ scores and the high school actually bragged about them during
graduation. They also happened to live across the street from each other in a
relatively large town.

I’ve always wondered what they did to cheat, I wonder if they’d be as open
about it now since they’re both graduating at MIT and Harvard soon.

~~~
sizzle
Why haven't you reported them already? They didn't earn that spot and took it
from someone that studied their ass off.

------
yeahitslikethat
What is criminal about this? I never heard of someone going to jail for
cheating on an SAT test.

And why aren't the admissions boards going to jail for accepting the bribes?

~~~
HaloZero
Because the proctor was the one who was bribed, not the organization itself.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
"Charges ranged from cheating on college entrance exams to paying bribe money
to university officials, "

------
thrower123
You dumb fucks, didn't you know that you could just spend a little more, buy a
building, and be assured of your kids getting in forever?

The number of Faheys, Wheelocks, Wheelocks and Fairchilds I went to college
with is stupid.

------
pauljurczak
Excellent!

------
baggy_trough
2 years in jail for this is absurd. A week would be more than enough.

~~~
munk-a
Please familiarize yourself with minimum sentencing guidelines for drug
possession. These parents, by preventing other students from being able to get
an education they earned, are causing far more harm.

~~~
baggy_trough
Perhaps those sentences are equally or more absurd?

~~~
munk-a
I absolutely agree and personally feel that incarceration as vengeance is
immoral and incarceration only becomes a moral action when it is a deterrent
to future actions. If you were omnipresent and knew that a murderer would
never murder again - and that the jailing of that murderer would not prevent
any future murders - then I'd consider it to be immoral to jail them.

Unfortunately a lot of America is on the vengeance path when it comes to
punishments for crimes. We need a lot more criminal justice reform but,
_please_ , let's not start by giving the elites a pass - justice is already
inequal enough.

~~~
lrc
So you get one free murder? No, the deterrent had to be there beforehand, so
that our hypothetical killer who is certain she only wants to kill one person
will be exposed to that deterrence. Even if she is not thereby deterred, the
fact that the punishment is applied to her will have a deterrent effect on
others contemplating a similar crime. Therefore the punishment has value even
if there is no need to prevent the murderer from killing again. (Edit: you did
point out that the omniscience allows you to know that there will actually be
no deterrent effect but that's asking a lot :)

~~~
munk-a
I included omniscience specifically for that reason, I agree that murders must
be punished because otherwise people will see fewer downsides to committing
murders themselves.

Can I push this to the concept of Botany Bay the far away prison colony - if
murder results in the murderer being shipped off and everyone in society
understands how terrible it is there... do you actually need to send people
there? Wouldn't the effect on society be the same if you just shipped them
somewhere nice and (again lots of omnipotence and omnipresence here) could
ensure no one ever learned of your deception?

I'm mostly pushing this out in an effort to clarify what we as a society get
out of punishment (in my opinion) we are seeking to reduce these sorts of
actions we consider to be bad for society, any punishment that exists solely
to inflict pain on someone (even if they're really bad) without any associated
benefits to deterrence or a decrease in recidivism ... it's pointless and
cruel (again, in my eyes).

And yes, I like philosophy, so this scenario is super removed from the real
world.

