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L.A.’s Elite on Edge as Prosecutors Pursue More Parents in Admissions Scandal
- cletus 8y agoHonestly, I really don't understand the motivations for some of these parents. Take Lori Loughlin. $500,000? For USC? For two daughters, one of whom clearly isn't that interested, isn't particularly academic and isn't particularly athletic? Like... why? I can understand if someone bribes their kid into, say, Harvard or Yale Law School. There's a career where going to a good school matters. But this? It just makes no sense to me. Felicity Huffman may end up being sentenced to 10 months in jail (and, let's face it, might serve only 5) but, still, that's a big deal for someone who probably never expected to go to jail. It's also on the lighter end because of her guilty plea and cooperation with the prosecution. What are these parents who have plead not guilty going to get when they're found guilty? Add to this the children have to live with the stigma of these actions. I don't have a huge amount of sympathy here because at least some of them were complicit. Posing for photos faking crew, that sort of thing. But still... why would you want to risk your children having to live with that... to go to USC?
- dvt 8y agoUSC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast (especially in Southern California). It's obviously not on the same academic level as UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford/Caltech, but it's still very much an exclusive brand. You don't get it because you don't live here and aren't surrounded by wealthy 16-year olds that yearn to go to USC (often times over UCLA/Berkeley/Stanford). (Disclaimer: I'm a UCLA alum.)
- shams93 8y agoOn average us students make far higher incomes than the average call tech grad.
- sologoub 8y agoSource? Edit: sorry that was rushed. Source of my skepticism - worked with grads from both, tech-wise CalTech is way better and therefore comp follows.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoThese three are clearly at the same academic level. Way below Stanford and Caltech though. 19: UCLA 22: Berkeley (tie) 22: USC (tie) https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...
- dvt 8y agoJust so you know, no one takes USNWR rankings seriously -- it's well-known that public schools are dinged due to lower endowments and higher student counts. To wit, the idea that Berkeley is academically comparable to USC is a joke.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoFeel free to share whatever ranking validates you.
- dvt 8y agoRegardless of rankings, I'm definitely jealous of USC's alumni network. It's leagues above UCLA/Berkeley (rivaled probably only by Stanford).
- TonyGonzalez 8y agoMaybe at the graduate level Berkeley should be ranked higher but how are public schools dinged? UCLA has an endowment almost as high as USC’s with comparable student body size. Thinking public schools are dinged because they’re poor is factually wrong. Also, Berkeley is about where it would be given its acceptance standards and standardized scores outside of EECS are among the lowest in the top 25. The only school where it’s actually getting easier to be accepted year after year.
- asdff 8y agoThe student bodies aren't all that comparable. Although they both have 45k students, USC has twice as many graduate students as UCLA and they even outnumber the undergrads. But really, its pretty foolish to compare an entire school to another. A given program against another given program? Sure. There are fields that USC and UCLA each might be at the top of, and there are fields where they are going to be much worse. That's the real rub with these rankings, combining and binning aspects of schools that aren't related at all. The only thing that's worth looking at is the rigor or research output of a specific program.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago> USC is definitely a status symbol on the West Coast (especially in Southern California). > it's still very much an exclusive brand I would say weirdly exclusively in Southern California. I can’t think of a school with more regional status and less national status than USC. Maybe some of the bespoke NYC schools? Hell, I’ve worked with folks in Oregon and Washington who have thrown out resumes because they went to USC.
- HighValuation 8y agoI went to Berkeley, it’s a far better public school than Washington or Oregon, who appear to be oddly insecure of their schools’ >40% acceptance rates. Surely our graduates would never make discriminatory hiring decisions that may deprive their company of talent.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoNothing says oddly insecure like creating a new account and repeatedly shilling for your alma mater when you are aggrieved because people happen to be criticizing it obliquely.
- mturmon 8y ago> ...I can’t think of a school with more regional status and less national status than USC... The state schools in the midwest are an example of this - say, Kansas State University. Another one: Catholic schools -- St. Louis University; huge regionally, but not nationally. I was not marinated in NY State, but my impression is that the SUNY schools have some of this too. Really, I think there are a lot of colleges with a big regional reputation, but not so much nationally. If you know international students, you can see the same kind of thing play out in a larger stage -- universities that are top nationally, but not so well-known outside the country. Say, Seoul National University, or Tsinghua, or ENS, or some of the IITs or IISc. And incidentally, for these excellent schools, it's not their fault that their quality is not well-known outside their host region.
- jjeaff 8y agoAnd you can't forget that these wealthy parents have the same desire as many parents to keep their children close to them. So USC offers enough prestige while keeping their kids closer. It is also prestigious in that it is hard to get in and very expensive.
- AbdulMohammad 8y agoI’m from the Bay Area and I can tell you that as far as “status” goes, USC and UCLA don’t carry much status at all, if any. Berkeley is considered far more prestigious here. And of course, Stanford.
- gnicholas 8y agoI grew up in norcal and live in the bay area. Plenty of my high school classmates chose UCLA over Berkeley because they wanted to get farther away from home. Some of them are now med school professors. The difference between these two UCs is not as great as you might think. Neither has the elite status of ivy league schools, but most people I've run across on hiring committees viewed the two ad fairly comparable. Note: I went to UCLA for grad school and have many family members that have gone to Cal.
- ikeyany 8y agoI think they meant that Berkeley and Stanford are the hardest to get into, not that they are necessarily the 'best'. I would assume that anyone who got into Stanford or Berkeley could get into any other school in California.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoMost people I’ve run into on hiring committees do not know or care what school the applicant went to, or if they even went to school. That data isn’t provided. Interview performance is the only factor. What industry do you work in?
- gnicholas 8y agoThis was in law, and I observed it with regard to both undergrad and law degrees.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoDid that only apply to new grads with no experience to judge? Or does degree still trump a successful 5-15 year track record?
- yumraj 8y agoI don't know how common it is, but once a person I knew had referred to USC as University of Spoiled Children.
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- verylongname 8y agoI think it is about status signalling for the parents and the social status prospects for the children more than its about career prospects for the children. What college your children attend seems to have a big affect on your social status in the US, and the children's social status is definitely hugely affected by what college they attend. Apparently it is much cooler to say you went to USC then the University of Arizona. Maybe it shouldn't be this way, but I think the parents aren't stupid to be worried about their children's social status in this way.
- HighValuation 8y agoIf you aren’t familiar with the US education system, it’s a school ranked in the top 20 with an 11% acceptance rate, only twice as high as Stanford’s with a body 4x as large. It's a large school with a massively beneficial and incestuous network. Based on LinkedIn numbers, 1 out of 4 people in SV that didn't graduate from Stanford went to USC. Go around talking misinformation about that school in particular and see what wonders it does for your career.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoTop 20 in letting applicants bribe coaches to get them in, maybe. Any rag with USC as a top 20 university isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
- HighValuation 8y agoWell I went to Berkeley, it’s questionable why we’re even ranked in the top 25 with an acceptance rate 30-40% higher than UCLA or USC this year whom like you said, don’t deserve to be in the top 20. Imagine what it would be without EECS. Berkeley grads need to pay attention to what’s happening with the school, it may be the only college in Californi where applications have been going down for the past 3-4 years.
- jwilbs 8y agoGoogle says the acceptance rate is 17%. Would love to see your source on 25% of non-Stanford alumni SV people being from USC. Anecdotally, I’ve met one.
- asdff 8y agoGoogle cites the rate from 3 years ago. From the horses mouth on the 11%: https://dailytrojan.com/2019/03/28/usc-fall-acceptance-rate-drops-to-11-percent-record-low/ https://dailytrojan.com/2019/03/28/usc-fall-acceptance-rate-...
- awad 8y agoNot sure where you are getting that wild number. There are 4,206,862 people in SF Bay Area on LinkedIn and 28,676 have USC listed on their profile. That's....not 1 in 4.
- lawnchair_larry 8y agoI’ve met some mothers that place huge value on status signals based on school that their kids attended. I don’t understand it in the least, but I know it definitely exists. It doesn’t matter at all how the school ranks objectively, it’s entirely related to the status among the specific individuals that the mother wants to impress. Often, it’s other mothers whose kids went there. Fathers might do this too, but I haven’t personally seen it. If I had to guess, the fathers that care about status are probably more likely to “one-up” than “keep-up”. Same insecurities, just manifested differently. It’s really ridiculous and petty behavior on the adults part, at the expense of the child’s best interests.
- strikelaserclaw 8y agoA lot of parents see their kids as younger manifestations of themselves, so they take the kids achievements such as getting into a good school as validation for themselves (Good genetics, great parenting etc...) and feel the opposite if their kids fail to do so. This is the only explanation for going so out of the way to essentially "fake" achievement for the kids so you can look better.
- darawk 8y agoThe actual problem here is not the bribery. The problem is that those bribes are being captured by random 3rd parties, rather than by the school itself. The correct way to implement college admissions is this: Charge a sliding scale fee based on application quality, and then use the excess revenue generated to subsidize poor kids tuition. Your kid has a 2.5 GPA and wants to go to Harvard? Great, that'll be a million dollars a year. You'll be funding the tuition of 20-30 kids of lesser means and everybody wins.
- chaostheory 8y agoI feel that your idea is already reality. It's just not official. The issue is that the people caught up in this scandal aren't wealthy enough to fund a building or even a building wing, or they would just go through the more acceptable route.
- tlrobinson 8y agoWilliam Rick Singer, the guy at the center of this, said exactly that: "There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement, which is 10 times as much money. And I’ve created this side door in" (unfortunately for him, he said it on a wiretapped phone call...)
- darawk 8y agoYa, it is partially reality you're right. I just think it ought to be more explicit.
- chaostheory 8y agoBuildings, wings, and other structures are named after them. Imo it already is
- shshhdhs 8y agoI’m sure someone has a reason to not like this, but I actually think this is a fantastic approach. Especially when you raise the bar that high (a million) that it could fund many students. There’s just got to be a way to enforce it so the money doesn’t end up in some stadium renovation fund or executive bonus.
- Blackthorn 8y agoThey're not that elite if they're gonna get ensnared in this one. If you're one of the elite you just donate a building, which is a completely legal way to get your kids into a school of your choice.
- NeoBasilisk 8y agonot elite enough to escape scrutiny but elite enough to embark on these ventures It's a balancing act, and this time it looks like many are going to fall.
- wavefunction 8y ago$500,000 isn't going to get you much of a building. These folks just didn't want to fork out the real dough even though some of them had the means.
- protomyth 8y agoIt might of made a nice check for one of those endowments, scholarship funds, or private (as in non-public) grants that make university administrators quite happy.
- coke_n_sympathy 8y agoAt least donating a building gives value to the other attending students that far outweighs the cost of their child going
- iscrewyou 8y agoWhat about the kids that didn’t get to go? The ones that the rich students replaced. That’s the real tragedy. The students don’t even know that they were out-moneid.
- bradleyjg 8y agoWhy is that a tragedy? So they didn’t go to Yale, Stanford, or USC (?!?). Presumably if they were borderline at those schools they ended up somewhere perfectly fine. I’m happy these parents are being prosecuted, but I don’t think there were any tragedies here.
- tedivm 8y agoThat's really fantastic news.
- baggy_trough 8y ago2 years in jail for this is absurd. A week would be more than enough.
- perfmode 8y agoaw, poor little elites
- munk-a 8y agoPlease familiarize yourself with minimum sentencing guidelines for drug possession. These parents, by preventing other students from being able to get an education they earned, are causing far more harm.
- baggy_trough 8y agoPerhaps those sentences are equally or more absurd?
- munk-a 8y agoI absolutely agree and personally feel that incarceration as vengeance is immoral and incarceration only becomes a moral action when it is a deterrent to future actions. If you were omnipresent and knew that a murderer would never murder again - and that the jailing of that murderer would not prevent any future murders - then I'd consider it to be immoral to jail them. Unfortunately a lot of America is on the vengeance path when it comes to punishments for crimes. We need a lot more criminal justice reform but, please, let's not start by giving the elites a pass - justice is already inequal enough.
- lrc 8y agoSo you get one free murder? No, the deterrent had to be there beforehand, so that our hypothetical killer who is certain she only wants to kill one person will be exposed to that deterrence. Even if she is not thereby deterred, the fact that the punishment is applied to her will have a deterrent effect on others contemplating a similar crime. Therefore the punishment has value even if there is no need to prevent the murderer from killing again. (Edit: you did point out that the omniscience allows you to know that there will actually be no deterrent effect but that's asking a lot :)
- yeahitslikethat 8y agoWhat is criminal about this? I never heard of someone going to jail for cheating on an SAT test. And why aren't the admissions boards going to jail for accepting the bribes?
- HaloZero 8y agoBecause the proctor was the one who was bribed, not the organization itself.
- yeahitslikethat 8y ago"Charges ranged from cheating on college entrance exams to paying bribe money to university officials, "
- olliej 8y agoI feel like the solution here is to not bribe your children's way into school. If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago> If your children aren't academically talented and you don't have the money to publicly buy a building for the school you should accept that and just let them live off your money and power as is traditional. The tradition is nepotism and bribes. It's a relatively recent thing for the state to go after the moderately wealthy for doing what they've done for millennia.
- olliej 8y agoThat was a joke targeting the tradition of the rich and powerful using said riches and power to get in, but at least it was obvious and in the public eye - it doesn't take a huge amount of deductive reasoning to see the connection between the new "Mark McMarksFace" Building and little jimmy mcmarksface gets into school). Similarly seeing friends and family of the school board getting in shouldn't be shocking.
- frankchn 8y agoI think a key difference here is that the McMarksFace building is given to the university, while the bribery scandal involves giving money to individuals. An analogy would be "buying" a car by giving $5k to the salesperson to get the keys rather than $50k to the dealership to actually buy it.
- munk-a 8y agoI don't think building purchasing should even be allowed, remove all of the slippery slope and put students on equal footing.
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- ForrestN 8y agoI'm surprised that this scandal doesn't seem to be causing anyone to think one step further and realize that the entire premise of "elite" colleges with competitive admissions is a device for the perpetuation of inequality. We're devoting most of our advanced educational resources to helping people who would already be successful reap even more rewards. I understand the idea of meritocracy in fields with life or death urgency—maybe we should be as selective as possible to make sure we're finding the best scientists or whatever. But the idea that Harvard is using its hideously huge tax-deductible endowment to teach rich people's children to do high frequency trading is far more scandalous than these marginal cases of bribery. As a society, we should not be devoting so many resources to helping the best-positioned kids succeed to the exclusion of kids starting with less advantage.
- munk-a 8y agoBack a while high school was the sort of "standard education" things have changed and now college is considered the default level people should have in the workforce, back when college was rare I think private colleges made sense, they were more of a final specialty training step at the end of your education - now that has shifted over to PhDs - let PhD programs remain privatized for whatever reasons, but we should extend government grants to cover all two and four year degrees and publicize the sector. Some kids will still stop their education at middle school - or high school, but we as a society benefit if everyone who wants one can get a college education.
- madengr 8y agoI don’t want the USA to turn into India or China, where your academic fate is decided by some cruddy standardized test given in 5th grade.
- munk-a 8y agoI don't either - but neither do I want it to be determined on the even more absurd basis of who your parents are. There should be a fair evaluation of students, designing that fair evaluation isn't trivial, but it's something we can work toward.
- munk-a 8y agoWhile we're all angry at this bribery program, can we please also be angry at legacy admissions? Far more kids skate in on legacy than bribes and the school doesn't even get a nice bit of cash for those sorts of admissions.
- rhegart 8y agoAffirmative action on one side, cheaters on the other. At least a dozen people cheated on the SAT in my school and had the audacity to brag about it. Financial aid if you poor, paid for if you rich. Middle class honest kids hurt the most. Had top 1% scores, no ivies or UCLA for me (got UCB at least) and I’m Asian. My little cousin, same scores and rejected from UCSC 10 years later...much worse now than before
- willio58 8y agoTwo people in my high school told me they cheated on the SAT. They got _perfect_ scores and the high school actually bragged about them during graduation. They also happened to live across the street from each other in a relatively large town. I’ve always wondered what they did to cheat, I wonder if they’d be as open about it now since they’re both graduating at MIT and Harvard soon.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoAnd whiners in the middle, apparently. Maybe you weren't as competitive of an applicant as you thought you were?
- dang 8y agoPosting like this will get you banned on HN. Can you please review the site guidelines? They include: "Be kind." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yingw787 8y agoI think this is a really good opportunity to see just how white-collar fraud falls in line with rational choice theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(criminology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory_(crimin...). In the quoted article, Felicity Huffman pleaded guilty to pay a college counselor $15,000 to arrange cheating on an SAT test. Hence, one data point on the market price for cheating, as agreed upon by Ms. Huffman and college counselor, is $15,000. One claim about Ms. Huffman's net worth is that she earns $275,000 per episode of "Desperate Housewives", which airs weekly. This fine is about half a day's work for her, if that. For half a day's worth of work, she can doctor her daughter's SAT scores. This is assuming that the episodes aren't recorded at once and take much less time than one week for filming, freeing up time to invest in other income streams. So cheating in this case is a very rational thing to do, given zero cost for broken morals or ethics. The only real "hard-power" argument I can think of for children who may inherit great wealth to gain intelligence is to avoid a run-around by the family lawyers after Mom and Dad croak. But even then, that doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence (Donald Trump is smart enough to avoid that fate), and it kind of doesn't make sense for a family lawyer to do that anyways. If the kids are stupid and can't manage their money, just charge more in fees instead of rocking the boat in order to pocket a greater portion of the pie. Crime does pay, if we don't punish it. That's why people do it. It's especially true in white-collar crime.
- maxhedrome 8y agoLol Higher Educashin
- basicplus2 8y agoThey should do something on the lines that politicians do in Australia.. property developers slip a property into a trust and slip that trust into the polys superfund as a contribution
- thrower123 8y agoYou dumb fucks, didn't you know that you could just spend a little more, buy a building, and be assured of your kids getting in forever? The number of Faheys, Wheelocks, Wheelocks and Fairchilds I went to college with is stupid.
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- pauljurczak 8y agoExcellent!