
Chinese Family Reportedly Paid $6.5M for Spot at Stanford - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/yusi-zhao-stanford-university.html
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chriselles
I truly do not understand the shock and outrage.

Jokes about the wealthy/elite getting their offspring admitted to schools in
exchange for "buying buildings" or making considerable donations to school
endowments have been around far longer than me, and I'm 50.

At what rate do the offspring of apex elite attend top tier schools?

Does that all work on merit?

Did Chelsea Clinton truly deserve her acceptance to Stanford when her father
was President? I assume so....

Or was it a much better executed version of Libyan dictator Qaddafi's son and
the London School of Economics scandal?

To me it seems these things have always happened.

The only surprise, I think, is when people think they are amongst the elite to
whom most rules don't apply, but they're really just part of the super
affluent and risk being made examples of.

~~~
inflatableDodo
I think you understand the outrage perfectly. I think you may be
overestimating the shock.

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bayareanative
Maybe there's a conflation of the "shock?" There's the level of shock implied
by the media and then there's the level of shock experienced by viewers of
said media.

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bayareanative
I worked at Stanford in both academic and business departments.

Given the prevailing attitudes and pedigrees of the non-scholarship students,
I'm surprised it took this long for the public to realize how elite
institutions operate.

Furthermore, I don't think people appreciate that going to an elite
institution isn't concerned much about academic rigor, rather it's about
networking and getting a pedigree "certificate of authenticity." I'd be
willing to bet around half of students cheat as there can be no proctors per
the honor code and guess around 10-15% of students buy their way through
school.

Universities are a business; elite universities are also status reaffirmation
factories.

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Jonnax
I get that going to a well regarded school is good for your career prospects.

But if you're that rich, what's the benefit? It's not like your child will
have trouble finding a job, you could even pay someone to employ them.

Also does anyone know what kind of degrees the kids of rich people who paid to
get them in get? I doubt they're graduating with a Master's in Physics.

~~~
krastanov
Even more frustrating for me is that for someone that rich it is easy to
provide early opportunities for the kid, so that they grow into a person that
Stanford actually would want on their own merits. Paying for good schools,
tutors, experiences, mentors is a useful helpful thing. You can not buy
friends and consciousness, but you can buy the opportunities to grow that on
your own. The fact that these people had so many opportunities and still
failed to be good parents is beyond sad.

~~~
donavanm
Theres an (arab?) parable about this. Something along the lines of “the
grandfather is born in a tent and dies in the palace. The son is born and dies
in the palace. The grandson is born in the palace, and dies in a tent.”

The people who strive and exceed can accomplish great things. Those who are
born to greatness may maintain it. But if they dont remember why their lineage
strived it can all be lost.

~~~
solatic
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my
son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will
ride a camel." \- Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai

~~~
thunderbong
In this case, I think the context was different. I think he was talking about
competition to petroleum

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ycombonator
They already bought the politicians off so its quite easy to buy Stanford
spots.

~~~
bayareanative
After donating a $20m building, is an elite institution ever going to pass on
a donor's kid?

The main source of outrage between the current scandal and school donation
quid-pro-quo is the brazenness of individualized graft. Before, the rigging of
the admissions game had a level of indirection and spatial-temporal separation
that seemed amenable and subtle.

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Simulacra
I wonder if there was a correlation between how much someone had to pay, and
how bad the student was.

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kalleboo
Lowering the tuition for other students by $6.5M sounds like a win to me

~~~
inflatableDodo
Yeah, because that is how these things are priced. Oh no, wait a minute, they
aren't. They will actually be priced using perceived-value-added, so someone
paying 6.5 million might push that up a bit.

~~~
krastanov
I do not know about Stanford in particular, but elite schools have some of the
best financial aid programs in the US. If against odds a kid from a blue
collar family gets into an Ivy, they might very well pay zero tuition (which
was the case for a number of acquaintances of mine).

However, this money was not paid to the school to buy a spot. It was paid to a
white collar criminal who falsified data in order to make it look like the kid
"deserved" to get in Stanford.

