You Have to Pay the Right Person
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
The other kid, on the other hand...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
The question is the type of society we want to live in.
Do we want to credential sub-par kids becuase “money” and give them a better chance at life to run the country?
Or do we want to promote the best and most astute thinkers and give them the best chance to run our country?
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.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130647...
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.
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.
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.
The few who know the value of social networking are the ones who will succeed.
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.
Saying this is no better than saying "poor people are stupid".
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.
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.
Adults often go back for masters degrees which are manageable as it’s less material.
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.
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.
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.
And since NCAA is a cartel, they can't sell their labor on the free market without moving abroad...
Both groups think the system "works quite well".
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.
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.
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
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.
There is no need to do that twice.
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.
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.
The article doesn't say it's bad to donate and get in.
>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.
The article agrees with this, saying it's theft from the school, whereas donating a building isn't theft from the school.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I enjoyed the style and tone of the writing in this article.
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.