
Bribes to Get into Yale and Stanford? What Else Is New? - resalisbury
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opinion/college-bribery-admissions.html
======
dang
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368815)

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40acres
This is why, to me, the entire debate about affirmative action at elite
colleges is a complete red herring. The amount of kids, regardless of race,
who can be considered "deserving" of a spot has been reduced more so by legacy
admissions and these bribes than by any effort of individual institutions to
even out racial or gender demographics.

~~~
NavyNuke
That is why it stings for poor or working class Asians and non-Jewish
Whites...you don't get the affirmative action or legacy leg up...

~~~
Rebelgecko
How do Jews get a leg up from affirmative action and legacies when the
application doesn't ask for your religion (any more) and there were quotas in
the past to limit the number of Jewish students?

~~~
richardhod
To be fair, whether there is affirmative action or bias or not, characteristic
names give a lot away for this religious-ethnic group, as with other groups.

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resalisbury
From the article: "It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as
your son is applying — which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him — and
illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but
how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over
accomplishment."

~~~
burtonator
How about completely blind job admissions, school admissions, etc.

No names, no race, no age, etc. Just raw test scores. Test them against
problem solving skills objectively, etc.

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umeshunni
That's how college admissions in most asian countries work.

You're get a roll number, you write a test, a list gets published that ranks
all the roll numbers, sometimes with scores. Colleges offer admissions to
anyone who scored between ranks 1-N. At more elite schools N is small (e.g.
100), but in lower ranking schools N is large (e.g. 100000+).

Affirmative action is practiced by having different Ns for different
disadvantaged groups (i.e if you are a lower caste, N=1000, but for general
admissions, N=100)

The downsides of this system are that it still fails to eliminate economic
biases (i.e a student from a well to do family can hire tutors who help them
test prep better) and that it's impossible for the school to control the
makeup of a class - e.g in a year I was in school, a new test prep school
opened up in a city and students from that school scored significantly higher
than others in the admissions test. So, about 50% of the incoming class were
students who went to that test prep school.

~~~
bobthepanda
At least in East Asia, this also results in a highly test-optimized education
system. This can result in multiple negative side effects, such as test
anxiety, stifled creativity, and elevated suicide rates among students. Most
East Asian countries have considered revising their educational systems.
[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2149978/insi...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2149978/inside-
asias-pressure-cooker-exam-sytem-which-region-has-it-worst)

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LarryDarrell
Meritocracy for thee, but not for me.

As the upper echelons continue to cordon off segments of the economy and
education for just themselves, will the "Bootstraps and Personal
Responsibility" mythology finally start to die out?

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maxxxxx
We are in the process of building up a new aristocracy. This process has
repeated itself over all of history.

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strikelaserclaw
Hell yea, look at our presidents, we got legacy admissions for the biggest job
in America.

~~~
maxxxxx
It would be nice if somebody like Truman got elected. Somebody who had real
experience how the regular citizen lives.

~~~
InitialLastName
You're right.

Now, if only we could agree on what the "regular citizen's" life looks like.

a) It's probably a woman, since they're the majority of the population and
have a distinctly different life experience to men

b) It's probably someone who lives in a city, since that was 80% of Americans
in the 2010 census.

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maxxxxx
I would be happy if that person didn’t come from an Ivy League school and
whose parents aren’t multimillionaires.

~~~
strikelaserclaw
Honestly they probably can't do worse.

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burtonator
My company foolishly donated data to Stanford for nearly a decade.

We asked them for an 'in kind' license to OpenNLP and were basically
completely rebuffed. They're taking in money hand over fist.

We need to stop thinking of these as universities anymore. They're cash
cows...

~~~
phonon
Do you mean
[https://github.com/stanfordnlp/CoreNLP](https://github.com/stanfordnlp/CoreNLP)
?

Why would you expect them to relicense GPL libre software to you? What does
"in kind" mean?

~~~
nordsieck
> What does "in kind" mean?

in-kind (adj): consisting of something (such as goods or commodities) other
than money

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/in-kind](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/in-kind)

~~~
hannasanarion
He's asking, how do you give a good as a gift or payment that is public, free,
and open?

It's like asking for an "in kind" license to the Declaration of Independence,
it just makes no sense.

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smallgovt
A smaller subset of this problem is paying people to take standardized tests
for you. I graduated from an ivy and had a couple peers who got a perfect
score on their SAT's but could only speak broken English. If you're willing to
pay someone to cheat on standardized tests, I'm not surprised you're willing
to bribe someone to gain admissions also.

~~~
zachguo
I know you are referring to Chinese students. But the reality is that SAT and
GRE are stupidly easy, especially math. Almost every Chinese student I know
achieved full score in GRE math, and yes, more than half of them spoke broken
English.

~~~
smallgovt
I'm in no way implying my anecdata is conclusive, but I'm mainly suspicious of
the verbal scores. And, if the verbal section of the SAT is stupidly easy, I
guess I'm stupid, shucks :(.

~~~
apta
It doesn't have to be bribing others to take the exam for you. I heard that
they write down the questions they got asked during the Verbal part of the
exam and collect them so other students can memorize them and get good scores.
It's been happening for quite a long time actually, a professor of mine told
me the same when he went to school in the 80s or so.

On a side note, the notion that a private company conducts all these tests for
profit in order for students to get admission into schools quite bizarre and
laughable to say the least.

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yodon
I used to have a lot of friends in the MIT admissions office. They felt
tremendous pride working at a school that didn't give precedence to legacy
admits or children of donors (the quote I remember was "if you give a
building, when your son or daughter is turned down for admittance you get a
phone call from a Vice President telling you the news" instead of just a form
letter).

~~~
guga42k
Do you expect them to tell you that they are taking bribes to admit certain
students?

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jcadam
Just reinforces my belief that an ivy league degree is much more an indicator
of socioeconomic class than it is intelligence or aptitude.

~~~
bobthepanda
As of 2013, the median grade at Harvard was an A-. The mode was an A.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
sheet/wp/2013/12/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-
sheet/wp/2013/12/04/harvard-colleges-median-grade-is-an-a-dean-
admits/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a8ff4f750887)

Anecdotally, I have heard of places that refuse to hire Harvard grads for this
reason.

~~~
anoncoward111
Agree. Anecdotally, I had a sales manager who graduated from Harvard. He was
literally no different from any corporate manager I've ever had and just
parroted whatever unattainable goals trickled down from the top, providing no
clear way to meet said goals

~~~
maxxxxx
I have worked with people from MIT media lab. I didn't notice them being
better than any other engineer. The VCs loved them though and talked pretty
much only to them when they visited.

~~~
tehlike
Try mit csail, or some other depts. Some undergrads in particular made me feel
rather stupid :)

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cwkoss
It's exciting that the national conversation is finally becoming directed at
classism.

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grecy
American society functions on bribery, and anyone that thinks otherwise simply
has their eyes closed.

"Contributing" to a congressman is literally giving them money so they make
decisions favorable to you. That is identical to me giving a policeman $50 to
look the other way.

Unlimited campaign contributions is just newspeak for "legal bribery".

~~~
SlumptonFidget
Your "legal bribery" is another's first amendment right to support someone
else's candidacy. Or so I was once told.

~~~
grecy
Of course. In America money _is_ speech, another indicator that the entire
society is built around the idea that money can get you what you want.

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DigiMortal
I personally know some that have paid 100k+ to get into ivy league school

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strikelaserclaw
Out of all my classmates that went to really prestigious schools, like 20%
were genuinely a cut above the rest. The other 80% just gamed everything,
taking easier AP classes to boost GPA, random "resume" building activities,
these folks just left a sour impression on me.

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lembandro
The discussion about 'who deserves a spot at a prestigious university x'
misses the issue. Acceptance at one of these universities is not based on who
is the most intelligent, hardworking, or accomplished. These universities,
just like any other institutions, have their own goals and agenda. They accept
you not because you deserve it or you have earned it, but because accepting
you promotes the kind of ideals that these institutions espouse (e.g. money,
but could also be racial diversity). Inferring someone's intelligence based on
their university, therefore, is highly unreliable at best.

~~~
bsanr
The question that always occurs to me when these kinds of discussions come up
is why there is such a huge disparity between educational institutions in this
country in the first place. If schools were funded to meet a certain level of
performance, instead of based on who was attending or on past performance -
like the military is funded - maybe that would be a step in the right
direction.

~~~
sjg007
Couple of reasons.. class sizes, access to cutting edge technology and
research and professors. Undergrad is probably more uniform except for some
degree requirements etc... at a smaller school you may get more hand holding
or at least a concerned advisor. At a bigger school that may be impossible.
Not to mention your peer group.

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paulkon
If the goal is to graduate alumni which will donate the largest amounts, then
a large donation up-front from a well-connected individual is one such filter
which achieves that goal without delay.

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oyebenny
I'm sad to say that I know one of these students that had it arranged for them
through what might have been this service.

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dsiegel2275
It is sad to think that for every one of these students that got in this way,
another deserving applicant got denied.

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h3ckr
Is it really surprising that the upper class is isolating itself from the
rest, as the gap gets bigger and bigger in time? That happens in all areas of
life, school included. The admission system of many universities just makes
this very easy.

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j-c-hewitt
What does this mean for the future of fake sports that no one watches or cares
about that exist purely to help students from a certain class get into
prestige schools?

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Tsubasachan
This seems inevitable to me when your university is funded by private money
and donations.

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crankylinuxuser
Its called a "return on investment". You don't 'donate' millions of dollars,
and have a building named after you out of love for education.

You do it for your name, your legacy, and to guarantee spots for your family.

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solomatov
The article isn't about this. It's about literal bribes.

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crankylinuxuser
And "Donations" like what I describe aren't bribes?

This is only slightly different classes of bribes. They __both __are bribes.

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mehrdadn
> slightly different

This is ridiculous. One benefits lots of students, one benefits just your kid.

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an-allen
The whole plot seems pretty stupid to me. I mean if I am a college admissions
official for Yale and I see an application with an essay about what the real
story of growing up as William H Macy's kid is - the kid is getting in
regardless of how stupid a standardised test makes them appear to be.

