Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, it feels more like they're getting punished for getting a discount and not giving the universities the bribe directly (likely because the actual 'fee' for getting your kid in is more than they could afford).

I was similarly bothered by this, and by the fact that nobody was worried that these students would fail out given that they cheated their way in.

Says a lot about the actual signalling value vs. educational value of the universities (and the lottery that is admissions).

On a tangential note, Lisa Brennan-Jobs' really great memoir "Small Fry" talks about her experience with this a bit. She dreamed of going to Harvard and during the admissions interview it didn't seem to be going anywhere until she quietly mentioned that her dad founded a computer company (the interviewer asked which one which prompted Lisa to say Apple at which point the dense interviewer figured out she was Steve Jobs' daughter) - and then the interviewer left the room for a time.

When the interviewer came back she was smiling and generally a lot more engaged. Lisa went to Harvard.

College admissions is an unfair system in a billion different ways, I hope ISAs like Lambda School end up replacing a lot of it for most people. Lori Loughlin and the actors cheated the system, but it's weird to me that they got in trouble because they didn't cheat in the right way.

You need to be rich enough to pay a large enough bribe to the school directly. If that fails, hopefully you have a famous father.

Otherwise it's a lottery.

[Edit]: For those arguing paying the school bribe is different because other students benefit, I'd argue there should be at least some transparency in this process. If admissions slots are for sale, let the public see the price (instead the schools pretend otherwise).

“ I was similarly bothered by this, and by the fact that nobody was worried that these students would fail out given that they cheated their way in.”

You would be surprised at how difficult it is to fail out of programs.

From what I’ve seen profs have an unwritten rule to not fail students from school admin, otherwise they might complain and so it’s easier to give a D than fail them completely.

That depends on the school. My 4-year would put you on academic suspension if your GPA was too low, which ended with you kicked out (well forced to take a 1 year break and have to ask to return... Not a lot of people did, especially since credits expired after 7 years). Although, I did get a D in a class I should have failed by the curve because I didn't write up all the lab reports, but I did well on all the tests and went to office hours to ask how to not fail, and a better grade than I deserved in a final quarter class where I wrote an apology note on the final exam, because I skipped studying that lieu of other course work, since that one wasn't needed to graduate.

On the other hand, my mom teaches pre-baccalaruate math at a CSU and gets all kinds of grief from administration for failing kids who don't earn a passing grade.

It wasn't really possible to flunk out of Caltech. What would happen is students would get discouraged and just leave. If you wanted to return, they'd let you back.

A friend of mine "flunked out" this way, and 10 years later came back and finished with all As. I asked him if he got any smarter in that decade. He laughed, and said no, he was just willing to do the work the second time around.

Yep exactly, curving grades is such a weird concept. But it makes sense if you think about colleges as a product, and students as customers. You don't want unhappy customers!

> pre-baccalaruate math at a CSU and gets all kinds of grief from administration for failing kids who don't earn a passing grade.

Hey I took pre-bacc math! At a Cal JCC but still... even my community college math classes were way harder than my "prestigious" undergrad institution which like Caltech is basically impossible to fail out from. Especially if you play a sport! Hockey and football teams got 1 page cheat sheets on exams which was outrageous.

Yeah, admissions isn't really about who can succeed at the school (since basically anyone who gets in will be fine).

While you do get some education, I'd argue the majority of the value is the signalling the institutions provide by being selective.

It's about forcing scarcity for social status.

> admissions isn't really about who can succeed at the school

At Caltech this definitely was not true. None of my fellow students were legacy that I knew of, and none were rich that I was aware of.

> (since basically anyone who gets in will be fine)

Also not true of Caltech. Caltech sometimes did make mistakes in admitting students who couldn't hack the program, and those poor students suffered until they gave up. It didn't matter how hard they worked, it just didn't work for them.

On the other hand, some students (like Hal Finney) effortlessly, and I mean effortlessly, aced everything.

Not me, I had to work fairly assiduously or I got F's.

Yeah Caltech is specialized enough that I could see it being an exception.

To expand on my previous point it’s not that all majors are unfailable - I knew plenty of kids that failed out of STEM and switched to some more generic liberal arts major anyone can pass.

At Caltech that’s probably not an option.

I would be nice if liberal arts programs also required calculus and physics. An educated person should know something about science besides these "I believe in science" memes on the internet.

Of course, I have no chance of becoming World Dictator, so those who don't like math are safe :-)

I’m an adjunct at a top 30 b school (not US but top 30 global), and I tried to fail a student and the administration made it pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. I don’t even think he had undergraduate freshman level of business acumen, let alone MBA level.

Hey now, it's "Cs earn degrees," not "Ds earn degrees!"

In private schools, "gentleman B grades" are given. Professors know this. Compare that with public schools like UC Berkeley.

That matches the experience of a few friends at VA state schools (UVA and VT). You could definitely fail out. At least this was the case back in the 90s. If you had below a C average, you went on academic suspension for a semester (or year?), then you were allowed to try again, but at that point you were so far behind that getting the GPA back to an acceptable level was really hard.

> Yeah, it feels more like they're getting punished for getting a discount and not giving the universities the bribe directly.

What do you think the word "bribe" means? Paying money for a service (admission to a university) is not a bribe. Exchanging money for services is literally how the entire economy works.

Paying an agent of an organization money to subvert their organization's processes and steal from their employer, on the other hand, is actual bribery.

The university pretends to have one admissions process, but quietly has another. It’s the subversion of their supposedly established process that makes it bribe like. Particularly when it’s money as a lever to get things in your favor.

In the quiet admissions process if you give them enough money they’ll act in your favor, but none of this is public or official and they pretend they’re not doing this at the same time.

It may not be illegal, but you’re shuffling deck chairs on the titanic of ethics at that point. If you’re selling slots at market price then do that, quietly taking money in a wink-wink donation for admissions slot looks a lot like bribery to me.

They aren't doing any pretending. It's well publicized fact that legacies get preferential admissions and people who donate to put their names on buildings get even higher preference. It's not something they are doing quietly in the background.

The colleges I applied to all had a section on the application for listing alumni you're related to.

Legacy admissions is a different issue (though that's a problem too).

It is not a well publicized fact that 'people who donate get even higher preference', even calling it 'preference' is a euphemistic way to obscure the bribery.

It isn't preference, there's some hidden price and people are paying it for a slot.

Nobody is paying for a building and finding out their kid is not accepted.

Show me where on any top university website it says 'as an alternative to our standard merit-based admissions process you can contact this number to discuss payment for admission'.

They can't say that, both because it would reduce their leverage in negotiating the bribe value, and because what people are paying for (in large part) is the social status of having been accepted to an exclusive institution on merit.

Universities know this, it's why they spend effort encouraging applicants they know they will never accept in an effort to drive down the acceptance percentage and drive up their exclusivity.

If it's public that your rich parent bought your slot then suddenly a lot of that status evaporates.

Since the social status is more the product in question than the actual education people paying for it don't want this to happen.

This being public is bad for the school's brand too since knowledge that a lot of students can buy their way in would reduce the status that they're selling in the first place.

I spent a brief time in university admissions. There are lots of “side doors” - and that’s not necessarily bad.

For example, one university had a rule that any prospective student who inquires about a certain program, and shows a detailed understanding of how that program works, be fast tracked in.

Why? We’ve spent a ton of time building that program and want to enroll interested students!

The same was true, to a lesser degree, of any prospect who had clearly done her research and was interested in this college specifically.

Asking things like “I hear you offer one on one tutorials - how do they work?” show that the students are actually interested in the college, and would probably be a good match.

On the other hand, if we get the idea that we’re simply a “safety school” that the student wants to avoid if they can - that student can expect an extremely rigorous and unforgiving assessment of her abilities.

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