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Comment by wppick | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

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.

Both groups think the system "works quite well".

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.

Ivies are research universities... Princeton and Harvard in particular are some of the best research institutions in the world.

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.

Going back full time always has a huge opertunity cost. But so does front loading education.

Adults often go back for masters degrees which are manageable as it’s less material.

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.

You can claim educational loans on your tax returns, but only the interest.

> 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.

There is no need to do that twice.

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.

>> Nobody is calculating the value of social networking.

The few who know the value of social networking are the ones who will succeed.

> Rich people don't even know what skill means

Saying this is no better than saying "poor people are stupid".

Can't it be both?

Not really, although there are plenty of either. Making blanket statements about a group of people based on a single attribute is bad.

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.

To me, this looks like an analogy for the state of software interviews.

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".

In all my software development interviews in the past many years I've been asked to state or demonstrate my skills and talents.

This is completely different from my experience interviewing.

Why bribe your way into a school when you could just buy or build your own?

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