
What happens after rich kids bribe their way into college? I teach them - haasted
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/what-happens-after-rich-kids-bribe-their-way-into-college-i-teach-them
======
choeger
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.

~~~
mfoy_
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.

~~~
VyseofArcadia
It's not just an idea they keep in their heads. I've had students tell me that
to my face.

~~~
bunderbunder
They don't get it from nowhere, though.

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.

------
jseliger
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...](https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-people-are-
fine-but-its-that-last-five-percent/). 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.

All this is also compatible with _The Case Against Education_ :
[https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-
educatio...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education-
bryan-caplan)

~~~
repolfx
The issue of administrators who repeatedly side with students even in absurd
situations seems to be slowly reaching awareness.

There's a good short video here that explores what's been happening at Yale:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM](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.

------
many_indicator
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](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.

~~~
dgellow
> 1500+, 4.0+, 12+ AP course student

What does that mean for people unfamiliar with US school system?

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
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.

------
pcurve
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)

------
dsfyu404ed
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.

~~~
ModernMech
> 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?

~~~
usrusr
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.

------
TheAsprngHacker
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.

------
mabbo
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.

~~~
apetresc
> 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.

~~~
mabbo
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.

~~~
apetresc
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.

------
gwbas1c
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.

------
11thEarlOfMar
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.

~~~
forgottenpass
>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.

~~~
bilbo0s
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.

~~~
whatshisface
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.

~~~
AdverseAffect
> 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

~~~
whatshisface
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.

~~~
spamizbad
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.

------
mcnichol
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.

------
mettamage
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.

~~~
zaroth
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.

~~~
heavenlyblue
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.

~~~
veryworried
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.

~~~
cheez
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)

------
rygxqpbsngav
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.

------
darepublic
Open source knowledge, remove impediments from those who want to better
themselves. Decrease the irrational social value of a degree.

~~~
EamonnMR
I think that much of the social value of a degree is the demonstration that
you can overcome impediments.

------
casion
_> 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?

~~~
imgabe
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.

------
cbsks
There’s a follow-up piece with responses from other professors here:
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-
brib...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-bribery-
scandal-professors-respond-to-our-anonymous-column)

------
maxaf
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?

~~~
YorkshireSeason
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.

~~~
maxaf
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.

~~~
YorkshireSeason
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 ...

------
zaroth
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.

~~~
La-ang
So ethics have a price? Meritocracy should be bought and sold?

~~~
zaroth
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.

------
adamnemecek
The big problem with universities is that a lot of the work required is just
tool. Uninteresting, time consuming, somewhat out of date.

And the professors have the worst attitudes. "This is how it is, deal with
it".

------
JoeAltmaier
Didn't faculty used to run the Universities? When they abdicated that job to
administrators, they sealed their fate.

