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".
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.
>Most of the kids in the elite education system are alright, they didn’t build this world and generally believe in an equitable one.
When I went to (not an Ivy, but a well known) college I ended up in a very nice fraternity with ridiculous numbers of guys that had trust funds (I think the highest number I knew of was 30M - although that guy was a chill stoner than didn't want much from life). A few had families with private jets. One owned a chandelier in their house that was worth 2x the house I grew up in.
I absolutely believe that these people would say they believe in an equitable society. I also know 90% of them are pretty solid people, a few assholes but I know lots of middle class and poor people that are assholes, too.
The issue is, they do not understand what life is like for middle class people, much less lower-class people. They do not understand the degree that making a society equitable would take and much of those ideas when discussed, even among friends, were vehemently scoffed at.
The problem is, lots of these people get to go on to become the decision makers of our society. And while completely fine people, they do not understand the realities of 80% of the country. I'd much rather Harvard and Yale and USC take the Cal-tech route and fill their halls with much more deserving kids (who are moreso likely to come from middle and lower class families than what's happening in present day).
It's ultimately the question, are you a bad person if you make a decision without understanding or knowing all the implications? I think the answer is no. But these people do not understand all the implications because they don't understand how most people in our society live. We should do our best to make our decision makers people that truly understand how most of us live - as unrealistic as that idea seems.
A private institution can successfully build a top flight school by selling off admissions slots.
Even in (especially in) the eyes of these people crying "unfair", these schools have apparently done a very good job of building a successful schools. They've sold off spots and built schools everyone wants to be in.
They want to go to a school with the prestige of money and connections, but those things came with a cost.
Do we want to respect the property rights of others?
Do we want to allow people to use the results of their labors to improve the lives of their kids?
There are tons of schools where you don't buy your way in. Why does everyone want into Harvard? Because people have thrown a ton of money at it to make it great. They didn't follow the process of only admitting the best and brightest. They followed a mix of that and people that would deliver money and connections. These are the results and if someone doesn't like it they have literally thousands of other options to choose from.
I know it's trendy to hate on the rich, but they've built something and are taking a small slice out of it while subsidizing a great many. Kick them out and they'll build another place that people will be screaming to get into next week.
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?
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.
The kid from the $50K/year high school got an education for that price (albeit expensive) and got in through his/her own work & dedication (you could say that the expensive high school "paid off"). That kid is supposed to be competent, since he got in through merit.
The difference is are they getting in because of money and connections vs qualifications money helped acquire.
Natural aptitude and/or sheer obsessive determination can allow anyone to compete with the second - and crucially the money must be spent well to help - if it is just more posh in surroundings but doesn't actually prepare them better than say an average Brooklyn High School then money isn't actually propping them up.
Meanwhile in the first only those with money and connections can "compete".
Two different competitive pools of different sizes. The pool of kids with buildings might be small enough that they can be accepted at a 100% rate, whereas the pool of $50k/y high school kids can only be accepted at a lower rate, maybe 20% ballpark.
Realistically, the kids with buildings also went to $50k/y high schools. If I understand the article, the bribery service was for upping the odds from 20% to 100% without the house getting their cut.
...to say nothing of the countless millions of un-influential persons violently robbed of life and liberty for just being imagined to have participated in such things.
In many states you lose your right to vote, you lose your right to firearms, you lose your right to privacy since you're now a known felon, you have almost no chance of getting a white collar job or a high paying job unless you were already connected before the felony and very wealthy. Poor people who get felonies often get tougher sentences because they can't afford the lawyers of the wealthy. Pretty sure for most people a felony severely limits any chances of a life that isn't just scraping by or in the best case middle class.
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
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.
> 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.
Will it? I grew up around a lot of rich kids, and know a lot of people in Ivy League schools. They generally weren't the smartest kids (those tended to end up at the #1 research universities in the world for the depts/broader areas they were interested in), and yet even now that we're pushing 30, they tend on average to think that the system works quite well.
The thought of #1 research universities crowded with rich dummies just disappoints me. Imagine what research could be accomplished if the universities were populated by smart people instead.
This is how I feel about college athletics. Make a minor league and pay the players, don't spend millions of govt/tuition dollars on coach salaries that could be spent on education and research.
This is how baseball works and it seems to be fine.
College baseball does exist, but it's not a de-facto minor professional league like college basketball and football are. Even the lowest level of the professional minor league system is stronger than college baseball, and it's perfectly normal for strong enough players to be drafted directly from high school into the professional minors.
As long as the athletic department breaks even or turns a profit, I don't have an issue with the coach salaries. According to this article, only about 1/4 of schools are running at a loss. That seems lower than expected though.
Doesn't change how unfair the system is for the players (specifically of men's football and basketball), who are prevented from earning a fair wage by the bizarre rule against paying them.
And since NCAA is a cartel, they can't sell their labor on the free market without moving abroad...
Well, the good news is that the graduate students and postdocs who actually do the research are sourced in a much more meritocratic way. Academia definitely has its politics and inefficiencies, but almost everyone wants to be there and do good work, and top universities have solid systems for attracting and identifying real talent.
Of course, the quality of undergraduates has some effect on morale among the researchers - one imagines that the professor and graduate students teaching a course colloquially called "Stars for Stoners" must be wholehearted evangelists and/or be dying inside a bit every year. But this is largely isolated from the research itself, and you'll always find diamonds in the rough - undergraduates who are truly passionate and capable at a graduate level. They do great work.
If anything, the parent post may be referring to students who come from "feeder schools" which provide tremendous amounts of preparation and everything-on-the-legal-side-of-this-entire-controversy. And though those students are slightly more likely to be immature when they first matriculate, they too end up finding their passions and work ethics, and making great contributions of their own. Sure, the very same resources that let them enter those feeder schools tend to help them when they graduate. But if anything, it's good that the university can now count them as alumni, and that they can help their fellow graduates with networking and continuity of the collegiate experience. Research universities are a well-balanced system, and though there are many reforms that can be done, the systems as a whole work well.
I think the poster you replied to was saying the opposite: that (a) he grew up around rich kids, and, separately, (b) knows people who went to top research universities.
No I was saying that the smartest kids I knew ended up in the research universities (with a couple of exceptions). The ones a step down were usually the ones at the Ivies. The quality of an education at a research university far outstrips their reputations (particularly if you're optimizing for departments), while a big chunk of the value of Ivies is the reputation.
Ivy admissions criteria make a lot more sense if you realize that they're engineering the makeup of the anointed upper-crust of the next generation (which only the most naive idealist would think is tightly related to merit). Tech is an unusually meritocratic industry (for now), which is why, at least in my experience, the brand power of the educational institutions on your resume aren't that great a predictor of success in the industry.
Sure, the two groups aren't mutually exclusive. When I said that the smarter people I knew generally picked schools based on the strength of the depts they had some interest in, that included a couple of people who went to Ivy Leagues for those reasons. But most of the people I know who went to Ivies had no more complex a decision process than "it's an Ivy League school". Not coincidentally, ten years later, none of the people in this latter camp are doing anything particularly interesting with their lives or careers.
I get that it sounds like my sample is skewed heavily towards tech,but I can only think of one or two people out of my high school friends/acquaintances who went into tech, so this particular sample isn't skewed that way
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.
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.
> What would be wrong with a cultural tradition of encouraging people to go back to school every decade or two?
This assumes that the main function of college is to acquire skills. But in reality, it is to "stamp" you as a qualified member of the elite by giving you a College Degree.
It's only a huge waste of human capital if people are actually building a lot of capital in college. There is a lot of evidence that they are not and that it's mostly a signaling exercise.
I think that it's because the value of social networking has increased to extreme levels. Skill is now nearly worthless in comparison. Rich people don't even know what skill means and they don't realize that all the people who are crowding around them are not actually skilled; they're charlatans.
This is because the incentive to engage in social schemes is so high that it makes no sense to spend any effort on honing your skills... So instead of working on improving our value-creation skills, we're all working on improving our ability to bullshit (value capture).
Bullshitting works. Bullshitting is success. If universities offered degrees in bullshitting, their graduates would be the highest paid. Guaranteed.
But the same group of people has in fact spent dearly on skill for their children, from bassoon lessons to math and computer coaches, and overseas experiences. It's just that an insane amount of skill isn't enough to get all of their kids into Harvard at once, so they're willing to chip in a bit more to make up the difference.
My kids are at a competitive high school, so I know these parents and their kids. Nobody is calculating the value of social networking. They simply see Harvard (or other similar places) as the best and they want the best for their kids.
I don't pay for guitar and volleyball lessons for my children because I think they're going to become especially skilled or get into Harvard. I pay because I want to get them out of the house and limit their screen time.
I live in a fairly affluent town with a lot of competitive parents, so I've seen all sides of this. I'm not one of them, but there are definitely parents who see their kids' activities in terms of a progression towards an ultimate goal.
My own philosophy is that those activities can lead to a fulfilling life, even if they don't pay back in monetary or career terms. I'm an amateur musician today, and it's a vital part of my life, so I'm grateful for the years of music lessons that my parents paid for.
I think the theory of skill being nearly worthless in comparison is correct. But I don't think that has really changed from the past. The majority of products & services in this world don't really bring any value to a person.
I think the main problem in society is overpopulation. We're getting to the point that too many people exist for the old systems to function and as smoothly & unnoticeable for the mainstream as before.
Even after Tim Cook said none of his best people have the obsolete degrees everyone covets, the focus and priorities of software interviews is perpetually: "please tell me your LinkedIn profile?" or "what was your college degree in, again?" as opposed to "oh you have precisely all the mad skilz to remake the world in Linus's image".
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.
It's not a fallacy, he's saying that its not the point. The question is why is this the crime?
Matt Levine talks about insider trading a lot. He brings up the point that "it's not about fairness, its about theft". He approaches this much in the way. The crime that took place was against the schools. People misappropriated their property; the ability to trade access for money.
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.
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.
Maybe universities are not merit based institutions and gateways for advancement of the underprivileged, but finishing schools funded by the elite to help elite children gain the training and social skills needed to become semi-functional elite adults?
Of course, these institutions do need some serious scholars to serve as professors, just like a good gym needs some serious athletes to serve as trainers -- but selecting and training athletes is not the point of a gym and maybe scholarship is not the point of a university?
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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”
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.
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.
