
You Have to Pay the Right Person - wallflower
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-have-to-pay-the-right-person
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cryptica
If one influential person does something bad, it's called "fraud", if a small
number of influential people do something bad together, it's called "unfair".
If most influential people do something bad together, it's called "reality".

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doctorpangloss
Yeah, I don’t know. Most of the kids in the elite education system are
alright, they didn’t build this world and generally believe in an equitable
one. College campuses are pretty much the most liberal places in the United
States. For every 1 rich kid buying their way in, there are 10 normal kids.
It’s a big red herring to worry too much about a handful of admissions to eg
USC. It’s hardly an elite institution anyway.

The big problem is the competition between the normal kids. Most people can’t
relate to inequities in the funnel for normals in ways other than race and
class. The fastest growing sectors of education—private, effectively
segregated schools and test preparation—reflect this reality but I wouldn’t
call it unfair or a fraud. Being a white parent and putting your kid into a
school with no Asian kids, or being a middle income parent and putting your
kid into a test prep program with no dirt poor kids—the reason these are bad
is that they obscure actual outcomes based analysis of education in favor of
useless retail indicators like test scores, income after graduation, racial
composition and income levels that parents actually use to determine where to
send their kids.

It takes an incredible amount of sophistication, on the part of parents and
students, to make wise decisions in education. So much pressure to look at
easily comparable but relatively meaningless things. I sympathize with the
parents with no high school education who bought their daughter’s way into
USC. They didn’t know any better and most of the supposed entrepreneurs/good
ideas in Ed-tech reinforce the bad trends, not work against them.

Most of the programmers, product managers and businesspeople working at those
companies are bought into that reductive retail system.

There is basically no one with “bad grades” working on Blockly at Google.
It’ll really open your mind up and make you less cynical when you realize how
ill equipped well meaning institutions are to actually address inequities in
education.

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chess93
What's the difference between someone getting in because their parents bought
a building and someone getting in because their parents spent 50k/year on a
highschool?

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CydeWeys
In one case, $200k is being given to a high school in exchange for an
education that may be of significantly higher quality than the public schools
in that area (it varies widely).

In the other case, $10M is being given to the university in order to fund a
building.

The better question is, what are the similarities? Different amounts of money
are being given to different parties for different purposes. Everything is
different. The only thing that's the same is that they're all sort of vaguely
related to education.

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wppick
With respect to the college admissions bribes it seems like the game just got
harder. Maybe the club of people able to bribe their kid's way into a school
has grown too large, and so the price has gone up. You now have to be more
wealthy, and more well connected to be able to bribe your kid's way into these
schools. In effect, these schools maintain their elite status of exclusivity
based on either brains or money/connections to get in. Seems like this could
be a "market correction" of sorts. If so, it's interesting to think about what
that means about the current state of wealth concentration and the
sociopolitical system

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leggomylibro
Honestly, it seems like you'd have to be very out of touch with reality to
offer actual bribes to people or engage in obvious fraud.

It's just not necessary. When they still had a "writing" portion of the SAT,
you could buy a 700-800 by writing an essay ahead of time and adapting it to
the prompt. If you had the means to afford a 'test prep' service that would
tell you that, you would be head-and-shoulders above the competition without
blatantly breaking the law.

And that's just one example; the entire system is tilted to make sure that
affluent kids get into good schools and stay there until they graduate. You
might not get into your 'dream school', but you will get into a world-class
institution and have countless barriers swept aside for you over the following
several years. It will tear the child to shreds in adulthood once they realize
what happened, but that doesn't seem to matter to most wealthy parents.

Plus, people entering their 20s don't usually know what will fulfill their
lives, what they are good at, how they can contribute to others, their
responsibilities as citizens, etc. I'd like to see a re-thinking of our entire
educational system, with a focus on lifelong learning.

What would be wrong with a cultural tradition of encouraging people to go back
to school every decade or two? It seems like a huge waste of human capitol not
to.

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xyzzy123
One problem with lifelong learning via formal institutions is that the less
well off are “tapped out” already with debt and expenses while those with good
careers (enough to save for an n-year break) face an enormous opportunity
cost, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There are lots of people who would love to go back to college already and
learn something new but the financial treadmill is running too fast to get
off.

More flexible learning options can help with this.

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leggomylibro
It would definitely need to be offset by subsidies, but maybe that could come
in the form of something that people could claim every 5-20 years like a tax
return.

It seems like we have a lot of levers to pull to make life easier on people
doing things like that; tuition reimbursement, housing/food/course material
subsidies, benefits like health care, child care, help with transit, etc.

But I guess you would have to look out for a resurgence of scammy public for-
profit institutions.

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cannonedhamster
You can claim educational loans on your tax returns, but only the interest.

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creato
This article really harps on the "just donate a building like a real rich
person" fallacy like so many people I've seen since this case broke.

If someone donates resources (money, a building, whatever) to the school, and
the school uses that to provide more services than one student consumes, that
is a net increase in the available spots for students at the school.

In this case, people bribed individuals to enrich themselves, not the school.
That is a decrease in the available spots for students at the school.

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mfringel
There might be a net increase in available resources for each student, but
there's no evidence to support that there would be net increase in available
spots.

e.g. Donating $25MM for a gym clearly gives students a nicer gym. It does not
necessarily enlarge the size of the undergraduate matriculating class, year
over year.

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analog31
Cynically, it could be even worse. A nicer gym gives students a bigger tuition
bill.

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adjkant
What's far more egregious than people buying their way in is the legacy and
sport admissions system. I would go after those long before those that make
large donations to schools, which at least benefit other students attending in
the process.

Counting legacy in admissions not only advantages the already privileged but
also reinforces the idea of this selective network of graduates. Schools love
to tout their alumni networks, but if a graduate is giving preferences in
hiring to people from their school simply because it is their school I
wouldn't consider them a smart person, or at least not a moral one. There are
tons of great schools out there and any educated person should know that being
preferential to one school arbitrarily only means you will miss better
candidates. It's not only unfair, it's not good hiring from a capitalist
perspective.

As far as athletics, I see a bit more sense there from a school perspective if
the athletics drive name recognition and sometimes money, but it seems
particularly silly that a college, academically motivated first, would more or
less forget their admissions standards for sometimes as much as 10% of the
incoming class.

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testpostpls
Life isn’t fair. People don’t want to catch grief for it. They don’t want to
be “gone after.” Part of the draw of hiring from these pools is you’re less
likely to get folks who have the hang ups you’ve displayed in your post.

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Nasrudith
I really hate "life isn't fair" as an excuse to be an asshole. It is like
excusing tripping a guy with a limp for being slow and prone to injury anyway.
Just because it may be so is no excuse for making it worse.

Not to mention it demonstrates the exact flaws they are warning about but
reality cannot be fooled. Those ignored talents will go elsewhere and the
competitors will lack those particular flaws by necessity. And then they'll
cry "Why did nobody warn me we were falling behind!" After doing their best to
not to listen.

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galaxyLogic
How about this: Hire some Yale students to teach your kid everything they
know. That way your kid gets into the social club that is perhaps the most
valuable thing about attending an elite university.

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drcode
What good is that if you don't get the magic piece of paper at the end that
says "I went to Harvard"?

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galaxyLogic
Probably right, but you could say: I was taught by the brightest students at
Harward. Brendan Eichnan was my teacher! Zuckerberg too. In fact I gave him
the original inspiration for Facebook :-)

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bredren
>Like so many things, it is an aristocratic economy of gifts and
relationships, not a grubby transaction.

I enjoyed the style and tone of the writing in this article.

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konschubert
Matt Levine is the author. This daily column is called “Money stuff”. You can
get it for free via email.

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bredren
I’ll check it out. Ty.

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nlh
Matt Levine (author of this piece) is amazing, and I suggest everyone
subscribe to the ‘Money Stuff’ newsletter. It’s this column, every (week) day,
and it’s absilutely hilarious. I describe it to friends as “The Daily Show in
written form for finance nerds”

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jrumbut
It's the funny side of what is called late capitalism.

I never miss it. Also there is no need for finance background knowledge. He
explains option, short, the relationship of bond price to yield, etc every
time they come up.

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kwindla
Funny, lucidly written (as you describe), and extraordinarily insightful in
making connections across areas of finance that are usually presented in the
business press as silos. Matt Levine is a rare talent.

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artursapek
I love me a good Levine piece.

