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Comment by resalisbury | Hacker News Reader

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."

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The first is for the benefit of all the other students in the form of reduced tuition grants, a new library, lab equipment etc. The other is for the benefit of the bribe taker. There are lots of situations that elevate X over accomplishment, but this seems like one with actual benefit on a large scale. That said, I hope they all get punished for it.

I dont think a monetary donation means a new lab or a library for all students to use that otherwise would have not been built. these universities have excess budget and easily afford to carry out new construction and procurement as planned regardless of donations. Im sure if the said parent had not donated the 2.5 million dollars, not a single thing would have been different for the students. not one.

>> I'm sure if the said parent had not donated the 2.5 million dollars, not a single thing would have been different for the students. Not one.

That's definitely false. Most universities tie annual endowment spending to total endowment size. Just because you can't directly tie the dollars to a specific project, doesn't mean it didn't contribute to the general student body's quality of education.

What are you talking about, of course sourcing new endowments allows them to build more things/provide more services/etc. Approximately half of Yale's operating budget comes from revenue generated by its hospital system (which is a whole 'nother contentious issue, but besides the point). The other half largely comes from drawing a "safe amount" on it's endowment principal, i.e., small enough to be sustainable in the long term without depleting the fund. A relatively small part comes from tuition. Obviously, increasing the endowment (be it $2.5MM or $250MM at a time) increases the amount that can be put towards budgeting in the future -- enabling, for example, the University to grow its student body (which Yale is currently doing) while maintaining the ability to privately subsidize student tuition.

If the bribe taker donated all of the money to charity, would that make it any less unethical for the University/basketball coach? A bribe is a bribe, and the spot that was taken in the University could have and should have gone to someone more deserving.

>If the bribe taker donated all of the money to charity, would that make it any less unethical for the University/basketball coach

Yes, it would. That wouldn't make it ethical or legal of course.

This is a classical "ends justify means" argument. Though most people won't admit it, I think it's a valid argument, but requires a rather perverse value system.

People who claim that top schools have excess budget have no idea how expensive it is to run them. Pledges are a total ok way of funding scholarships and other benefits for the student community on those schools. One "stupid rich" student enabling "smart poor" ones.

If the money goes towards scholarships for the deserving but poor its a good trade. Less so if it ends up in the pockets of corrupt paper pushers.

And if I had to bet I would put money on the money not 'trickling down' as we would hope.

About 65% of students at Yale receive need-based financial aid from the University. Students coming from households making less than $65k don't pay anything at all for tuition/room/board. So clearly some of that endowment money is "trickling down".

Source: https://finaid.yale.edu/costs-affordability/affordability

At the university of Whatshisface, tuition is $10^12/semester, and everyone receives $(10^12-10^3)/semester in needs-based financial aid. I assure you that I have a karmatic license to do anything I want - after all, summed across all students I give more than the GDP of many small countries.

Right... From the stats from Yale linked above, the median net cost after financial aid is $12.5k. That's a lot less than I paid to go to a public university.

As for a "license to do anything", it's not clear what exactly you're complaining about here? They get some money through non-merit based admissions, sure, and then use the money to build nice things for students, and to help cover most students' tuitions. The point of this thread is that there's a difference between private schools accepting donations for this purpose, vs. corrupt individuals accepting bribes. The latter case benefits only the unmeritious student and the corrupt individual, and not the university has a whole.

I wonder how that compares, demographically, to the proportion of students receiving need-based financial aid and full-rides at my alma mater (an HBCU with a substantially smaller endowment).

Financial aid at ivy league schools is extremely generous in large part due to their huge endowments.

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.

I mean this still disadvantages poorer people, who don't have money to fund their kids' preparations for exams. The point of holistic admissions is to try to factor things like that in.

Goodheart's law.

Besides what employer wants to hire someone based just on their intelligence scores? If someone is an uncooperative egoist prick I don't think many companies will want to hire them no matter their test scores.

Pure test prioritization also encourages rote learning and optimizing for the test, which is not great for creativity.

Did you read the article? The fixer just paid the folks administering the test to let someone else take it, or to let them fix the answers after the fact. Also, agree with the person who mentioned Goodhart's Law.

Do you really think these schools would have the same prestige and endowments if money and connections didn't get peole in?

People want the prestige and connections of a legacy/endowment driven school, but don't seem to realize that it comes with legacy admissions.

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.

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...

Then you eliminate high schools like the one I went to where, we spent 10s of hours in labs per week to be competitive for college. How are you going to incorporate electrical engineering or materials science into a standardized exam and meaningfully compare our results to our peers?

The wealthy have the income to test prep for high scores. The poor don’t necessarily have the time or money to focus as much on test prep as the rich. Your method may exclude a population of the poor.

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