UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted students as favors to donors
auditor.ca.gov
auditor.ca.gov
Much like doping in sports, you have two paths you can take: try to combat cheating, or accept the cheating as part of the game.
I think these universities should accept that they are providing an education, but they are selling prestige, and split their admissions into two pots: people who pay their way in and the other who earns it. And they announce ahead of time what the size of each bucket is. When you apply, you chose which path you will take and that's it, you're stuck.
The people who choose the merit path take the standard entry exams, have their grades review, etc. And the ones who do the best get in. Those who choose to pay for admission participate in a silent auction, and those willing to pay the most are admitted.
This system isn't "fair", but the outcome is effectively the same as our current setup. With the most notable difference being that, at least this system is transparent and acknowledges that X% of incoming students paid for their post.
This is similar, there needs to be enough for people being accepted to and graduating from a university so when the rich kids also does it people think that he is smart and accomplished.
Some of them will go into politics and business, and their entitlement and delusionally rosy view of their talents will make them a national liability.
You really want to steer rich slackers towards wasting their lives with dumb hedonism, keeping them as far away as possible from any activity with strategic influence.
That's before even considering that some small amount of what graduating from one of these schools conveys is a high likelihood of having networked with other people that will be well placed later. My naive expectation is that someone graduating with a science major from MIT might have had a harder curriculum than someone graduating from that same major from Harvard, but I also (again, naively) expect that the person from Harvard may have made contacts with people that will be more diversely placed and in more powerful positions later.
It is tricky to maintain the 'prestige' associated with an institution doing this, so I don't really agree with making it too public. But, after all, it was kinda an open secret that this happens and the prestige was maintained away, so if it kept happening with a bit more legitimacy it probably wouldn't change much. Prestige doesn't just mean academic credentials: for some people, if they see Berkeley on a resumé they probably want it to be because that applicant is super-rich and well-connected!
My ideal reform would be a simultaneous enactment of several things:
* allow people to pay millions to go to college; allow this to fund student aid for other students. Explicitly stop using it to build buildings
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
This reframes things so that the point of strong applications isn't to _get in_, it's to get the scholarships required to get in for free instead of paying the absurd tuition. Meanwhile the school has to keep admitting remarkable kids in order to maintain its brand as prestigious. All of this is already how it works, but making it explicit ought to align incentivizes in a way that makes the whole thing less disturbingly bizarre.
The state schools already do this. It's called "out of state tuition". For example, UC Berkeley charges California residents $14k/yr tuition while everyone else pays $44k/yr. Not surprisingly, the number of out of state students admitted to the UC system is increasing every year. [0]
[0]https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-plannin...
At D1 schools the football and basketball programs generate huge revenue, which is used to subsidize less popular sports (particularly women's teams under Title IX). For better or worse a lot of prospective students care about sports and it's a factor in making colleges more attractive.
and --
Lots of people care about sports but that's partly cause lots of people in the past cared and baked it into our culture. It's still a perverse misalignment of incentivizes -- education should be about education; university should be about education + social development + various other forms of development. The American university system is largely about sports and partying for lots of people and I hope no one thinks that's healthy. I don't necessarily think the big sports should be cut, but there's no reason in 2020 that a university should regularly have people who are there on, like, golf scholarships. Universities should certainly take remarkable people of all walks of life -- but the emphasis on sports is insanely beyond what is appropriate.
Most elite colleges (not the UCs though) offer 100% need-based aid to accepted students and are need blind in the admissions process. This comes directly from the endownment or the rich alumni and donors already.
* stop having all of these overfunded and weirdly inappropriate sports institutions as a core part of academia.
I completely agree.
* stop with massively-inflated grades that allow the rich-but-undercapable kids to graduate with the appearance of successful academics. They can buy their way in but they have to do as well as everybody else after that.
They do have to do as well as everyone else. Grade inflation is a school-wide phenomenon, but GPA in general is a poor indicator of academic performance: all of the prospective med school students at my school are being advised to apply to colleges which practice grade inflation. The grading system at colleges is taken into account by graduate and preprofessional programs.
* ensure that the influx of money from rich kids' applications doesn't go to administrators in any way, as that would incentivize them to over-prioritize these people.
The admissions office is somewhat decoupled from the rest of the institution, and receive fixed salaries -- this problem does not exist.
With the little weird caveat that poor students at top institutions have to work doing things like cleaning the bathrooms of the richer kids as part of their "term-time work expectation" for receiving financial aid.
It's not the admissions office that that was targeted at. The donations today go to programs, buildings, etc -- things that involve lots of administrative staff and leaders who are payed executive-level salaries. This should all be going to support students and educators.
That's true until the University is so rich that it no longer has any need to acquire any more money. Harvard has a $40 billion investment fund. No amount of rich kids are going meaningful move the needle there. At that point, why bother selling spots to rich kids at all? If you're worried about bribery, why not just literally ban students whose parents are wealthy?
Harvard benefits from the prestige of its alum network, and admitting the children of wealthy parents ensures a certain level of influence/access to said parent.
The correct way to do this is via marginal tax rates.
Admittance is a zero sum game, someone paying to get in doesn't subside another student they take their spot.
This is also known as a progressive taxation system.
Lots of boys sitting in their rooms smoking weed and ordering pizza and having to be edged out over 2 or 3 years because their parents paid for a swimming pool...
It needs plausible deniability to work.
So we already had two categories of students, with somewhat different prices and somewhat different admission standards. I don't see a problem with adding adding more categories along the same lines, as long as some minimum academic standard is enforced.
If I'm in the middle category, I'm happy with my peers who pay more than me because they subsidize the other categories, and I'm happy with my peers who pay less because they elevate the school's reputation.
I can see that for UC Berkeley, but would that be true of somewhere like Harvard? I get the feeling it would devalue some of the perks of a Harvard education to accept on merit, when a lot of the students from low income backgrounds find the value in mixing with the legacy students.
Works well, doesn't really devalue the prestige of the uni or the students who get in by paying like some of the sibling comments are speculating.
> Works well, doesn't really devalue the prestige of the uni or the students who get in by paying like some of the sibling comments are speculating.
Not sure which part of India you lived in but private engineering schools like Manipal, SRM, Vellore aren't considered prestigious. BITS is the only private one which has good clout but they don't have any management quotas.
https://google.com/search?q=harvard+legacy
Other private schools are no different.
With the current setup, there are consequences to trying to pay your way in if you're caught. What's the point of removing those consequences?
This would replace that with cash on the barrel, which is simpler and more honest.
I'm not convinced it's better, but that would be the point of so doing.
But this has how it has always been. Everyone knew it was always like this, had a feeling it was like this while they were considering or going through higher education, and now a couple articles and investigations come out.
Is anyone surprised here?
The only thing that has occurred is that people covet these institutions and also think they have a chance of accessing them, thanks to illusions of meritocracy that become real enough to be meaningful avenues for a wider population than before.
In the past it was very clear who didn't have a chance and who did.
Look at the example applicants in the article! A babysitter who knew reality and took a chance they got - babysit with this connected family and ask for the favor. DUH! Ka-CHING! Even dropping out of that kind of university looks good. Life upgraded. What game are the rest of you all even playing?
A certain percentage of places are designated 'Management Quota', i.e., the management is free to do with them as it wishes. They are used in many ways. For example, if a certain religious community/sect/order runs the place, it may set aside a large chunk of the management quota to admit students from its community/sect/order; if a (non-sectarian) charitable trust runs the place, as is very common, it may set aside some percentage of the management quota for indigent students who would otherwise not had the chance to attend the institution. Additionally, almost invariably, some part of the management quota is sold to the highest bidder in a pure cash transaction. In this way, rich students end up subsidizing a reasonable number of otherwise deserving students.
There is a significant number of (relatively much less deserving) candidates that all institutions (private or public) are required to admit, such as those coming from the so-called "Scheduled Castes", "Scheduled Tribes", "Other Backward Classes" (from communities that have been lagging in privilege and access to economic opportunities because of their caste/religion), and candidates that have done most of their prior schooling in (massively underserved) rural areas (IOTW, "Reservation" aka Affirmative Action candidates). In fact, the chunk of places allotted (by Government Order) to Affirmative Action candidates is much larger than Management Quota, and even 'Merit Quota' (i.e., candidates who sit competitive examinations in order to gain admission).
As far as subsequent success is concerned, though, it's sink-or-swim for all the candidates who are admitted: they are not given any preference in tests, exams, etc. In some specific cases, for a small initial period, affirmative action candidates may be allowed to advance with lower scores, but that is very much a small exception, not the norm.
Generally, in polite conversation, no one ever talks about the other person's caste. A lot of the time, this is unnecessary, though. There are tons of caste signifiers, such as your last name, your skin tone, your language (both speakers can use the same language but the set of words used and usage/abusage can tell you a lot about the person's background. Like how you could tell a cockney from an upper-crust West Londoner.) Don't even get me started on food. If you are a "pure vegetarian", then it's a very good chance you are high-caste. With the professions also, things are changing a bit more quickly, but age-old divisions remain. You would be hard-pressed to find a Brahmin working a construction site (there's a good chance a Brahmin would be in an air-conditioned office drawing up the plans for said site); almost zero chance you'd see an upper-caste person going out fishing to sell the catch and make a living, and so on.
If you participate in a conversation with a group of Indians who have just met (at the workplace, say), just observe how they interact: they will put out direct or subtle questions like: "Where are you from originally?", "Where did you attend college?", "What do your parents do?", "Are you vegetarian or non-vegetarian?"... It just goes on and on. You can tell a lot about a person within 15 minutes of meeting him, if you have been raised in India.
EDIT: BTW, the terms "Scheduled Caste", "Scheduled Tribe" (perhaps even "Other Backward Classes") were introduced by the British! The British bureaucrats who ruled the country had an obsession with making tidy lists to categorise people (hence the "Schedule" in "Scheduled"!) and came up with the (original) lists of these castes and tribes!
Suppose that instead the auction was only open to people who got put on the wait list after the regular admissions process?
Top schools get a lot more qualified applicants than they have openings for, and a lot of people end up on the wait list who are just as qualified as people who were admitted.
https://google.com/search?q=harvard+legacy
Other private schools are no different.
This would theoretically lead to college degrees representing what they claim to represent (skill of an individual at graduation, not at their junior year of High School), would solve most of the cost issue (self studying and taking the exam would be a viable option that wouldn't be penalized), and admittance would be much less important (since it'd be disconnected from credentials). Of course it would also defang the leverage universities currently hold over society, so I imagine they'd fight tooth and nail against it.
Nobody is complaining about fairness or that it happens, let it happen but be open and honest about these transactions so other market participants can behave accordingly.
These universities also provide valuable networking opportunities. Would it be appropriate to completely segregate the pots so that they couldn't network?
And it probably differs from school to school -- depending on what the goal of the school is.
The entire sub-part of UC admissions having to do with top 9% of students (by school) being guaranteed admission is an effort to achieve racial diversity without calling it that and violating the law.
See page 9 and 21 of the UC's admissions materials. https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/counselors/file...
Going to the "correct" school can transform the life of some people, essentially pulling them up from the lower working classes, and opening up the doors to middle, or even upper-middle classes.
And what's even worse, a lot of these rich kids could go pretty much anywhere, without it affecting their future finances or lifestyle - if anything, it almost seems like a vanity project from their parents side, where they get the bragging rights that their kids are studying at HYPS or whatever.
And it's not that the kids of richer parents are necessarily worse, academically speaking - many of them get private tutors, go to private / prep schools, etc. from young age, but still the parents are so risk averse, that they feel the need to pour even more money, just to eliminate the stress of uncertainty. Even if it's illegal.
I know these cases encompass a broad range of controversy (for example that top-tier Asian-American students can't get into certain schools, because of some nonsensical "personality" assessments) - but in the end, it's just plain old classism. Doesn't mater what skin color you have, where you come from; As long as you have the cash, the odds are increasing in your favor.
Then you have rich folks like David E. Shaw. The guy spent literally tens of millions in donations, to all the top schools, just to increase the chance of his kids getting accepted (or rather - minimize the chances of their kids getting rejected)
The one that comes to mind was the study that compared long term outcomes of students who were accepted to Harvard and attended to those who were accepted but did not attend.
Average future incomes were not statistically different.
But the study did note that the starkest improvents in future incomes were found in poor and minority students.
Either way, I'm sure having a diploma from Harvard would open some doors for pretty much anyone, and I'm not naïve enough to pretend otherwise, but I have serious doubts that a diploma from Harvard can truly tell you anything other than that person has the ability to make it through Harvards' admission filter, and do mindless homework for X number of years, like every other college.
I don’t know if this comparison controls for the confounders. Alice and Bob are both accepted to Harvard, and Alice decides to attend and Bob decides to chill out at the University of Maui for four years. That’s pretty indicative of Alice being more ambitious and achievement-oriented.
I will say I don't totally understand how future income differences can be not statistically significant and also be "stark" between lower income students at the same time.
https://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/...
The no-difference in financial outcomes was based on comparing the average incomes of the two groups. So naturally, you will have outliers on both sides. They found that minority students tended to be the outliers.
Part of that probably has to do with the more prestigious school getting them a job they wouldn't have had. But also probably has to do with minority students getting access to the rich, well connected network that they wouldn't have had access to otherwise.
Edit: I believe this is it: https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322
It's nice that this sort of due diligence and review is even possible with public institutions.
> In Violation of University Policy, the Campuses We Reviewed Admitted 64 Applicants Because of Their Families’ Donations and Connections
> UC Berkeley inappropriately admitted 42 other applicants
the UC schools as a whole have ~226K students, and at Berkeley, it's ~17,000. I'm very surprised that the corresponding fractions are so small.
Then again, if you get recruited to play a sport that is all-but-exclusively a rich person's leisure activity -- Water Polo, Crew, Golf, Volleyball, and Beach volleyball are all played at Berkeley -- and recruiting gave you an edge in admissions, does that count as "inappropriate?" I would say so, but I doubt this report would. The line between corruption and "that's just how we do things around here" is not self-evident to me here.
The report comes close: "the average grade point average for the bottom quartile of applicants whom UCLA admitted for academic year 2019–20 was 4.15, but the average grade point average for its admitted student athletes was 3.74. Similarly, two‑thirds of the admitted student athletes whom UC Berkeley evaluated through its holistic review process for academic years 2017–18 through 2019–20 received the lowest possible rating from its application readers—which is equivalent to a recommendation that the applicant be denied admission."
So the student athletes averaged halfway between an A and an A-? So did I in HS, 15 years ago, and I was a pretty good student! GPAs are really hard to make sense of with all the AP bonuses and whatnot. Standardized test scores strike me as providing a more apples-to-apples comparison. Of course that’s increasingly difficult to do in a test-optional world. (My recollection from an article about ‘The Chosen’ in 2005 is that recruited athletes tend to score 100-200 points lower on the SAT, on average, at Ivy League schools. I would double-check had I not exceeded my monthly free New Yorker quota: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in/amp)
For regular classes, A: 4.0, B: 3.0, C: 2.0, D: 1.0 (with some variance depending on + or - grades offered). For Honors/AP classes, every grade is essentially bumped up 1.0 point.
So yes, a 3.74 is around an A- average, but that's an A- average in less rigorous classes, without competition from top students. That's more of a B-/C+ average in AP/Honors classes (obviously the calculation is far from perfect, though, because every school has it's quirks- at mine, you couldn't get above a ~4.5 overall). For reference, I graduated high school with a 3.6 with multiple Cs and hardly any As, simply by virtue of taking the maximum number of AP/Honors classes. The point being, a 3.74 is not a terrible GPA, but good students are generally over a 4.0 these days.
The article describes something actually inappropriate: falsely saying students are good athletes in exchange for money.
When I worked for Stanford in admissions, it ended up making up about 10-15% of each incoming class.
People on "the list" could still be denied, but the admissions officer would need to write a letter to the Dean explaining why - and that never happened.
People think donating small amounts to the school or being a legacy student help admissions, but they absolutely do not have an impact. The most impactful variables to admission are grades, race/gender, test scores, and essays - roughly in that order.
Beach volleyball is more common in areas close to the beach. Beach and indoor players are also significantly taller than the average person-- in the league that my college was a part of, the shortest woman playing middle blocker was still 185cm. Height and beach access both have correlations to socioeconomic factors.
For various reasons, the US has huge racial disparities when it comes to swimming ability. Most African American and Hispanic children don't know how to swim.
As others have mentioned, football, basketball and to a lesser extent soccer/baseball tend to be the "pleb" sports. But even within a sport, you'll see class and racial distinctions when you compare different positions. When you look at pros and college, the majority of quarterbacks and centers are white. QBs also tend to come from wealthier families. Meanwhile, wide receivers and running backs are mostly black. The defense is mostly black, and I don't think there's a single non-black cornerback in the NFL (unless you miscount Tre'Davious White)
Out of curiosity, how common is it for public elementary, middle and high-schools to include swimming lessons in (mandatory) PE class in general? How often do schools without their own swimming pools take their PE class at a nearby public pool?
This works well as a heuristic because visible racial characteristics are visible and the rich don't usually want to play with the poor.
I don't think it's in the double digits for any school. You need large amounts of wealth to donate your way in.
It's among the private schools, such as the Ivies, where this really comes into play.
[1] https://opa.berkeley.edu/campus-data/uc-berkeley-quick-facts
Beach Volleyball, I guess, kinda, but sand is pretty cheap even in cold weather climates.
Crew, sure. The 'field' is hard to get things to, typically. Lacrosse, well, maybe 20 years ago, but it's everywhere now.
Now, (horse) Polo and Dressage. Those are rich people sports.
And water polo... even if there are public pools near you, they probably aren't dedicating space for competitive water polo.
As it should. One student admitted in this fashion is too many for a public university.
Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.
How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.
Are we are starting to see similarly different sets of rules for each class in the United States? Is such privilege in accordance with our ideals of liberty and justice for all?
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rend...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
How can you fail out Timmy Upperclass, if 10 students lose their funding next year with him gone?
The limiting factor for elite universities usually isn't dollars, but the quantity of qualified tenure-track faculty and physical space. Not at the university, but overall. The number of postdocs and graduating PhD students each year with the credentials that Cal wants to accept isn't huge. Similarly, the number of rooms that the university has is limited, and both of those numbers take time to change.
A certain ticket for 4x the price of Harvard is still a really, really good deal for lots of wealthy people.
Imagine there are 10 students for 5 spots, and there is an objective ranking from most-qualified (#1) to least-qualified (#10).
Now let's assume student #10 can pay that $200k. That funds their spot plus another spot. So instead of admitting:
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
You can now admit:
{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10}
Doesn't this seem unfair to candidates #7 to #9, who are more qualified than #10, but will end up with a less valuable credential?
The question you should ask is whether being able to admit #6 is worth it.
If #10 is some trust fund baby who couldn't study himself out of a wet paper bag, then probably not.
But if #10 is merely 'good' it might be worth it to be able to admit just-0.1-GPA-short-of-great #6.
The economy travellers make it possible to travel first class. First class travel is for the moderately wealthy. The very wealthy have their own transport.
Economist article on decline of 1st class travellers: http://archive.vn/OQPt2 (2019).
The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory.
As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).
Do people really favor Marxism, or is something else wrong?
a) It's not uncommon these days for the term "Marxism" to be used as a brush to paint anyone "too left wing" (despite not being close to actual Marxists)
b) "Cultural Marxism" has become an antisemitic term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Plus, yes there are still some people in the world who believe in Marxism, although often just in a broad sense rather than thinking everything about it is right. But I doubt many on HN.
And while complaining about downvoted may be against the rules, personally I think it's completely fine in the context of wanting to understand something like your question, rather than "this shouldn't be downvoted".
So by having a guaranteed ratio of very wealthy mixed into your student pool, it's hugely beneficial to everyone else. It's practically the reason people chase after prestigious MBA educations.
The practice might be distasteful philosophically, but the results are apparently great.
That's the point -- rule of law means everyone is subject to the same rules, without partiality.
The Auditors of the State of California wrote it. A body of auditors who are officially part of the executive branch, but wholly independent of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Auditor
They are extremely professional.
I didn't look at the page header, only the domain (.ca.gov) and skimmed the illustrations and was wondering why a Canadian govt body is researching an American university. I didn't know California had its own domain.
:)
Making a donation to a university is certainly a direct way to apply money to the process, but we already see that through additional factors.
You’ve got private K-12 schools that give many people a leg up, but even the best public schools have a similar effect through zoning. You want to get your child into a better public school, you move to a home that’s zoned for it. The homes zoned for the best schools? Well they are more expensive.
That’s not even factoring in tutors, SAT prep or even just well educated parents who give their children additional support at home.
I tend to agree with the idea that it’s happening no matter what. It’s just a matter of whether we choose to acknowledge it and let it benefit others.
Many schools give a general boost for legacy, but it is not always so tit-for-tat as the transactions that occurred here with Cal. They'll often have a different non-legacy pipeline for large donor -> admission.
For instance, at Harvard, there is the legacy SCEA process, but there is also the "z-list" process which is the more direct "children of billionaires" route.
Those would simply be fraud considerations in a private institution that charges an application fee.
Of course, a private institution also has Equal Protection / (Substantive) Due Process considerations at play as to what the published factors and criteria can be, as well as (Procedural) Due Process considerations as to whether it actually follows them.
I was in graduate school when I first learned that writing good grant proposals (and other skills related to acquiring large quantities of money) was arguably more valuable than doing good science.
... I'm more surprised it was only 64 kids.
The real number is likely much, much higher, and they say so.
For public universities like those in the University of California system, to whom the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution (and, often, similar and sometimes more expansive provisions of state constitutions) apply, it probably would be a problem.
Note, even "private" universities (eg not the UC school discussed here) receive tremendous amounts of public money, as well as tax-exempt status. See, for e.x. [1]: the Ivy league received >$40B in public money and benefits from 2010-2015.
IIRC, research at MIT is >66% funded by federal grants.
Not going out to bat for legacy admissions, but it's not always tit-for-tat related to donations and there are other reasons schools do it other than just $$$ from donations.
The uber-rich aren't getting in through a generic legacy boost.
It's not perfect, but it levels the playing field a lot more than other systems. And it's good at making sure talented but poor students have access to the best programs. At those the level is high, for example the best math program probably has the highest Fields medal per student ratio of any university in the world.
The downside is that universities and engineering schools are small and underfunded so they don't stand out in worldwide rankings.
How do rich people game the system? They can to some extent game it earlier, putting their kids in better high schools. But the kids will still have to take the same exams. So generally they just avoid this system and put their kids into business schools, which are not state funded and where admission is based on much softer and game-able criteria. Or they send them to US universities.
Same goes for universities (don't know about the impact on research though, just talking about education here)
And I also highly doubt that graduating a "prestige" university really makes much difference here. If you want to make more money, start your own business.
In my opinion, a lot of problems in US come from the fact that they don't offer proper education to the lower class. In Europe it's great to share a class with kids from all kinds of backgrounds.
1/3 of them were admitted as student athletes. Everyone knows that it is official policy at most schools to accept people with athletic ability who would not qualify academically. Why? Because those athletic programs make the university a lot of money!
How is admitting someone because their family gave a lot of money any different in principle? It is just a question of reducing how many steps there are to making a profit for the school.
In any case, it might be negatively impacting the school's athletic program because real athletes have spots taken by opportunists.
My point remains. Once you've opened the door to accepting students for non-academic reasons, you've opened it to accepting them for other non-academic reasons.
(In this case I don't care about the impact on "real athletes" because I don't think that athletic programs are important to the university's core mission.)
Also these students admitted as "athletics" did not actually qualify and were never part of the team.
Therefore the fact that individual sports and athletes do not make money doesn't mean that money isn't a reason for student athletic programs.
It reminds me of the Lori Loughlin case, where she was arrested not because bribing a university to admit your child is unfair to other applicants and sullies the ideal of an academic meritocracy, but because she didn't follow the university's established process for bribery. (Matt Levine expounds on this with his usual hilarity at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...)
[1] Current admission numbers are available for each university here https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/campuses-majors...
Why? Because I also went to a Marianist high school in Italy, and it so happens that the principal of that school had in the meantime (I worked for a few years between high school and university) become procurator-general for the Marianists in Rome. He was also my Latin teacher.
So he basically told the president of the university "This person is a good student, got 99% on their maturity exam, let them in, tell your USCIS liaison to sort it out". I was given a provisional visa, took the SAT, got a nearly perfect score, and they let me in. For whatever reason, I always got enhanced screening and questioning whenever I got on an airplane or went through US customs, after that, until I got my green card, but they let me in.
Was this abuse of power? Not being sarcastic or rhetorical; I'm asking if what my principal did at the time was an abuse of power/authority.
Yes, rich kids will on average have the advantage because they are more likely to afford good studying conditions and a tutor, nothing to do about this, rich kids will always have some advantage on average. This system motivates everyone, rich or poor, that what matters most to climb the social ladder (or just not fall) is effective studying.
It really is a great system, you can see what were the grades the previous year for your dream university and course, and give it your all with knowledge that it is solely in your hands, and not depending on alumni, quotas, distance, wealth, etc.
I personally don't believe that moving to a system like China's gaokao would solve any of the issues to do with wealth, because the American university system is more than an academic system. It can't simply test for academics (although GPA is the #1 factor considered in admissions across the board), because the strength of American universities is also in community and intellectual diversity. Most applicants to top schools are academically qualified to attend.
This is just a symptom of the underlying problem with our education system in the US. It’s no longer about educating but about $. When the almighty dolla gets in the way judgment is clouded.
Come to think of it... maybe this happens in politics and medicine too? ;)
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead with JUST 64 students admitted on the basis of connections and donations.
* MIT wouldn't be caught dead letting external auditors look at this stuff.
* MIT wouldn't be caught. None of this would be public for MIT. That's what NDAs and non-disparage agreements are for.
I'm sorry, but all schools don't do this. Most are smart enough to stay out of this kind of trouble. For Harvard, it took a lawsuit and subpoenas to get in trouble over this.
Having external auditors, standards, and accountability is probably completely unique to UC/Berkeley. Admitting just 64 applicants based on graft and corruption is also unique within the top-20 schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/23/jeffrey-epst...
What I'm trying to say is that it's a world of greys and putting things in black and white terms doesn't do any good. MIT doesn't get money from selling spots, but they misstep and get money from other even less savoury places. You gotta get your money somehow.
If MIT did let in some legacy admissions due to donations, could it be said that the donations department would have been more discerning about not taking money from someone like Jeff Epstein? It's impossible to revisit history, but nobody is clean in this higher ed game.
MIT shut down the entire CSAIL mailing list -- whose legacy dates back to the old AI Lab days -- because someone had the nerve to raise the question of Epstein, asking what MIT's attitude should be towards a faculty member who visited the island. The list had been through horrible flamewars, thick and thin, over it's many-decade existence, and it finally took the whole Epstein cover-up to shut it down. MIT did the equivalent of a shadowban, collecting all emails sent to the list, but not forwarding them to the community for two days, to see what people send BEFORE announcing it was shut down. A lot of people sent a lot of stuff they wanted to share with the community but not the leadership.
To give a slight bit more context, the question was about a faculty member who had visited Epstein's island. We were promised that'd be answered in MIT's so-called fact-finding report. Naturally, it wasn't. It got shut down before anyone publicly put 2 and 2 together.
Read it again.
this isn't a controversial opinion
The vast majority of people in highly-competitive positions are not doing the right thing.
* A statement like "all politicians are corrupt" is to a first order accurate. You can't get elected without money, and you can't get money without doing donor bidding.
* A statement like "all executives are psychopaths" is not accurate, but becomes pretty close to accurate as you look at organizations with more than 1000-people who are no longer led by founders. You don't make it to the top of the corporate ladder without outcompeting people fighting dirty. People who are clean don't make it to the top.
* Not all academics fabricate data, but a growing number of academics at elite schools do. MIT has 1000 applicants for each faculty slot at CSAIL. You don't make it through that level of competition without cheating at least a little bit, and that makes it into the culture.
* Not all universities are corrupt, but by similar logic, most universities with massive endowments are. Dirty money goes to institutions willing to accept it.
Same thing goes across the board. Most religious leaders are deeply ethical people. Televangelists tend to be corrupt. Most lawyers who make partner tend to be a little bit unethical. Etc.
Anytime you get high enough on the ladders, bad behavior goes up.
indeed, the USA has made a business-marketplace out of anything, including things which should never be driven by profit driven competition (e.g. jails)
There is an argument to be made that the race-based admissions help make up for prior injustices.
A good "Church of Satan" reaction to these policies in California would be a university that set the bar higher for Black applicants, with the justification that other policies have in fact over-corrected for past injustices, and now the injustice of that over-correction must be righted.
The thing to keep in mind is that the justification for some of the worst racism in history has been injustice or past injustices. We should learn from history and pre-commit as a society to react hyper-negatively to any policy that involves racial discrimination. Get it the hell out of the Overton window.
so it was legal until then but didn’t make a dent in inequality? but i’m sure it’ll work this time!
It's either to take the top students, bar none, or it is to educate and uplift poorer students (economically and educationally). Mixing these two doesn't work.
In this case, the students are alleged to have been less qualified which does not imply unqualified.
Once you're admitted, you no longer need to participate in the rat race. You just need to meet the criteria for passing your classes, which do not scale up, just because the person sitting next to you in lecture is an orphanage-builder.
i bet this fact is how the admissions officials rationalized this corruption -- if the line between acceptance and rejection is arbitrary anyway, how much worse could it be to try to get some money out of it? (a lot worse)
Agreed. I was accepted to a top-5 school and rejected from more than one school ranked 25+ (one was >50). I know someone for grad school applied to 5 schools: they got rejected from all 5 schools, reapplied the next year, and got accepted to 3/5.
Malcolm Gladwell (yeah, yeah, I know) did a podcast series about the admissions process for law schools and the role that test taking speed plays in the admission process.
This is one of the papers he referenced:
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Yet it makes sense because universities want to lessen liabilities and have rich alum give back (esp. the case with the children of wealthy donors).
Never giving a penny.
(In all seriousness, the people who call are usually just students working a job, so be respectful of you plan to do the same. Just ask to mark that as the reason for no donation).
If they cant, well, they can get in line like everyone else.
This really just makes the process transparent and put a price tag on it. And now, if a professor or dean takes a lower donation for admittance, they're stealing from the school and would be put in jail, not given some wrist slap or administrative leave.
If you incentivize "anti-social behavior" (this seemed like a reasonable middle ground word), what else does anyone expect to happen?
I don't care what the rich person spends their money on, but I do care about the student that worked hard, played by the rules, and deserved to be admitted but because of corruption was denied their spot.
UC is not a business, it's a public institution. Every Californian tax-payer pays for this institution, the administrators are there to be stewards of the public funds for the public good.
As a Californian tax-payer, I care about the mismanagement of the institution that my tax dollars fund.
People seem to want robotic admission standards.
Is there no room for circumstance?
Does a donation to the school that helps improve the quality of the school and the research need to come without strings attached?
Should the rich be required to have such purity of intention? Or should they only donate to private schools where they can legally have influence?
By being the child of a wealth donor, does the person being admitted (through this side channel) not have more potential impact on the world and thus more reason to be admitted?
On the other side, does the education have the most impact on the person who was denied entrance (bottom of the applicant pool), assuming they would get through to graduation. (utility of education)
I think the person writing this report clearly has an agenda, as can bee seen in the level of sensationalism in the clip art.
It is a non-editorialized factual report by the office auditor of CA. It's literally their job to audit things
There is and there should be. Affirmative action has already been help up by the US supreme court.
> Does a donation to the school that helps improve the quality of the school and the research need to come without strings attached?
Yes.
> Should the rich be required to have such purity of intention? Or should they only donate to private schools where they can legally have influence?
A donation should not be used as a way to get one's child into a university. That's not a donation. That's an entrance fee.
> On the other side, does the education have the most impact on the person who was denied entrance (bottom of the applicant pool), assuming they would get through to graduation.
That seems reasonably true, though I have no source to back this up.
Now it is starting to sound like capitalism at work!!!
"BOARS’s guidance provides recommended reasons for considering an applicant for admission by exception. These include the applicants having overcome personal challenges, having had limited or nontraditional educational opportunities, having special talents, or having academic achievements equivalent to the eligibility requirements."
The report takes no issue with such a system, just the one where people pay for their special exception.
The best way to get around the funny business: have a system where students are classified into bins. Be very clear with donors: if a student isn't in the "top bin", they will not get in. However, in that bin, allow the "donor connection" to influence admission.
Is this perfect? No, of course not. But it accepts the reality of the world without perverting it too much. And honestly: can you really predict if one student is going to do better than another because of 1pt on some standardized test?
Most donation-influenced admits are borderline to begin with - it just eliminates the randomness of the admissions process. The issue here is that Cal is public, and so more laws apply.
Moreover, universities want students with a wide variety of academic (and other) interests.
Is the issue that Berkeley has to comply with state laws and regulations that mandate that admissions be based solely on academics rather than other considerations? Or is it that they put on a facade of solely considering academics without acknowledging the (many) non-academic considerations that may override admissions decisions?
I suppose the real problem is that UCs are no longer financed fully by the state. If they were, there would be no excuse for this.
It's a part of the nature of these schools that money/donors get kids into school. That's the way it's always been, and it's worth saying it up front. That's the first step.
And face it, this is the reason UC Berkely, etc are so great. It's because there are donors supplying a huge stream of funding dollars. Without these kinds of favours, UC Berkeley will be a 4th or 5th rate school.
You want that new lab or that new library wing? Accept some kids with rich families. That's how it works.
If they want to establish a policy of selling seats to raise money, there's nothing inherently unconstitutional about that. But, they need to change the policies, and if necessary, state law to allow this to happen legally and with the consent of the taxpaying citizens.
For example, how many movies or sitcoms have you heard a phrase a long the lines "My boy is going to ____ just like I did."
I understand how donations or children of prominent alumni got around admissions...but babysitting can get someone entry over others? That seems like a bit of a stretch.
I see no problem with universities having an admission tier for rich people that's like 10x as expensive as normal tuition, but completely bypasses the application process.
Or maybe they auction off 5% of their seats and let the market set the price for those no-qualifications-required seats.
So these people donated and then got admission to UC Berkeley in exchange. Surely that has some value! I don't know how you determine that figure, but it's >>$0
(Of course, that wouldn't mean that nobody ever does report this sort of thing to make tax savings, in which cases I would assume you're right it would be tax fraud but again I'm not the person to answer that.)
I wonder how this comment section would look if it was revealed that people from a low income background had hacked the admissions system to gain entry. I expect the tone would be much more critical, calling for prosecutions and sanctions, and lamenting the sheer unfairness of it. I'm pretty sure it would be in stark contrast to all the bribery apologism we can see in these threads.
But I’m not remotely surprised. Didn’t everyone in this thread, or basically everyone everywhere, kind of assume that donors get some sort of perks? Even if it is corrupt, isn’t it the most obvious and predictable corruption? Would donations drop without this corruption? Are the donations vital to the school’s budget? Should we do away with donations to Universities somehow?
These are all things that come to mind.
When a public school does this, it's a violation of the public trust and taking advantage of taxpayers.
> If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline
I think you just answered your own question.
Both of my parents went to Cal, which at an Ivy might guarantee admission but in my case didn't affect my chances at all (which is a good thing!). I hope this doesn't taint the school's reputation too much.
so no this doesn’t really have a systemic effect on anybody. and perhaps the money donated actually paid for scholarships for poor kids
Pure meritocracy.
And certain kinds of merit can come primarily/only from high caste individuals. How do you choose merit that isn't coloured in race or otherwise?
I saw one donor give a few thousand and one person get admitted for babysitting. Almost all the donations in the report went directly to athletic departments, which would only seem to help student athletes and not academically qualified students that were bumped.
SHOCKED!
It is entirely legal (though morally problematic) to "donate" your way into a school with a donation to the school directly.
There have been other scandals in the last few years where officials were bribed directly, and that looked worse.
[1] https://haseebq.com/how-to-break-into-tech-job-hunting-and-i...
I don't know about you, but I've used all of those in real software. Additionally, I'm happy teaching myself skills needed for programming that I wasn't taught in college, but I'd much rather learn something like calculus from a teacher than on my own.