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You Have to Pay the Right Person
- cryptica 8y agoIf one influential person does something bad, it's called "fraud", if a small number of influential people do something bad together, it's called "unfair". If most influential people do something bad together, it's called "reality".
- rexpop 8y ago...to say nothing of the countless millions of un-influential persons violently robbed of life and liberty for just being imagined to have participated in such things.
- doctorpangloss 8y agoYeah, I don’t know. Most of the kids in the elite education system are alright, they didn’t build this world and generally believe in an equitable one. College campuses are pretty much the most liberal places in the United States. For every 1 rich kid buying their way in, there are 10 normal kids. It’s a big red herring to worry too much about a handful of admissions to eg USC. It’s hardly an elite institution anyway. 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.
- chess93 8y agoWhat's the difference between someone getting in because their parents bought a building and someone getting in because their parents spent 50k/year on a highschool?
- magnetic 8y agoThe kid from the $50K/year high school got an education for that price (albeit expensive) and got in through his/her own work & dedication (you could say that the expensive high school "paid off"). That kid is supposed to be competent, since he got in through merit. The other kid, on the other hand...
- analog31 8y agoTwo different competitive pools of different sizes. The pool of kids with buildings might be small enough that they can be accepted at a 100% rate, whereas the pool of $50k/y high school kids can only be accepted at a lower rate, maybe 20% ballpark. 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.
- Nasrudith 8y agoThe difference is are they getting in because of money and connections vs qualifications money helped acquire. 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".
- CydeWeys 8y agoIn one case, $200k is being given to a high school in exchange for an education that may be of significantly higher quality than the public schools in that area (it varies widely). 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.
- OrgNet 8y agoif a non-influential person does the same thing, it's called a felony
- scarcely 8y agoJust because one is a felon doesn't mean "it's all over". Case in point, Jeremy Meeks
- cannonedhamster 8y agoIn many states you lose your right to vote, you lose your right to firearms, you lose your right to privacy since you're now a known felon, you have almost no chance of getting a white collar job or a high paying job unless you were already connected before the felony and very wealthy. Poor people who get felonies often get tougher sentences because they can't afford the lawyers of the wealthy. Pretty sure for most people a felony severely limits any chances of a life that isn't just scraping by or in the best case middle class. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130647626 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130647...
- teslaberry 8y agowhether that's original of yours or not, it's salient and relevant and on point. good job and thanks for a pithy memorable quote.
- galaxyLogic 8y agoHow about this: Hire some Yale students to teach your kid everything they know. That way your kid gets into the social club that is perhaps the most valuable thing about attending an elite university.
- drcode 8y agoWhat good is that if you don't get the magic piece of paper at the end that says "I went to Harvard"?
- galaxyLogic 8y agoProbably right, but you could say: I was taught by the brightest students at Harward. Brendan Eichnan was my teacher! Zuckerberg too. In fact I gave him the original inspiration for Facebook :-)
- bredren 8y ago>Like so many things, it is an aristocratic economy of gifts and relationships, not a grubby transaction. I enjoyed the style and tone of the writing in this article.
- konschubert 8y agoMatt Levine is the author. This daily column is called “Money stuff”. You can get it for free via email.
- bredren 8y agoI’ll check it out. Ty.
- fierro 8y agothis sentence also particularly stuck out to me!
- wppick 8y agoWith 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
- jondubois 8y agoI 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.
- stormbeard 8y agoTo me, this looks like an analogy for the state of software interviews.
- torqueTorrent 8y agoEven 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".
- 8y ago
- nlh 8y agoMatt Levine (author of this piece) is amazing, and I suggest everyone subscribe to the ‘Money Stuff’ newsletter. It’s this column, every (week) day, and it’s absilutely hilarious. I describe it to friends as “The Daily Show in written form for finance nerds”
- jrumbut 8y agoIt's the funny side of what is called late capitalism. 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.
- kwindla 8y agoFunny, lucidly written (as you describe), and extraordinarily insightful in making connections across areas of finance that are usually presented in the business press as silos. Matt Levine is a rare talent.
- artursapek 8y agoI love me a good Levine piece.
- creato 8y agoThis article really harps on the "just donate a building like a real rich person" fallacy like so many people I've seen since this case broke. 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.
- mfringel 8y agoThere might be a net increase in available resources for each student, but there's no evidence to support that there would be net increase in available spots. 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.
- analog31 8y agoCynically, it could be even worse. A nicer gym gives students a bigger tuition bill.
- Thorrez 8y agoHow is "just donate a building like a real rich person" a fallacy? 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.
- gimmeThaBeet 8y agoIt's not a fallacy, he's saying that its not the point. The question is why is this the crime? 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.
- adjkant 8y agoWhat's far more egregious than people buying their way in is the legacy and sport admissions system. I would go after those long before those that make large donations to schools, which at least benefit other students attending in the process. 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.
- testpostpls 8y agoLife isn’t fair. People don’t want to catch grief for it. They don’t want to be “gone after.” Part of the draw of hiring from these pools is you’re less likely to get folks who have the hang ups you’ve displayed in your post.
- Nasrudith 8y agoI really hate "life isn't fair" as an excuse to be an asshole. It is like excusing tripping a guy with a limp for being slow and prone to injury anyway. Just because it may be so is no excuse for making it worse. 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.
- int_19h 8y agoLife is as fair as we make it; it's not like there's some force of nature that makes some people screw over others. It's their choice.