7 ms·

What happens after rich kids bribe their way into college? I teach them

106 points by haasted 8y ago

mettamage 8y ago
I am curious if any of this would happen in my own country — The Netherlands. I would think not, but then again, neither did I know about US universities.
- ragebol 8y ago
  It's been a few years since university, but there are only a few numerus fixus studies in The Netherlands AFAIK. For those, bribing yourself in would make sense, but I also doubt it happens and you would be found out soon I suppose. But it could..
- zaroth 8y ago
  Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    Not being able to survive the vacuum of space is a basic human condition, too. Yet we developed space suits that allow ourselves to operate in there. >> Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition. Over the past 20 centuries we saw enough events that implied literally killing those who were abusing their positions of power, and I am pretty sure poor people are absolutely capable of doing so again today. History is periodic, but lack of ethics isn't a basic human condition.
    - veryworried 8y ago
      Nobody is killing anybody. We need a peaceful, sustainable solution to let those who abuse power fall and those who have the good interests of people at heart to rise.
      - cheez 8y ago
        That's what they want you to do so they can maintain power. The threat of violence is what keeps people in line. Don't like it? Go talk to the police about it (you know... those people who use the threat of violence)
  - ojilles 8y ago
    But different cultures look differently at that spectrum. I would expect to find differences from one country to another.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    True. But the university-as-a-business, alumni-as-donors, and non-grades-based-admissions are famously strong at US universities. A university that was government-funded well enough that it didn't have to solicit rich alumni could employ traditional anti-corruption/anti-cheating mechanisms, like blind admissions based on grades alone.
    - zaroth 8y ago
      Blind admissions based on grades alone sounds like a terrible way to prevent cheating or select college applicant in general. But that’s because I believe strongly in the power of outliers and that systems need to support and foster those outliers to achieve the best outcomes. The smartest and most qualified applicants often don’t have the best grades. In fact I think a purely grades based system would be far from optimal, select for the wrong strengths, and miss many of the best applicants. Of the top 10 universities ranked by number of Nobel prizes, the US holds 8 spots. US is doing something right.
- yitchelle 8y ago
  When this story first broke, I wondered if there are much bigger occurrences in Asian countries where getting into the "right" school is ultra competitive?
  - sct202 8y ago
    Most Asian countries use high stakes testing as the 'fair' way to admit students, so most of the cheating/bribery is on the testing side.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Educational corruption used to be much worse in Asian and African colleges (I don't know if it still is. I have been out of the loop for a long time.); it was a near-continuous source of amusement at the department level when new grad students arrived expecting to continue to get by on money or contacts. On the other hand, most of those students didn't take up an excessive amount of faculty and TA time. Instead, they kept their heads down. Most of the class time I saw wasted was due to fully-qualified students who wanted to argue with the instructor or who thought they should be teaching the class.
- deugtniet 8y ago
  I guess I'm part of academia in the Netherlands, doing a PhD and teaching students. I have seen students who 'game' the system, but our job is not on the line if we refuse to play ball. This is likely only so because our universities are publicly funded, and don't require rich students and alumni for funds. In the case of disputes on grades and extracurriculars, the commission of exams will nearly exclusively side with the teacher. Except when it can be shown that the teacher dropped the ball severely. Another factor in this matter is that once you have reached your second year, you can do your coursework for as long as you like, so there is little consequence in failing a course other than extending study time. That being said, I work in a field that is not as sexy as some others (medicine, psychology), and I would guess the issues are bigger there, due to the kind of students that are attracted to these types of majors.
  - joris 8y ago
    Yes, in Holland students know they can simply fail an exam and usually know that’s on them. In the US, students can literally complain to the dean who then puts pressure on the professor. And they do, so professors know to err on the lenient side. In fact: the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless.
    - throwaway32479 8y ago
      > the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless. I won't deny grade inflation, but Harvard allows students to drop classes very late in the semester. For "hard" classes, it wasn't uncommon for less than 25% of the students present in the second week of class to still be around to take the final. I never saw anything like that at the public university I went to as an undergrad. Some amount of the high average grade is because the students not doing so well in the course drop with little to no penalty.
jseliger 8y ago
This matches my experiences teaching at non-elite schools. Entitlement is high and professors are hired either for research (among TT faculty) or as adjuncts; the former realize that their research is important and one student making a stink can jeopardize their TT work. The latter realize that one student making a stink can jeopardize their contracts. See also https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-people-are-fine-but-its-that-last-five-percent/ https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe.... So the incentive is to give the students what they want. In addition, in most schools no one knows what a given set of admins will do or whether admins will back faculty. So what are professors incentivized to do? What are admins incentivized to do? Particularly in an age where accusations of impropriety are common and can also sink or stymie careers. The number of tools students have is large; the number faculty have, small. All this is also compatible with The Case Against Education: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education-bryan-caplan https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...
- repolfx 8y ago
  The issue of administrators who repeatedly side with students even in absurd situations seems to be slowly reaching awareness. There's a good short video here that explores what's been happening at Yale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM Trigger warning - it has clips of students attacking professors and acting in ways that are completely delusional. I found it almost physically hard to watch and from the comments, seems I wasn't the only one. In a scene where a professor is literally surrounded by students yelling at him and having meltdowns, it's shown that one of the adults at the back of the group is an actual university administrator: he watches passively and does nothing to intervene. The presenter argues the problem is that the administrators are often just as extreme as the students and benefit from cowtowing to almost any level of immature nonsense because the students demands inevitably translate into growth of administrative departments.
11thEarlOfMar 8y ago
Who is more guilty? The parents bribing their way in, or the schools for not sufficiently policing the gate keepers? The author claims that blowing the whistle is not an option faculty is ready to take due to the risk it brings to their career, but I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.
- forgottenpass 8y ago
  >I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role. How do you know they didn't? Six months ago, would anyone have listened to them? The answer is no, because we all already knew about the sports and 'legacy' students.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Sports and legacies are different. They bring money, and lots of it. New buildings, better facilities, better equipment, etc. Thousands of other students benefit if I admit the daughter of a philanthropic billionaire. These "lesser nobles" who just give some women's sports coach a bribe, or pay to get a higher SAT score are doing nothing for any of the other thousands of students. It literally ONLY gives THEIR kid a leg up.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      For that matter, the "greater nobles" would just as soon bribe their way in over paying millions in "philanthropic" gifts. The only way you could ever get these incentivized donations would be if bribery is not an option or too risky of an option. If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal practice of exchanging a service for money.
choeger 8y ago
How dare they to demand students to actually do some studying! Honestly, it is refreshing to see someone from an elite university to face the same issues that we at the lower universities complained about for decades. Admitting everyone and their cat to universities destroys them. But I think this is a lost cause. Popular culture has completely lost the idea that you have to work (hard) to improve yourself. Everything nowadays is about "equal this" and "equal that", no one recognizes that opportunities do not automatically lead to outcome.
- mfoy_ 8y ago
  The real problem is that society is more and more treating universities like companies that sell a product instead of educational institutions. The idea that "I paid for this, so I deserve it" is toxic.
  - dustindiamond 8y ago
    Well, universities act like companies, particularly resorts.
  - VyseofArcadia 8y ago
    It's not just an idea they keep in their heads. I've had students tell me that to my face.
    - bunderbunder 8y ago
      They don't get it from nowhere, though. The public transit in my city is plastered with advertisements that have headlines reading, "Get a career in X!" These campaigns are being run by every one of the local universities, and quite a few ones that are further afield, too. It seems like the only ones still advertising an education rather than an income boost are the city colleges. Like it or not, incoming students' perception of the nature of their college education is going to be driven by the admissions office's hijinks. Faculty don't get to talk to them until later.
  - skocznymroczny 8y ago
maxaf 8y ago
Can’t the labor market do anything about this? I wouldn’t mind implementing changes to resume review that deprioritize degrees from “elite” universities. I’m sure I’d miss some legitimate candidates, but how much of a problem can that really be considering the cheating that pervades these schools?
- YorkshireSeason 8y ago
  The labour market has already responded to this, at least in computer science: you need to do coding challenges in many / most job interviews in parts because a degree, even a good degree from a top school is no longer strongly predictive of your coding ability.
  - maxaf 8y ago
    True, but that’s still a surprisingly progressive stance. Not 18 months ago I got rejected after crushing the interview because “no one at this firm would vouch for someone without a college degree”. This still happens to me now as often as when I began my career in the early 00s.
    - YorkshireSeason 8y ago
      Unfortunately, this also happens, but I think it is an orthogonal issue. Degree / No-Degree is not a filter I apply personally, but I can see why some companies use it. When you get 2000+ applications for a position, you need to filter out almost all extremely quickly. Just because there are many charlatans with a degree, doesn't mean no-degrees are perfect ...
- mcguire 8y ago
  "Deprioritizing elite universities" would be more damaging than helpful. We are talking a smallish minority of students.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 8y ago
mabbo 8y ago
This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. Sure, there's things like sports scholarships or the super rich kids whose parents donated a building, etc, but that's a small percentage. The school can just admit those admissions are unfair and be honest about it.
- apetresc 8y ago
  > This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. > > Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.
  - mabbo 8y ago
    Fair point. But surely somewhere out there is some metric that can calculate a students likelihood of succeeding at University but also isn't easy to cheat at.
    - apetresc 8y ago
      Something other than a human evaluation of a student's entire resume, which is what we have now? No, it's not at all obvious to me that such a thing is possible. That's basically tantamount to fortune-telling.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The grade/score threshold itself is easy to game, which is a big part of why universities generally use a rubric that encourages the admissions department to look at other things as well. For example, because of a quirk in how the grade point system in one of the high schools I went to worked, it was very nearly a mathematical impossibility for kids who took an extra class instead of a study hall period to make it to the top echelons of the honor roll. Creating a strategy where, for example, helicopter parents who wanted to see their kid named valedictorian would forbid them from taking that extra class, since doing so would have knocked them out of the running. Similarly, the college admissions exams are well-known to be poor predictors of academic aptitude. A big chunk of what they measure is simply how much money your parents spent on prep programs and tutors. This is even before we start digging into the muddy waters about the extent to which grades and test scores unintentionally measure factors related to socioeconomic background rather than academic aptitude, though there does seem to be a pretty robust body of research around that morass as well.
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining). Anyone who's ever taken a class with one of these professors should know what I'm talking about. Watching them teach is like watching an expert tradesman craft some product and finely adjust their inputs and technique as they go in order to get the desired result. They seem to be able to teach their selected content to the student equivalent of a brick. It's the professors who are interested in doing all the other things professors do but regard teaching as a chore that have problems with under-performing students. They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) and it shows when the lower quality students fall through. That doesn't mean they're not good professors, they just aren't good teachers. I've known some really great professors that I would never want to take any class from because they didn't prioritize good teaching and likewise sucked at it. Undergrads and these professors would probably be happier if schools relaxed the teaching requirements for this group but that has other trade-offs. As the price of college has increased the amount of extra work (office hours, Q/A sessions before major tests, etc.) professors are expected to do to prevent the customer from failing and having to spend thousands to go around again has increased with it. This is independent of student quality. The author sounds like he/she is annoyed with the new normal and is blaming it on the few people who bribed their way in. In reality student performance in any given class is going to depend mostly on how much they care. If you're teaching some elective that checks a certain box for a large group of undergrads and sounds like it's easy but is really a lot of work you're gonna have a lot of students barely passing, even the smart ones because your class simply isn't a priority for them. These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  > They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) To be clear, it's not just less important to the professors, it's less important to the school as well. Just look at the tenure guidelines to see this: Publications and grants are by and large the biggest part of your tenure portfolio. At a good school, you can get tenure while being a mediocre lecturer, but you will never get tenure being a mediocre researcher. So can we really blame professors for reacting to the incentives they are given?
gwbas1c 8y ago
I really enjoyed this article, but I want to point out something: > to regard themselves as customers who are always right I encountered a lot of awful professors in college. (A private, 2nd tier school.) Some were outright incompetent, and others adversarial towards their students. The admissions process also portrayed the school as career prep, not education for the sake of pursuing knowledge. The disconnect at times between how the experience was marketed, versus what the professors wanted to do, was shocking. The reality is that a college education is expensive, and ultimately funded by a customer, either the student or the student's parents. Quality must be demanded by the paying customer. Or, to put it mildly, when every student is a customer paying a quarter million dollars, they need to be treated as such. That doesn't mean fabricating grades, but that does mean going the extra mile to please someone who ultimately is funding your paycheck.
pcurve 8y ago
I'm in my 40s and went to one of them Ivy schools. There were legacies. There were affirm action kids that clearly weren't at the same level as others. But I didn't mind. They all studied hard, and harder than others because they knew. They knew how they got it, and they knew that even smart kids flunk out. IMHO, this is more of a broader trend that has more to do with poor parenting. I went through schooling systems in HK, Korea, America at very different ages. Parents didn't dare meddling with how teachers taught. Teachers were the rule of law. Got B+? Well, tough shit. Did you take advantage of all the professor and teacher assistant office hours? Yes? Sorry but maybe you're just not as good as others taking the same course. (My own experience taking Comp sci 100)
many_indicator 8y ago
You'd think a 1500+, 4.0+, 12+ AP course student coming from an elite magnet school, with a parental income of $250,000+ is smarter than the poor kid from rural Idaho that lacked such opportunities. The poor rural kid from Idaho may not be admitted to MIT, Duke, Berkeley, ivies and may not look as good as that 1500+ kid, but you surely will miss kids like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller that would have been successful at an MIT or Caltech. While the 1500+ kid might have gotten that score due to SAT prep, they may not actually be that smart. The Idaho kid could be much more intelligent, but since they're coming in with fewer AP courses and fewer ECs, they wouldn't pass the sniff test.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  First, lots of kids get 1500+. Even the kids getting special consideration would have such an SAT score. So if you can't match that score, I'd strongly urge you to give serious consideration to some "safety" schools. Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union. Which means the easiest way into a lot of these schools is not a wicked three point shot, but rather to graduate high school in Wyoming. Third, if you're from Idaho and are not admitted, it means there were better candidates that these schools selected in lieu of yourself. (Remember, a lot of schools have a mandate, so they definitely admitted someone.) So introspection is in order. What did the other Idaho candidates have that you did not?
  - many_indicator 8y ago
    >Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union. That may be true. But to tell a kid from rural Idaho she has a shot at MIT, when her parents never graduated from high school, may not be something she'd believe, even if she could get into MIT. Even if she'd get a full ride, her parents may encourage her not to apply, since they'd tell her it's too expensive, and she may believe that over reality. Just because a university tries to help such people, she may never get the message. It isn't like rural America is where Harvard is sending their representatives to educate poor rural kids their opportunities. A talented poor person may not realize they could actually get into Harvard, so why waste an application fee? Being poor effects you in ways most non-poor people cannot begin to understand. It effects your mindset, attitude and outlook on life. It can artificially lower your goals and scope.
casion 8y ago
> They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well. I assume this means 'do well in class', however I think the article itself points out the real, genuinely valuable, thing the students learn: > In comparing stories, we have also found that such students strive to “work the system”, using university procedures to get the grades they desire Like it or not, this is how many people find success. Rich, poor or in between. I think that a lot of this behaviour is deplorable, but I can't deny that it requires some type of intelligence and work. It's just not the type of smarts or ethic that most people value. Perhaps after hundreds of years of this 'privileged kid games the system' dynamic, it's time to embrace that and use it as leverage to encourage the students towards more generally accepted modes of effort. Or maybe not... the school's are already teaching them to be successful. Maybe this is a question of ethics, not education?
- imgabe 8y ago
  I wouldn't call that success, unless parasites are successful. At the end of the day, we need people to do real work and produce real results. You can't "game the system" into building a good road or writing a good operating system or growing healthy food. These people leech off of others who are doing the real work and they drag down everyone by accumulating resources without providing real value in return. Like any parasite, they should be removed.
mcnichol 8y ago
We are dealing with the path of least resistance and the natural flow of entropy. It seems naive to believe these institutions are not businesses at the end of the day. To change people wanting a degree for degrees sake due to the institution, then you have to add weight to the knowledge that comes with the degree (or detection of it). I have an assumption that won't scale and you will question if it's as big a problem as it feels and what change can be controlled on a weak-link biased system.
JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Didn't faculty used to run the Universities? When they abdicated that job to administrators, they sealed their fate.
cbsks 8y ago
There’s a follow-up piece with responses from other professors here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-bribery-scandal-professors-respond-to-our-anonymous-column https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-brib...
adamnemecek 8y ago
The big problem with universities is that a lot of the work required is just tool. Uninteresting, time consuming, somewhat out of date. And the professors have the worst attitudes. "This is how it is, deal with it".
darepublic 8y ago
Open source knowledge, remove impediments from those who want to better themselves. Decrease the irrational social value of a degree.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  I think that much of the social value of a degree is the demonstration that you can overcome impediments.
rygxqpbsngav 8y ago
Impeccable timing. Haven't read the article, but want to say something. i was watching a regional film 2 days ago. The plot starts with a doctor doing wrong surgery to hero's father and so he loses his father. The doctor, apparently, bribed himself into the university for studying even though he never gets any qualifying results in the entrance exams.The story goes on and questions the audience in the end, will you risk with your own life or your loved ones in the hands of them? Don't know if there is any governance or other controls in U.S. uni's but that's not how it should work. Isn't it discouraging one way for a student who earned it after hard work, compared to the one who simply enters a uni just because he was happens to be born to a rich father. Don't want to question the morality or ethical side, but it just doesn't feel right and should be handled in someway. may be more stricter exams etc. But I don't think that's practical either as they can easily workaround the system same way.
zaroth 8y ago
If someone wants to donate $70 million and maybe their kid gets a free pass into the university, I think that’s a win-win. Presumably that $70 million is being used to provide a tremendous amount of resources for everyone who attends the goal. A lot of kids get full ride scholarships on the back of that $70 million, or a pretty sweet new building gets built on the campus. Obviously there’s a trade-off in fairness and at some point ($7 million? $700k? $70k?) you look at it and say, no that’s not worth taking a spot away from another student. Bribery obviously is a different matter, because the gains aren’t going to the university and therefore the students in any form.
- La-ang 8y ago
  So ethics have a price? Meritocracy should be bought and sold?
  - zaroth 8y ago
    Well there isn’t a meritocracy to begin with, so that’s not the choice we actually have here. But no, I’m not a purist, I think as a practical matter the majority of choices we make have externalities or trade-offs and sometimes you weigh the good versus the bad. Society is certainly worse off as a whole by not taking the $70 million donation and maybe there’s one rich kid who doesn’t get in. Obviously this approach has its limits and can go terribly wrong. Would you let one die to save a billion? Would you shoot down a plane that’s been hijacked? I don’t think it makes sense to be moral absolutists when the world is filled with practical choices that have to be made that will save some people and hurt others. Is it really ethical to fail to provide full scholarships to let’s say 1,000 students because 1 student’s application got fast tracked? My two cents are that “legacy” students are real (probably pervasive), and so is the benefit to pocketing their big fat donations.
TheAsprngHacker 8y ago
I am a highschooler who is interested higher-level theoretical computer science and math. I am motivated to get into a good college because I want to have good educational foundations and the opportunity to meet professors involved in the research areas that I am interested in. Seeing the college admissions bribery scandal outraged me. Society pressures people my age into getting into a good college as an indicator of worth. Before the controversy, I had already felt cynical about the whole culture of test prep and ungenuine ECs. I feel as though society pressures other teenagers and me into not being true to ourselves, and living our own lives, but instead doing things just for the grades or the attractiveness to college admissions officers. When the bribery became known, it bolstered my belief that elite colleges are places of classism, dishonesty, and phoniness. The girl mentioned in the article who said that she was going to party instead of study is especially a slap in the face for me. Therefore, I have a conflicting view of elite colleges. On one hand, I greatly admire the professors who work at the colleges, and respect the colleges as places of research. On the other hand, I have a cynical view that elite colleges are a place for social prestige. I had wondered if there was a conflict between the interests of the professors, who would like passionate students, and the interests of the admissions officers, who, according to the scandal, maintain a class barrier by taking bribes instead of admitting students egalitarianly. This article solidified my thoughts that there is a conflict between the interests of professors and admissions officers.
maxmayer 7y ago
As I see there is no governance or other controls in U.S. and that's very upset. Look like rich kids can buy whatever they wanna and I suppose rules must be chagnged anyway. No expensive services, just available for anyone. Paperell looks like it so I also wanna add that goverment should prevent such situations in the future and that's all..

106 points by haasted 8y ago

I am curious if any of this would happen in my own country — The Netherlands. I would think not, but then again, neither did I know about US universities.

ragebol 8y ago
It's been a few years since university, but there are only a few numerus fixus studies in The Netherlands AFAIK. For those, bribing yourself in would make sense, but I also doubt it happens and you would be found out soon I suppose. But it could..
zaroth 8y ago
Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition.
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  Not being able to survive the vacuum of space is a basic human condition, too. Yet we developed space suits that allow ourselves to operate in there. >> Rich parents setting up their kids using tactics at various degrees along the ethical-unethical-illegal spectrum is not a US centric phenomenon but a basic human condition. Over the past 20 centuries we saw enough events that implied literally killing those who were abusing their positions of power, and I am pretty sure poor people are absolutely capable of doing so again today. History is periodic, but lack of ethics isn't a basic human condition.
  - veryworried 8y ago
    Nobody is killing anybody. We need a peaceful, sustainable solution to let those who abuse power fall and those who have the good interests of people at heart to rise.
    - cheez 8y ago
      That's what they want you to do so they can maintain power. The threat of violence is what keeps people in line. Don't like it? Go talk to the police about it (you know... those people who use the threat of violence)
- ojilles 8y ago
  But different cultures look differently at that spectrum. I would expect to find differences from one country to another.
- michaelt 8y ago
  True. But the university-as-a-business, alumni-as-donors, and non-grades-based-admissions are famously strong at US universities. A university that was government-funded well enough that it didn't have to solicit rich alumni could employ traditional anti-corruption/anti-cheating mechanisms, like blind admissions based on grades alone.
  - zaroth 8y ago
    Blind admissions based on grades alone sounds like a terrible way to prevent cheating or select college applicant in general. But that’s because I believe strongly in the power of outliers and that systems need to support and foster those outliers to achieve the best outcomes. The smartest and most qualified applicants often don’t have the best grades. In fact I think a purely grades based system would be far from optimal, select for the wrong strengths, and miss many of the best applicants. Of the top 10 universities ranked by number of Nobel prizes, the US holds 8 spots. US is doing something right.
yitchelle 8y ago
When this story first broke, I wondered if there are much bigger occurrences in Asian countries where getting into the "right" school is ultra competitive?
- sct202 8y ago
  Most Asian countries use high stakes testing as the 'fair' way to admit students, so most of the cheating/bribery is on the testing side.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Educational corruption used to be much worse in Asian and African colleges (I don't know if it still is. I have been out of the loop for a long time.); it was a near-continuous source of amusement at the department level when new grad students arrived expecting to continue to get by on money or contacts. On the other hand, most of those students didn't take up an excessive amount of faculty and TA time. Instead, they kept their heads down. Most of the class time I saw wasted was due to fully-qualified students who wanted to argue with the instructor or who thought they should be teaching the class.
deugtniet 8y ago
I guess I'm part of academia in the Netherlands, doing a PhD and teaching students. I have seen students who 'game' the system, but our job is not on the line if we refuse to play ball. This is likely only so because our universities are publicly funded, and don't require rich students and alumni for funds. In the case of disputes on grades and extracurriculars, the commission of exams will nearly exclusively side with the teacher. Except when it can be shown that the teacher dropped the ball severely. Another factor in this matter is that once you have reached your second year, you can do your coursework for as long as you like, so there is little consequence in failing a course other than extending study time. That being said, I work in a field that is not as sexy as some others (medicine, psychology), and I would guess the issues are bigger there, due to the kind of students that are attracted to these types of majors.
- joris 8y ago
  Yes, in Holland students know they can simply fail an exam and usually know that’s on them. In the US, students can literally complain to the dean who then puts pressure on the professor. And they do, so professors know to err on the lenient side. In fact: the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless.
  - throwaway32479 8y ago
    > the average grade at Harvard has been an A- for some years now. So grades from Harvard are basically meaningless. I won't deny grade inflation, but Harvard allows students to drop classes very late in the semester. For "hard" classes, it wasn't uncommon for less than 25% of the students present in the second week of class to still be around to take the final. I never saw anything like that at the public university I went to as an undergrad. Some amount of the high average grade is because the students not doing so well in the course drop with little to no penalty.

jseliger 8y ago

This matches my experiences teaching at non-elite schools. Entitlement is high and professors are hired either for research (among TT faculty) or as adjuncts; the former realize that their research is important and one student making a stink can jeopardize their TT work. The latter realize that one student making a stink can jeopardize their contracts. See also https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-people-are-fine-but-its-that-last-five-percent/ https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe.... So the incentive is to give the students what they want. In addition, in most schools no one knows what a given set of admins will do or whether admins will back faculty. So what are professors incentivized to do? What are admins incentivized to do? Particularly in an age where accusations of impropriety are common and can also sink or stymie careers. The number of tools students have is large; the number faculty have, small. All this is also compatible with The Case Against Education: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education-bryan-caplan https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-educatio...

repolfx 8y ago
The issue of administrators who repeatedly side with students even in absurd situations seems to be slowly reaching awareness. There's a good short video here that explores what's been happening at Yale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK4MBzp5YwM Trigger warning - it has clips of students attacking professors and acting in ways that are completely delusional. I found it almost physically hard to watch and from the comments, seems I wasn't the only one. In a scene where a professor is literally surrounded by students yelling at him and having meltdowns, it's shown that one of the adults at the back of the group is an actual university administrator: he watches passively and does nothing to intervene. The presenter argues the problem is that the administrators are often just as extreme as the students and benefit from cowtowing to almost any level of immature nonsense because the students demands inevitably translate into growth of administrative departments.

11thEarlOfMar 8y ago

Who is more guilty? The parents bribing their way in, or the schools for not sufficiently policing the gate keepers? The author claims that blowing the whistle is not an option faculty is ready to take due to the risk it brings to their career, but I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role.

forgottenpass 8y ago
>I'd expect that somewhere in the US college system, someone, perhaps tenured, would have spoken up by now and shone the light on the school administration's role. How do you know they didn't? Six months ago, would anyone have listened to them? The answer is no, because we all already knew about the sports and 'legacy' students.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Sports and legacies are different. They bring money, and lots of it. New buildings, better facilities, better equipment, etc. Thousands of other students benefit if I admit the daughter of a philanthropic billionaire. These "lesser nobles" who just give some women's sports coach a bribe, or pay to get a higher SAT score are doing nothing for any of the other thousands of students. It literally ONLY gives THEIR kid a leg up.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    For that matter, the "greater nobles" would just as soon bribe their way in over paying millions in "philanthropic" gifts. The only way you could ever get these incentivized donations would be if bribery is not an option or too risky of an option. If colleges really want to, they can set tuition at three million a semester and offer price cuts to students that "get in." I don't see why this has to be a wink-wink thing, if they want to offer goods or services for a price so be it. There's no need to involve corruption or secret winks in the normal practice of exchanging a service for money.

choeger 8y ago

How dare they to demand students to actually do some studying! Honestly, it is refreshing to see someone from an elite university to face the same issues that we at the lower universities complained about for decades. Admitting everyone and their cat to universities destroys them. But I think this is a lost cause. Popular culture has completely lost the idea that you have to work (hard) to improve yourself. Everything nowadays is about "equal this" and "equal that", no one recognizes that opportunities do not automatically lead to outcome.

mfoy_ 8y ago
The real problem is that society is more and more treating universities like companies that sell a product instead of educational institutions. The idea that "I paid for this, so I deserve it" is toxic.
- dustindiamond 8y ago
  Well, universities act like companies, particularly resorts.
- VyseofArcadia 8y ago
  It's not just an idea they keep in their heads. I've had students tell me that to my face.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    They don't get it from nowhere, though. The public transit in my city is plastered with advertisements that have headlines reading, "Get a career in X!" These campaigns are being run by every one of the local universities, and quite a few ones that are further afield, too. It seems like the only ones still advertising an education rather than an income boost are the city colleges. Like it or not, incoming students' perception of the nature of their college education is going to be driven by the admissions office's hijinks. Faculty don't get to talk to them until later.
- skocznymroczny 8y ago

maxaf 8y ago

Can’t the labor market do anything about this? I wouldn’t mind implementing changes to resume review that deprioritize degrees from “elite” universities. I’m sure I’d miss some legitimate candidates, but how much of a problem can that really be considering the cheating that pervades these schools?

YorkshireSeason 8y ago
The labour market has already responded to this, at least in computer science: you need to do coding challenges in many / most job interviews in parts because a degree, even a good degree from a top school is no longer strongly predictive of your coding ability.
- maxaf 8y ago
  True, but that’s still a surprisingly progressive stance. Not 18 months ago I got rejected after crushing the interview because “no one at this firm would vouch for someone without a college degree”. This still happens to me now as often as when I began my career in the early 00s.
  - YorkshireSeason 8y ago
    Unfortunately, this also happens, but I think it is an orthogonal issue. Degree / No-Degree is not a filter I apply personally, but I can see why some companies use it. When you get 2000+ applications for a position, you need to filter out almost all extremely quickly. Just because there are many charlatans with a degree, doesn't mean no-degrees are perfect ...
mcguire 8y ago
"Deprioritizing elite universities" would be more damaging than helpful. We are talking a smallish minority of students.
deleted 8y ago
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8y ago

mabbo 8y ago

This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. Sure, there's things like sports scholarships or the super rich kids whose parents donated a building, etc, but that's a small percentage. The school can just admit those admissions are unfair and be honest about it.

apetresc 8y ago
> This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. > > Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.
- mabbo 8y ago
  Fair point. But surely somewhere out there is some metric that can calculate a students likelihood of succeeding at University but also isn't easy to cheat at.
  - apetresc 8y ago
    Something other than a human evaluation of a student's entire resume, which is what we have now? No, it's not at all obvious to me that such a thing is possible. That's basically tantamount to fortune-telling.
bunderbunder 8y ago
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The grade/score threshold itself is easy to game, which is a big part of why universities generally use a rubric that encourages the admissions department to look at other things as well. For example, because of a quirk in how the grade point system in one of the high schools I went to worked, it was very nearly a mathematical impossibility for kids who took an extra class instead of a study hall period to make it to the top echelons of the honor roll. Creating a strategy where, for example, helicopter parents who wanted to see their kid named valedictorian would forbid them from taking that extra class, since doing so would have knocked them out of the running. Similarly, the college admissions exams are well-known to be poor predictors of academic aptitude. A big chunk of what they measure is simply how much money your parents spent on prep programs and tutors. This is even before we start digging into the muddy waters about the extent to which grades and test scores unintentionally measure factors related to socioeconomic background rather than academic aptitude, though there does seem to be a pretty robust body of research around that morass as well.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

The professors who are actually interested in being good teachers don't seem to have a problem with under-performing students (or at least you never hear them complaining). Anyone who's ever taken a class with one of these professors should know what I'm talking about. Watching them teach is like watching an expert tradesman craft some product and finely adjust their inputs and technique as they go in order to get the desired result. They seem to be able to teach their selected content to the student equivalent of a brick. It's the professors who are interested in doing all the other things professors do but regard teaching as a chore that have problems with under-performing students. They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) and it shows when the lower quality students fall through. That doesn't mean they're not good professors, they just aren't good teachers. I've known some really great professors that I would never want to take any class from because they didn't prioritize good teaching and likewise sucked at it. Undergrads and these professors would probably be happier if schools relaxed the teaching requirements for this group but that has other trade-offs. As the price of college has increased the amount of extra work (office hours, Q/A sessions before major tests, etc.) professors are expected to do to prevent the customer from failing and having to spend thousands to go around again has increased with it. This is independent of student quality. The author sounds like he/she is annoyed with the new normal and is blaming it on the few people who bribed their way in. In reality student performance in any given class is going to depend mostly on how much they care. If you're teaching some elective that checks a certain box for a large group of undergrads and sounds like it's easy but is really a lot of work you're gonna have a lot of students barely passing, even the smart ones because your class simply isn't a priority for them. These things aren't the fault of students, professors or any one group, it's just how the complex system that is college education in the US has evolved.

ModernMech 8y ago
> They put in less effort into teaching (why wouldn't they, it's less important to them) To be clear, it's not just less important to the professors, it's less important to the school as well. Just look at the tenure guidelines to see this: Publications and grants are by and large the biggest part of your tenure portfolio. At a good school, you can get tenure while being a mediocre lecturer, but you will never get tenure being a mediocre researcher. So can we really blame professors for reacting to the incentives they are given?

gwbas1c 8y ago

I really enjoyed this article, but I want to point out something: > to regard themselves as customers who are always right I encountered a lot of awful professors in college. (A private, 2nd tier school.) Some were outright incompetent, and others adversarial towards their students. The admissions process also portrayed the school as career prep, not education for the sake of pursuing knowledge. The disconnect at times between how the experience was marketed, versus what the professors wanted to do, was shocking. The reality is that a college education is expensive, and ultimately funded by a customer, either the student or the student's parents. Quality must be demanded by the paying customer. Or, to put it mildly, when every student is a customer paying a quarter million dollars, they need to be treated as such. That doesn't mean fabricating grades, but that does mean going the extra mile to please someone who ultimately is funding your paycheck.

pcurve 8y ago

I'm in my 40s and went to one of them Ivy schools. There were legacies. There were affirm action kids that clearly weren't at the same level as others. But I didn't mind. They all studied hard, and harder than others because they knew. They knew how they got it, and they knew that even smart kids flunk out. IMHO, this is more of a broader trend that has more to do with poor parenting. I went through schooling systems in HK, Korea, America at very different ages. Parents didn't dare meddling with how teachers taught. Teachers were the rule of law. Got B+? Well, tough shit. Did you take advantage of all the professor and teacher assistant office hours? Yes? Sorry but maybe you're just not as good as others taking the same course. (My own experience taking Comp sci 100)

many_indicator 8y ago

You'd think a 1500+, 4.0+, 12+ AP course student coming from an elite magnet school, with a parental income of $250,000+ is smarter than the poor kid from rural Idaho that lacked such opportunities. The poor rural kid from Idaho may not be admitted to MIT, Duke, Berkeley, ivies and may not look as good as that 1500+ kid, but you surely will miss kids like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller that would have been successful at an MIT or Caltech. While the 1500+ kid might have gotten that score due to SAT prep, they may not actually be that smart. The Idaho kid could be much more intelligent, but since they're coming in with fewer AP courses and fewer ECs, they wouldn't pass the sniff test.

bilbo0s 8y ago
First, lots of kids get 1500+. Even the kids getting special consideration would have such an SAT score. So if you can't match that score, I'd strongly urge you to give serious consideration to some "safety" schools. Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union. Which means the easiest way into a lot of these schools is not a wicked three point shot, but rather to graduate high school in Wyoming. Third, if you're from Idaho and are not admitted, it means there were better candidates that these schools selected in lieu of yourself. (Remember, a lot of schools have a mandate, so they definitely admitted someone.) So introspection is in order. What did the other Idaho candidates have that you did not?
- many_indicator 8y ago
  >Second, kids from rural Idaho, (kids from rural anywhere really), are given special consideration at most elite schools. They're essentially given the same consideration as poor minorities. Most elite schools have a mandate that you must admit a certain number of males and females from every state in the union. That may be true. But to tell a kid from rural Idaho she has a shot at MIT, when her parents never graduated from high school, may not be something she'd believe, even if she could get into MIT. Even if she'd get a full ride, her parents may encourage her not to apply, since they'd tell her it's too expensive, and she may believe that over reality. Just because a university tries to help such people, she may never get the message. It isn't like rural America is where Harvard is sending their representatives to educate poor rural kids their opportunities. A talented poor person may not realize they could actually get into Harvard, so why waste an application fee? Being poor effects you in ways most non-poor people cannot begin to understand. It effects your mindset, attitude and outlook on life. It can artificially lower your goals and scope.

casion 8y ago

> They can’t do the work, and are generally uninterested in gaining the skills they need in order to do well. I assume this means 'do well in class', however I think the article itself points out the real, genuinely valuable, thing the students learn: > In comparing stories, we have also found that such students strive to “work the system”, using university procedures to get the grades they desire Like it or not, this is how many people find success. Rich, poor or in between. I think that a lot of this behaviour is deplorable, but I can't deny that it requires some type of intelligence and work. It's just not the type of smarts or ethic that most people value. Perhaps after hundreds of years of this 'privileged kid games the system' dynamic, it's time to embrace that and use it as leverage to encourage the students towards more generally accepted modes of effort. Or maybe not... the school's are already teaching them to be successful. Maybe this is a question of ethics, not education?

imgabe 8y ago
I wouldn't call that success, unless parasites are successful. At the end of the day, we need people to do real work and produce real results. You can't "game the system" into building a good road or writing a good operating system or growing healthy food. These people leech off of others who are doing the real work and they drag down everyone by accumulating resources without providing real value in return. Like any parasite, they should be removed.

mcnichol 8y ago

We are dealing with the path of least resistance and the natural flow of entropy. It seems naive to believe these institutions are not businesses at the end of the day. To change people wanting a degree for degrees sake due to the institution, then you have to add weight to the knowledge that comes with the degree (or detection of it). I have an assumption that won't scale and you will question if it's as big a problem as it feels and what change can be controlled on a weak-link biased system.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Didn't faculty used to run the Universities? When they abdicated that job to administrators, they sealed their fate.

cbsks 8y ago

There’s a follow-up piece with responses from other professors here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-bribery-scandal-professors-respond-to-our-anonymous-column https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/30/college-brib...

adamnemecek 8y ago

The big problem with universities is that a lot of the work required is just tool. Uninteresting, time consuming, somewhat out of date. And the professors have the worst attitudes. "This is how it is, deal with it".

darepublic 8y ago

Open source knowledge, remove impediments from those who want to better themselves. Decrease the irrational social value of a degree.

EamonnMR 8y ago
I think that much of the social value of a degree is the demonstration that you can overcome impediments.

rygxqpbsngav 8y ago

Impeccable timing. Haven't read the article, but want to say something. i was watching a regional film 2 days ago. The plot starts with a doctor doing wrong surgery to hero's father and so he loses his father. The doctor, apparently, bribed himself into the university for studying even though he never gets any qualifying results in the entrance exams.The story goes on and questions the audience in the end, will you risk with your own life or your loved ones in the hands of them? Don't know if there is any governance or other controls in U.S. uni's but that's not how it should work. Isn't it discouraging one way for a student who earned it after hard work, compared to the one who simply enters a uni just because he was happens to be born to a rich father. Don't want to question the morality or ethical side, but it just doesn't feel right and should be handled in someway. may be more stricter exams etc. But I don't think that's practical either as they can easily workaround the system same way.

zaroth 8y ago

If someone wants to donate $70 million and maybe their kid gets a free pass into the university, I think that’s a win-win. Presumably that $70 million is being used to provide a tremendous amount of resources for everyone who attends the goal. A lot of kids get full ride scholarships on the back of that $70 million, or a pretty sweet new building gets built on the campus. Obviously there’s a trade-off in fairness and at some point ($7 million? $700k? $70k?) you look at it and say, no that’s not worth taking a spot away from another student. Bribery obviously is a different matter, because the gains aren’t going to the university and therefore the students in any form.

La-ang 8y ago
So ethics have a price? Meritocracy should be bought and sold?
- zaroth 8y ago
  Well there isn’t a meritocracy to begin with, so that’s not the choice we actually have here. But no, I’m not a purist, I think as a practical matter the majority of choices we make have externalities or trade-offs and sometimes you weigh the good versus the bad. Society is certainly worse off as a whole by not taking the $70 million donation and maybe there’s one rich kid who doesn’t get in. Obviously this approach has its limits and can go terribly wrong. Would you let one die to save a billion? Would you shoot down a plane that’s been hijacked? I don’t think it makes sense to be moral absolutists when the world is filled with practical choices that have to be made that will save some people and hurt others. Is it really ethical to fail to provide full scholarships to let’s say 1,000 students because 1 student’s application got fast tracked? My two cents are that “legacy” students are real (probably pervasive), and so is the benefit to pocketing their big fat donations.

TheAsprngHacker 8y ago

I am a highschooler who is interested higher-level theoretical computer science and math. I am motivated to get into a good college because I want to have good educational foundations and the opportunity to meet professors involved in the research areas that I am interested in. Seeing the college admissions bribery scandal outraged me. Society pressures people my age into getting into a good college as an indicator of worth. Before the controversy, I had already felt cynical about the whole culture of test prep and ungenuine ECs. I feel as though society pressures other teenagers and me into not being true to ourselves, and living our own lives, but instead doing things just for the grades or the attractiveness to college admissions officers. When the bribery became known, it bolstered my belief that elite colleges are places of classism, dishonesty, and phoniness. The girl mentioned in the article who said that she was going to party instead of study is especially a slap in the face for me. Therefore, I have a conflicting view of elite colleges. On one hand, I greatly admire the professors who work at the colleges, and respect the colleges as places of research. On the other hand, I have a cynical view that elite colleges are a place for social prestige. I had wondered if there was a conflict between the interests of the professors, who would like passionate students, and the interests of the admissions officers, who, according to the scandal, maintain a class barrier by taking bribes instead of admitting students egalitarianly. This article solidified my thoughts that there is a conflict between the interests of professors and admissions officers.

maxmayer 7y ago

As I see there is no governance or other controls in U.S. and that's very upset. Look like rich kids can buy whatever they wanna and I suppose rules must be chagnged anyway. No expensive services, just available for anyone. Paperell looks like it so I also wanna add that goverment should prevent such situations in the future and that's all..