It’s different in the scale of the donation. 2 Million dollar donation materially improves things for other students and is tax deductible. $15,000 bribe doesn’t do much for other students except rob them of a spot.
A guy donates an engineering complex, and every engineering student on that campus gets to take advantage of said complex and its resources. Guy donates a new business school building and every student on that campus can take advantage of said building and its resources. In exchange, the university lets in two girls, their daughters or whatever, who might want to major in Art History and French, and coincidentally will likely be inheriting a few hundred million to upwards of a billion dollars in the future. (Future donors.)
It's a fair trade. I'm not wealthy on that level, but if I were calling the shots at a university I'd make that trade every time.
It sounds like you agree, then? It should be public.
It's left unsaid because it's better for the brand to pretend that this isn't a thing and that just because your parents gave money or because your parents are famous doesn't mean they'll let you in.
if you have to ask for price ... :)
I were calling the shots at a university
I'd make that trade every time.
But would you be proud enough of the policy to publicise it and your price list?
Because I'd do it, but I'd also be embarrassed I was doing it.
Also, in the interest of truth-in-advertising, shouldn't the institutions that practice this not have to rename themselves from "university" or "college" to "degree supermarket"?
Donating for improvement that affects others is one thing, but donating for a quid pro quo might affect this.
In other words, is the concept of creating barriers to entry, limiting competition, not unreasonable? In any market, economists say that is anticompetitive, and should even be illegal.
Are people paying for education? Or for epaulets?
So let's talk about this "materially improving things for other students" in an honest context of what this is.
We are already far past the point on using exam scores as a basis for admissions. Many of the Ivies, famously say every year that they could fill their incoming class with students with perfect scores and perfect GPAs many times over forcing these schools to consider other factors. The US DoE says there are 16.9m undergrads, assuming ~4m are freshmen, the top 1% is 40,000 students. The Harvard freshman class size is 2000 students. At this point its only natural, according to the "market", that people would be paying for slots.
If you believe the primary purpose of a university is to educate and certify, that is indeed "not much". But if you believe that the education is secondary, and the actual primary purpose is to cultivate a social network of influential graduates and dropouts, and to act as gatekeeper to future opportunities, then that bribe is better than a perfect SAT score.
That kid will end up with seed money or angel investments from mommy and daddy, and will be able to hire some former classmates right out of the gate, and they might build a unicorn, which will forever be tagged with "founded and built by a team of University X graduates".
In that sense, no one is robbing anybody of a spot. There are genius spots, and rich idiot spots, and the only problem is getting a few from each pile into the same rooms, with a reason to talk about their futures. One way is to coerce the rich kid into studying (or cheating) their coursework by paying off the genius kid. Management training.
Buying a basketball team and hiring a coach in order to win is legal. Paying one player to lose a game is not legal.