Forget Bribery – The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value

I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational establishments. I've worked around people from some of these places and almost to a man, they reeked of one-upmanship, my father knows..., I know..., oh, you went to <insert no-name university> while glancing down their nose at you.

I worked with a guy like this at UUNet who went to Brown. He thought he was the cat's pajamas and everyone should defer to him because he went Ivy League. Oddly enough (sarcasm), his mistakes were often corrected by those who attended the no-name schools. He never saw the error of his ways. Daddy, after all, was a prominent attorney in the DC area. Why this guy went IT is a mystery. He would have been a better fit with the other sharks and scammers in DC or on Wall Street.

The recent scandals don't necessarily indicate a degree don't verify capital stocks, but it does clearly demonstrate the divide between those who have capital and those who do not, and the myriad methods capital perseveres in self-preservation. And as these loopholes will most likely remain open in one way or another, it will continue to teach this lesson across generations.

I think this, and numerous other blatant shows of power, underline just how important it is to federate capital across class boundaries and prevent capital concentration. The "old boys clubs" care about your pedigree. The SME CEO cares about putting food on the table for his/her family and his/her employees, and cares moreso for your merit. Greater capital distribution leads to stricter capital verification (yes you are smart in practice) due to the decentralization of trust, greater alignment between merit and success and exercise of existing talent surpluses, and higher societal cohesion due to greater class turnover.

If you're interviewing candidates and you have a candidate graduating from Stanford, one from MIT and one from Middle-of-Nowhere State - which candidates are you going to prefer? We can argue whether such preferential judgement is justified. Living near the East Coast I can tell you I've met my share of MIT grads who are idiots and Middle-of-Nowhere State grads who've been really good. Yet the perception persists. Why? Because of the handful of truly outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-of-Nowhere State hasn't. Those handful of exceptional graduates skew people's perception of reality for a really long time.

Who knows? Maybe this scandal will change people's perception of these elite schools but I doubt it.

I dropped out and hate the system as much as the next guy, but to pretend that degrees have literally zero value and exist purely as a wealth transfer mechanism is a bit shortsighted. The author discredits MOOCs in the very same breath, but forgets to mention that thousands of companies are only using a degree as a baseline and all it would take is for HR to start accepting a slightly different piece of paper.

There will always be an Ivy club, fraternities, secret societies, and so on. Flood the market with Ivy degrees and the social elite will pick something else. But those are pretty small factions if you think about everybody else, at the University of Nowhere Special.

> As long as Ivy League alumni occupy positions of power, academic credentials will remain costly and scarce. Ongoing credential inflation is not evidence of a bubble about to burst, but a reflection of how successful the elites are at convincing the greater populace that degrees are valuable.

The underlying implication of the article doesn't seem to be hit home. If "good" schools don't produce rich powerful/people, but "name" schools do, that's because there is heavy corruption by the established elite to favor their alma mater's to make sure their degrees remain valuable - is I think a core tenet of the article.

Through disparate impact legislation and jurisprudence, employers can only consider job applicants on narrow grounds. Schools have much more leeway to admit/deny admission.

An employer would probably get sued for using IQ tests because blacks and hispanics tend to do poorly on those tests. However, the ACT and SAT are highly correlated with IQ and schools can and do use those to make admission decisions. An employer that wants to filter for smart people would be well-advised to hire from schools that only accept cognitively gifted students.

You can't refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't speak well, but you can refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't hold a degree from an institution that refused to admit Jamal because he didn't get a high enough score in the English section of the ACT/SAT.

Interesing, I had the same thought about expensive artwork.

> Online courses (and before that, public libraries) rendered institutions of higher learning unnecessary for, you know, learning. But the idea that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace colleges is a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of a university degree.

I think the author misunderstands as well. Classic "if it's in a book then the class is worthless".

Information is not the teaching. The idea is that a teacher can instruct better than a mere textbook. YMMV, but there's no denying that having a pre-planned curriculum with instruction and 1:1 Q&As inherently supersedes walking into a store and hoping you can find and understand the right books in general. Never mind that books don't grade or provide feedback on homework, etc.

The problem is that university became a requisite for people who didn't want to attend. Standards for what the teaching we expect of universities has plummeted. That's why they work so hard to keep their brand. For the self-motivated and good learners, MOOCs and libraries can replace big parts of university. That's not for everyone.

> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not graduate many future elites. Alumni go on to be successful in their academic fields, but don’t tend to dominate finance, tech or politics.

A school exclusively for technical competence doesn't produce as many social elite [citation needed] as a school that's not focused on technical competence? I wonder why. How many of the financial elite came from mechanical engineering background at all? It's a silly comparison.

Side note: Don't forget it's an order of magnitude smaller, CalTech has ~2,200 students in contrast to Harvard's ~22,000.

> Successful parents in the upper middle class can leave money to their children, but that doesn’t guarantee entrée into the social elite. The more reliable way for powerful parents to buy power for their children is through a name-brand, exclusive education.

> Jared Kushner’s father famously secured Harvard acceptance for his son with a $2.5 million charitable contribution.

When did people making $2.5m donations become "upper middle class"?

Chances are of you found the number you understood at least something about the model. And if you showed your working out, which is always a good idea, you provide more quite specific evidence.

In stuff that's more essay based, the weak can hide and the strong can be mistaken for middling. Essays can be long but still formulaic: talk about the question, mention the main things people have suggested about it, pros and cons. There's a lot of permutations of arguments that are valid, making it hard to disqualify someone who has mentioned a few relevant things. But also hard to make someone stand out, because people know the answer required is a bunch of bullet points, and if you just fire enough bullets some will resemble a smart answer. I've sat in essay subject tutorials that went perfectly fine for everyone despite very little prep having gone in.

Back to the article, naturally you don't want to buy your way into a degree that you have no hope of completing.

On the same side of that coin, I also taught technical subjects for a certification I never bothered to acquire. The students often asked why, and my tactful response is that it would have been a conflict of interest, and not at all that I couldn't see the value outside of checking off a box for the headhunters... Too many highly certified people with zero experience and near-zero skill, I'm afraid to say. Certs simply do not replace a good technical interview.

I also employed a PhD for 3 months. He was brilliant but so stubborn and opinionated I had a hard time justifying the expense of keeping him on board. He could barely function and kept trying to steer the company. Thankfully he eventually screwed up bad enough I had a nicer sounding reason to turf him.

Most students don't build a big social network in college. Most students don't take away meaninful thoughts from university. Most students probably don't even end up using the discipline or domain knowledge they acquired for a significant part of their career.

If all universities produce for people is a piece of paper that says "this person MIGHT be able to do the job you want done" (and let's be real - how many people do you know got a college level job simply by flashing their degree?) then there's absolutely no reason that degree comes with a 6 figure debt. That's something we can cut down to low 5 digits easily. The problem of course is universities only have the incentive to charge more for the same product because no one's demanding they do anything of value.

For me degree is only an indication that person has grit, and dedication to spend 4+ years on something rather hard and boring. Which is a good thing. I can expect that person knows that sometimes work is a boring grind, just as Uni taught. However, learning programming by themselves require quite a dedication too.

I hire regardless of degree, but I do take a closer look during probation period how candidate handles slower more boring tasks.

So far, I didn't see much correlation between years spent in academia and long term productivity.

Ban the humanities, right?

I liked school. It was valuable. I have a better job because of it. I didn't spend absurd amounts of money to go.

[Citation needed]

I think we are simply seeing another generational rise.

And why not - human beings one big advantage is our brains - and training our young to use that advantage as best we can is the single best ROI we can make ().

Will it cost us? Yes. Will it benefit us. Yes.

()there are many others as my socialist soul will tell you)

To me, this is similar to Lebron James trying to go 3/3 from the field with 2 assists and no turnovers. Anyone with that high of a GPA in my mind did not seek to challenge themselves through taking the most difficult subjects, i.e. they maximized credentials over learning. Elite schools then become worried that students won't get the best jobs, so they add easier classes to ensure GPA averages stay similar to comparable schools. Overall, this produces a worse "real" educational outcome. Companies should start asking interviewees with a 4.0 GPA, "Why didn't you challenge yourself?" Medical schools should add 0.5 points to biomedical engineering degrees, etc. I think these actions have a much higher correlation to grade inflation than a couple students getting accepted due to a large donation.

I particularly like their solution: Increase enrollment to point of where it inflates away their value. The intrinsic value would still remain, but the bragging rights will fall away.

Just because some company has now decided minimum wage jobs should require a degree doesn’t mean a degree is valueless, it simply a stupid requirement (like requiring 10 years of nosql experience or whatever).

And yes, there are degrees that have much lower economic value - and it’s an idiosyncrasy of design that leads to identical costs.

But there are real cases where degrees matter. For example large scale engineering - you want to employ people who know what they’re doing at a very core level. So they need to have been taught those skills, and they need to have a way of showing that they have been taught them, and that they actually did learn: a degree.

For many things apprenticeships would also work, but note that most apprenticeships do result in pieces of paper (journeyman, etc).

Do I think my CS degrees are necessary in of itself? No. But I learned a lot while getting it, so it’s nice to have an public record of that.

Now that's an interesting thought, referring to ivy league degrees.