15 ms·

Ivy League Schools Sure Look Like a Cartel

318 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

jhawleypeters 4y ago
https://archive.ph/I6mJI https://archive.ph/I6mJI
- meghan_rain 4y ago
  @dang, why are some comments that include archive links replyable, and some not?
  - causality0 4y ago
    Most likely the same rule about replies too soon after the comment is posted, like any other comment.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure mods can pin a post, something they often do to archive links, and that makes it so you can't reply.
somat 4y ago
I like to joke that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between the mafia and the government, they both demand you give them money in return for protection. Which is why the government goes after the mafia, they hate the competition.
- baq 4y ago
  If you think about it, large criminal structures need to become like governments, otherwise they are unstable, so it’s in their best interest to have rules and be fair within themselves. One interesting limit case is what happens if everyone is a member of such a criminal organization? There’s no practical difference between a government.
  - influx 4y ago
    And if they grow large enough, they typically start providing welfare to the population, to pacify normal citizens. They even police their bad actors, see the cartel giving up their own in the recent murders of American tourists.
    - stametseater 4y ago
      I don't have personal experience with it, maybe it's all fantasy, but a popular trope in mafia stories is the mafia serving as a parallel or backup government to otherwise law-abiding people. For instance, The Godfather opens with a man, not part of the mob, asking the Godfather for vigilante justice because the American criminal system failed to punish the man who disfigured his daughter.
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  The bottom-line tangles a weave of right-of-force and rule-of-law.
- sixo 4y ago
  The difference is the legitimizing force of accountability to the people (at least, in principle.) It's a big difference. Pre-liberalism govts basically were mafias.
- soneca 4y ago
  Omer Moav mentions in a recent Econtalk episode how you can say that the emergence of the state in human society can be considered the transition from road bandits to organized crime. https://www.econtalk.org/omer-moav-on-the-emergence-of-the-state/ https://www.econtalk.org/omer-moav-on-the-emergence-of-the-s...
  - mikeg8 4y ago
    Listened to that episode yesterday and was about to recommend as well, it was fascinating.
- mhb 4y ago
  The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman is an exploration along those lines. http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
- kolbe 4y ago
  This is basically the opening scenes of Goodfellas. Henry Hill : [narrating] All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. That's what it's all about. That's what the FBI can never understand - that what Paulie and the organization offer is protection for the kinds of guys who can't go to the cops.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Organized crime also routinely work to control government.
- gptgpp 4y ago
  Wow, I am so sorry... It must be really difficult living in an area of the world where the Government tortures your child, dismembers them with a chainsaw, and dissolves them in a barrel of acid if you don't pay your taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupara_bianca#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupara_bianca#Examples :(
  - hnuser847 4y ago
    You act as if governments throughout history haven’t committed atrocities a thousands times more gruesome than this. I’m fact, I can think of a fairly famous example within the past hundred years.
    - gptgpp 4y ago
      Come on, give examples please don't leave me hanging! I think the Mafia are sick fucks, but lots of governments have been too. No shortage of violence in this pit of animals on this stupid space rock. But thousands of times more gruesome than that!? That's wild. I've watched Cartel vids where they slice open and expose the vocal cords laterally as their victims wail, creating otherworldly sounds. But that's like... MAYBE 0.5x as gruesome as torturing some poor helpless child or tossing infant into a barrel of acid. So if you've got stuff that's 1000x as gruesome, I can't even comprehend! Please post.
      - somat 4y ago
        Take china for example, How many families/people/children were tortured and killed when the japanese invaded manchuria. That is an invasion, you may say, it does not count, ok, Now look at how many more than that were tortured and killed in chairman mao's cultural revolution. The scale at which modern governments operate makes all of organized crime look like child's play. The quote "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" Is particularly apt here.
      - lordnacho 4y ago
        Have you seen those pyramids made of human skulls in Cambodia? I think the scale of the brutality matters a lot, and governments can get bigger scale.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  [dead]
nobodyandproud 4y ago
The author seems to have an axe to grind. > The need for diversity in education is as vital today as ever. But it’s not clear whether the Ivy Agreement’s ban on athletic scholarships actually promotes that end. One might even wonder whether, by not competing over sports stars, the schools are reducing the diversity of their student bodies. Yet later admits: > But recent research tells us that fielding a great team predicts higher alumni giving only to the athletics department. And a 2005 study found little connection between on-field success and giving, at least among those alums who regularly attended sporting events. Higher education became corrupted with money from athletics and I wish more schools took note of: > In the Ivy Group Agreement, the universities defend their ban on athletic scholarships as part of a general policy “that the players shall be truly representative of the student body and not composed of a group of specially recruited athletes.”
- pge 4y ago
  The flaw with this statement is that the Ivies absolutely do recruit athletes and allow coaches to prioritize students for acceptance, just like other D1 schools. The only difference is that instead of putting scholarship money in front of them, they dangle an Ivy League degree. If Ivies removed coaches from the admissions process, they would have more integrity.
  - kevinventullo 4y ago
    Honestly I’d prefer admission of an athlete who prioritizes an Ivy League degree over money to admission of one more silver-spoon legacy.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      In my experience at an Ivy, these things often dovetail because of the types of sports they choose to recruit (outside of football & basketball) tend to be of the decidedly more squash, crew, equestrian sports, etc. that bias towards new england elites.
      - 4y ago
mikeg8 4y ago
Hate the headline as it downplays the terror and brutality that cartels inflict on the people of Mexico. Nobody is holding a gun to a football player head and forcing them to play for Harvard. Is there price fixing going on? Probably. But I don’t have very much sympathy for student athletes who had to pay full price to go to an Ivy league school… I’m sure they had more opportunities in life than the cartels give they people the rule over.
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  There's a cartel, then there's The Cartel
- noobface 4y ago
  Just because the term is used to describe groups of organizations participating in price fixing activity doesn't mean all groups performing price fixing are equal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
- khazhoux 4y ago
  > Hate the headline as it downplays the terror and brutality that cartels inflict on the people of Mexico The word "cartel" is not exclusive to the criminal Mexican organizations. > I’m sure they had more opportunities in life But that reasoning applies to academic scholarships too. Every single person smart enough to get into a top school, will have more opportunities throughout life.
- stametseater 4y ago
  1. Cartel is a technical term which the article is using correctly. 2. Renaming the technical term would not do anything to help the victims of drug cartels (in Mexico or otherwise.) That would be textbook slacktivism.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  The article doesn't mention the Mexican drug cartels at all. Maybe you're just not aware, but the word cartel has a meaning outside of organized crime and the drug trade. OPEC, for example, is a cartel of oil producing states.
mindcreek 4y ago
[flagged]
- JoshTko 4y ago
  "Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. "
jshaqaw 4y ago
Most Ivy League schools could eliminate most teams and most students/donors could care less. This isn't Duke or Michigan we are talking about.
blobbers 4y ago
Is this the Chris Rock joke... there's a new form of discrimination called 'Price'? ... and it discriminates against the poor?
TrackerFF 4y ago
Athletic scholarships is one of those very foreign concepts, for us outside the US. Seems like a uniquely (North) American thing?
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  That and the institution of the "college application essay". Does any other country have that?
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    I think it is common everywhere to require essays during the college evaluation process, but I don't understand well enough what is the US's "college application essay" to compare.
    - lazyasciiart 4y ago
      In the US you write an essay to send to the college with your application, about why you should be accepted. I don’t know of anywhere else that has anything like it. Edit: examples https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019-04-24/college-essay-examples-how-to-write-your-story https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019...
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        Wow, no, I have never seen anything like that before. Is it really a literary resume for people that didn't have the time to accomplish anything yet? I just found a niche for chatGPT!
      - whimsicalism 4y ago
        Oxford certainly has it when i applied.
        astura 4y ago
        And my college in the US didn't require one, and I didn't write one. It was optional.
musicale 4y ago
For some reason I can't reply to a comment that said > Author is biased, probably couldn't get to one of those schools... Ad hominem attack, but I was amused even though the facts don't precisely support the accusation. It is technically true that Prof. Carter didn't attend an Ivy League school as an undergraduate - he went to Stanford, which (currently) plays in the Pac-12 and NCAA division I. Of course that doesn't tell us whether he received admission offers from any of the Ivies at that time - it seems likely that he would have. But the reason I rate the implication "false" is because he subsequently attended and graduated from Yale's law school and currently teaches there.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Because it was marked dead. replying to flame bait comments is precisely what HN tries to avoid when it does that, but you found your workaround :)
  - musicale 4y ago
    Hmm, I don't think I would have been quite as quick to hit the flag button. The (now missing?) PP comment to me read "probably couldn't get into an Ivy" with the crux being that Stanford is of course not part of the Ivy League. (But Yale Law School is certainly part of Yale, though iirc it's rare for graduate or professional students to play in the NCAA due to eligibility.) Sometimes people forget that the Ivy League isn't a classification of elite schools but actually an athletic conference; this is of course directly relevant to the issue of athletic scholarships which is under discussion.
    - metadat 4y ago
      On your profile page there is a setting called "Show dead", enable it if you want to see the skeleton threads.
      - musicale 4y ago
        Interesting, thanks.
gptgpp 4y ago
As the premier Ivy League authority on the inner-workings of Cartels, I can definitively say that our illustrious Ivy League institutions only happen to appear like a Cartel to the very, very stupid and uneducated (eg. People who couldn't attend). It is quite an amazing psycho-social phenomena, inextricably linked to a low SES and impoverished social capital; I hope to secure a grant to make my PhD students shit out a bunch of papers with my name on it soon. Don't worry, all the confounding variables have been accounted for. We can't release any raw data though, so sorry but it's to protect confidentiality. Could we reasonably anonymize the data? Oh nooooo, I'm so sorry you're breaking u --
musicale 4y ago
It was always baffling to me that collusion on financial aid wasn't illegal (also note that it's not just the Ivies that are involved.) I find this particularly interesting: "But the 3rd Circuit’s 1993 rationale isn’t helpful to the Ivies today. Back then, the court rejected the government’s accusation that the schools’ cooperation on financial aid increased tuition for other students. But subsequent work has concluded that the government was probably right." Over the past 30 years, universities have absolutely continued to raise tuition and fees beyond the rate of inflation. They have increased the size of university administrations and enhanced campus facilities and services to some extent, but the educational benefit isn't as clear, while student loan debt has ballooned. Tuition at Yale (for example) was about $15K in 1993 (equivalent to around $31K today.) In 2023 Yale's tuition is more than $64K. I'd like to hear Yale's explanation of how this is possibly sensible.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  But very few at Yale etc. pay full sticker. it’s basically perfect price discrimination you have to have a very affluent family to pay full sticker at Yale or Harvard.
  - musicale 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that doubling tuition didn't actually put more money in Yale's pockets? Yale currently takes in some $475 million in tuition, room and board. In 1990 the number was $165M, equivalent to about $378M today.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      How is $475 2x $378? At 14,567 students that's 32,607 each. Website says tuition is 59,950.
      - musicale 4y ago
        Good point - $32K per student is actually lower than it was in 1991, and that is likely due to including grad students, whose numbers have increased and whose tuition is often covered by assistantships. Grad students are still paid poorly however, especially when one considers the amount of money the research they perform brings into the university.
whimsicalism 4y ago
Surprised the article does not discuss the much more impactful fact that Ivy’s coordinate to not provide merit scholarships. Columbia does a bit of defection on the side that is tolerated, but otherwise there are no merit scholarships for Ivy league students.
- ryukoposting 4y ago
  This one has always been truly baffling to me. By all means, make sure that need-based scholarships are plentiful, but isn't great academics the entire point of the Ivy league? I was never going to make it into an Ivy anyway, but I remember learning about that system as a middle-class high school kid and thinking "huh, sucks for me I guess." Too rich for need-based scholarships, too poor to pay full price.
  - camel_Snake 4y ago
    > but isn't great academics the entire point of the Ivy league? No, that is just branding. If these institutions were truly based on merit the legacy system wouldn't exist.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Arguably. The legacy system exists to provide funding that can be directed to students of merit. It is also unclear the extent to which legacy programs influence admissions. Legacy applicants have higher acceptance rates, but we would likely also expect this in a situation where there was no preference for legacy admission.
  - horns4lyfe 4y ago
    Excluding middle class kids is the point. The needs based scholarships are an obfuscation.
- sandkoan 4y ago
  The Ivies and adjacent elite colleges are more than capable of giving out academic scholarships—they simply refuse to because that would lead to a race to the bottom in terms of how much money they'd be able to extract from top talent (who could easily negotiate colleges against each other for lower and lower tuition). And, from experience, Colubmia's defection hardly counts for much (which is why, I suspect, it's permitted): even their "prestigious" Rabi Scholarship yields no reduction in a mind-boggling $90,000 tuition—just a minute research stipend. They want to make you feel special while ensuring you still pay full price.
lofatdairy 4y ago
Cui bono? There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from poverty are commonplace at the highest level. That's simply not the case at Ivies. You think underrepresented and the economically disadvantaged are rowing or playing squash or fencing or golfing or diving at the level where this would matter? Sure, there are ways of making this equitable, but that's not solved by the scope of this argument. The fact is that athletics has been a backdoor for admissions, and always used to exclude, not to include, those outside the upper class. The college admission scandal showed as much, with the Stanford sailing coach. It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students, and it's currently used to exclude Asian students among maintaining a proportion of elite students. Certainly, it looks like price fixing, and I don't have a problem with that argument, but I would prefer is more universities took courage to actually focus on academics like chicago, caltech, mit, etc.
- brian_cunnie 4y ago
  > It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian. > athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class. The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
    I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result. >The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class. Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Need blind admissions at my alma mater died 25 years ago. Were the Ivy's still pretending they weren't? That's actually good news. Oh, you aren't blowing money on ancillary things like big time college football and other academics-undermining activiites? Sounds like a smart move by the Ivy League. The Ivys have been admitting scions and the like under the table? You don't say. Does that provide the Ivys with prominent influential alumni and the like? Yep. Is EVERYONE else with even a remotely significant reputation doing this with rich Chinese and others? I know all the Big10 is. Christ, the CARTEL is the NCAA not paying EMPLOYEES what likely is 1? 10? 100? 1000? BILLIONS that could have been made by revenue NCAA athletes over the last 50 years. Now THAT is a cartel worth writing about. In football, they likely left a million students or more with lifelong injuries with no healthcare or compensation that played big time football for the bowl schools.
gehwartzen 4y ago
I follow college basketball a good bit and one interesting development is that the NCAA now allows student athletes to make money independently from scholarships (ie NIL name, image and likeness). Soon a lot of athletes (and programs) won’t require the schools funding for scholarships. Of course they will still fill up applicant spots
duxup 4y ago
As far as I know the Ivy League football has attendance well below 10k a football game in general. They have no significant TV contract money compared to the "P5" conferences. I suspect many of their football programs barely, if at all support themselves with the income they have for that given sport. I doubt their other sports are much more profitable... So what then? Force them to offer athletic scholarships? I feel like this lawsuit is trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
ouid 4y ago
if we're talking about cartels, The NFL using the university system as its private farm team system seems like far more of a problem. Especially given that student athletes are often bringing in large amounts of income to the schools they represent.
synergy20 4y ago
This is how Ivy works the best: 1. A group of smart people to sustain the academics and ranking. 2. A group of elites to benefit from the brand mostly created by step 1. 3. Adding some diversity to shut up complaints, for political correctness too. This is called holistic strategy and has been working all the time. After graduation they help each other to keep the brand, for those who become more "successful", they donate back to keep this pattern strong and probably feed their own next generations to step 2 above.

318 points by xqcgrek2 4y ago

jhawleypeters 4y ago

https://archive.ph/I6mJI https://archive.ph/I6mJI

meghan_rain 4y ago
@dang, why are some comments that include archive links replyable, and some not?
- causality0 4y ago
  Most likely the same rule about replies too soon after the comment is posted, like any other comment.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure mods can pin a post, something they often do to archive links, and that makes it so you can't reply.

somat 4y ago

I like to joke that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between the mafia and the government, they both demand you give them money in return for protection. Which is why the government goes after the mafia, they hate the competition.

baq 4y ago
If you think about it, large criminal structures need to become like governments, otherwise they are unstable, so it’s in their best interest to have rules and be fair within themselves. One interesting limit case is what happens if everyone is a member of such a criminal organization? There’s no practical difference between a government.
- influx 4y ago
  And if they grow large enough, they typically start providing welfare to the population, to pacify normal citizens. They even police their bad actors, see the cartel giving up their own in the recent murders of American tourists.
  - stametseater 4y ago
    I don't have personal experience with it, maybe it's all fantasy, but a popular trope in mafia stories is the mafia serving as a parallel or backup government to otherwise law-abiding people. For instance, The Godfather opens with a man, not part of the mob, asking the Godfather for vigilante justice because the American criminal system failed to punish the man who disfigured his daughter.
Eupraxias 4y ago
The bottom-line tangles a weave of right-of-force and rule-of-law.
sixo 4y ago
The difference is the legitimizing force of accountability to the people (at least, in principle.) It's a big difference. Pre-liberalism govts basically were mafias.
soneca 4y ago
Omer Moav mentions in a recent Econtalk episode how you can say that the emergence of the state in human society can be considered the transition from road bandits to organized crime. https://www.econtalk.org/omer-moav-on-the-emergence-of-the-state/ https://www.econtalk.org/omer-moav-on-the-emergence-of-the-s...
- mikeg8 4y ago
  Listened to that episode yesterday and was about to recommend as well, it was fascinating.
mhb 4y ago
The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman is an exploration along those lines. http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf
kolbe 4y ago
This is basically the opening scenes of Goodfellas. Henry Hill : [narrating] All they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. That's what it's all about. That's what the FBI can never understand - that what Paulie and the organization offer is protection for the kinds of guys who can't go to the cops.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Organized crime also routinely work to control government.
gptgpp 4y ago
Wow, I am so sorry... It must be really difficult living in an area of the world where the Government tortures your child, dismembers them with a chainsaw, and dissolves them in a barrel of acid if you don't pay your taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupara_bianca#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lupara_bianca#Examples :(
- hnuser847 4y ago
  You act as if governments throughout history haven’t committed atrocities a thousands times more gruesome than this. I’m fact, I can think of a fairly famous example within the past hundred years.
  - gptgpp 4y ago
    Come on, give examples please don't leave me hanging! I think the Mafia are sick fucks, but lots of governments have been too. No shortage of violence in this pit of animals on this stupid space rock. But thousands of times more gruesome than that!? That's wild. I've watched Cartel vids where they slice open and expose the vocal cords laterally as their victims wail, creating otherworldly sounds. But that's like... MAYBE 0.5x as gruesome as torturing some poor helpless child or tossing infant into a barrel of acid. So if you've got stuff that's 1000x as gruesome, I can't even comprehend! Please post.
    - somat 4y ago
      Take china for example, How many families/people/children were tortured and killed when the japanese invaded manchuria. That is an invasion, you may say, it does not count, ok, Now look at how many more than that were tortured and killed in chairman mao's cultural revolution. The scale at which modern governments operate makes all of organized crime look like child's play. The quote "A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" Is particularly apt here.
    - lordnacho 4y ago
      Have you seen those pyramids made of human skulls in Cambodia? I think the scale of the brutality matters a lot, and governments can get bigger scale.
hummus_bae 4y ago
[dead]

nobodyandproud 4y ago

The author seems to have an axe to grind. > The need for diversity in education is as vital today as ever. But it’s not clear whether the Ivy Agreement’s ban on athletic scholarships actually promotes that end. One might even wonder whether, by not competing over sports stars, the schools are reducing the diversity of their student bodies. Yet later admits: > But recent research tells us that fielding a great team predicts higher alumni giving only to the athletics department. And a 2005 study found little connection between on-field success and giving, at least among those alums who regularly attended sporting events. Higher education became corrupted with money from athletics and I wish more schools took note of: > In the Ivy Group Agreement, the universities defend their ban on athletic scholarships as part of a general policy “that the players shall be truly representative of the student body and not composed of a group of specially recruited athletes.”

pge 4y ago
The flaw with this statement is that the Ivies absolutely do recruit athletes and allow coaches to prioritize students for acceptance, just like other D1 schools. The only difference is that instead of putting scholarship money in front of them, they dangle an Ivy League degree. If Ivies removed coaches from the admissions process, they would have more integrity.
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  Honestly I’d prefer admission of an athlete who prioritizes an Ivy League degree over money to admission of one more silver-spoon legacy.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    In my experience at an Ivy, these things often dovetail because of the types of sports they choose to recruit (outside of football & basketball) tend to be of the decidedly more squash, crew, equestrian sports, etc. that bias towards new england elites.
    - 4y ago

mikeg8 4y ago

Hate the headline as it downplays the terror and brutality that cartels inflict on the people of Mexico. Nobody is holding a gun to a football player head and forcing them to play for Harvard. Is there price fixing going on? Probably. But I don’t have very much sympathy for student athletes who had to pay full price to go to an Ivy league school… I’m sure they had more opportunities in life than the cartels give they people the rule over.

llanowarelves 4y ago
There's a cartel, then there's The Cartel
noobface 4y ago
Just because the term is used to describe groups of organizations participating in price fixing activity doesn't mean all groups performing price fixing are equal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel
khazhoux 4y ago
> Hate the headline as it downplays the terror and brutality that cartels inflict on the people of Mexico The word "cartel" is not exclusive to the criminal Mexican organizations. > I’m sure they had more opportunities in life But that reasoning applies to academic scholarships too. Every single person smart enough to get into a top school, will have more opportunities throughout life.
stametseater 4y ago
1. Cartel is a technical term which the article is using correctly. 2. Renaming the technical term would not do anything to help the victims of drug cartels (in Mexico or otherwise.) That would be textbook slacktivism.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
The article doesn't mention the Mexican drug cartels at all. Maybe you're just not aware, but the word cartel has a meaning outside of organized crime and the drug trade. OPEC, for example, is a cartel of oil producing states.

mindcreek 4y ago

[flagged]

JoshTko 4y ago
"Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. "

jshaqaw 4y ago

Most Ivy League schools could eliminate most teams and most students/donors could care less. This isn't Duke or Michigan we are talking about.

blobbers 4y ago

Is this the Chris Rock joke... there's a new form of discrimination called 'Price'? ... and it discriminates against the poor?

TrackerFF 4y ago

Athletic scholarships is one of those very foreign concepts, for us outside the US. Seems like a uniquely (North) American thing?

BurningFrog 4y ago
That and the institution of the "college application essay". Does any other country have that?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  I think it is common everywhere to require essays during the college evaluation process, but I don't understand well enough what is the US's "college application essay" to compare.
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    In the US you write an essay to send to the college with your application, about why you should be accepted. I don’t know of anywhere else that has anything like it. Edit: examples https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019-04-24/college-essay-examples-how-to-write-your-story https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019...
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Wow, no, I have never seen anything like that before. Is it really a literary resume for people that didn't have the time to accomplish anything yet? I just found a niche for chatGPT!
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      Oxford certainly has it when i applied.
      - astura 4y ago
        And my college in the US didn't require one, and I didn't write one. It was optional.

musicale 4y ago

For some reason I can't reply to a comment that said > Author is biased, probably couldn't get to one of those schools... Ad hominem attack, but I was amused even though the facts don't precisely support the accusation. It is technically true that Prof. Carter didn't attend an Ivy League school as an undergraduate - he went to Stanford, which (currently) plays in the Pac-12 and NCAA division I. Of course that doesn't tell us whether he received admission offers from any of the Ivies at that time - it seems likely that he would have. But the reason I rate the implication "false" is because he subsequently attended and graduated from Yale's law school and currently teaches there.

whimsicalism 4y ago
Because it was marked dead. replying to flame bait comments is precisely what HN tries to avoid when it does that, but you found your workaround :)
- musicale 4y ago
  Hmm, I don't think I would have been quite as quick to hit the flag button. The (now missing?) PP comment to me read "probably couldn't get into an Ivy" with the crux being that Stanford is of course not part of the Ivy League. (But Yale Law School is certainly part of Yale, though iirc it's rare for graduate or professional students to play in the NCAA due to eligibility.) Sometimes people forget that the Ivy League isn't a classification of elite schools but actually an athletic conference; this is of course directly relevant to the issue of athletic scholarships which is under discussion.
  - metadat 4y ago
    On your profile page there is a setting called "Show dead", enable it if you want to see the skeleton threads.
    - musicale 4y ago
      Interesting, thanks.

gptgpp 4y ago

As the premier Ivy League authority on the inner-workings of Cartels, I can definitively say that our illustrious Ivy League institutions only happen to appear like a Cartel to the very, very stupid and uneducated (eg. People who couldn't attend). It is quite an amazing psycho-social phenomena, inextricably linked to a low SES and impoverished social capital; I hope to secure a grant to make my PhD students shit out a bunch of papers with my name on it soon. Don't worry, all the confounding variables have been accounted for. We can't release any raw data though, so sorry but it's to protect confidentiality. Could we reasonably anonymize the data? Oh nooooo, I'm so sorry you're breaking u --

musicale 4y ago

It was always baffling to me that collusion on financial aid wasn't illegal (also note that it's not just the Ivies that are involved.) I find this particularly interesting: "But the 3rd Circuit’s 1993 rationale isn’t helpful to the Ivies today. Back then, the court rejected the government’s accusation that the schools’ cooperation on financial aid increased tuition for other students. But subsequent work has concluded that the government was probably right." Over the past 30 years, universities have absolutely continued to raise tuition and fees beyond the rate of inflation. They have increased the size of university administrations and enhanced campus facilities and services to some extent, but the educational benefit isn't as clear, while student loan debt has ballooned. Tuition at Yale (for example) was about $15K in 1993 (equivalent to around $31K today.) In 2023 Yale's tuition is more than $64K. I'd like to hear Yale's explanation of how this is possibly sensible.

whimsicalism 4y ago
But very few at Yale etc. pay full sticker. it’s basically perfect price discrimination you have to have a very affluent family to pay full sticker at Yale or Harvard.
- musicale 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that doubling tuition didn't actually put more money in Yale's pockets? Yale currently takes in some $475 million in tuition, room and board. In 1990 the number was $165M, equivalent to about $378M today.
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    How is $475 2x $378? At 14,567 students that's 32,607 each. Website says tuition is 59,950.
    - musicale 4y ago
      Good point - $32K per student is actually lower than it was in 1991, and that is likely due to including grad students, whose numbers have increased and whose tuition is often covered by assistantships. Grad students are still paid poorly however, especially when one considers the amount of money the research they perform brings into the university.

whimsicalism 4y ago

Surprised the article does not discuss the much more impactful fact that Ivy’s coordinate to not provide merit scholarships. Columbia does a bit of defection on the side that is tolerated, but otherwise there are no merit scholarships for Ivy league students.

ryukoposting 4y ago
This one has always been truly baffling to me. By all means, make sure that need-based scholarships are plentiful, but isn't great academics the entire point of the Ivy league? I was never going to make it into an Ivy anyway, but I remember learning about that system as a middle-class high school kid and thinking "huh, sucks for me I guess." Too rich for need-based scholarships, too poor to pay full price.
- camel_Snake 4y ago
  > but isn't great academics the entire point of the Ivy league? No, that is just branding. If these institutions were truly based on merit the legacy system wouldn't exist.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Arguably. The legacy system exists to provide funding that can be directed to students of merit. It is also unclear the extent to which legacy programs influence admissions. Legacy applicants have higher acceptance rates, but we would likely also expect this in a situation where there was no preference for legacy admission.
- horns4lyfe 4y ago
  Excluding middle class kids is the point. The needs based scholarships are an obfuscation.
sandkoan 4y ago
The Ivies and adjacent elite colleges are more than capable of giving out academic scholarships—they simply refuse to because that would lead to a race to the bottom in terms of how much money they'd be able to extract from top talent (who could easily negotiate colleges against each other for lower and lower tuition). And, from experience, Colubmia's defection hardly counts for much (which is why, I suspect, it's permitted): even their "prestigious" Rabi Scholarship yields no reduction in a mind-boggling $90,000 tuition—just a minute research stipend. They want to make you feel special while ensuring you still pay full price.

lofatdairy 4y ago

Cui bono? There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from poverty are commonplace at the highest level. That's simply not the case at Ivies. You think underrepresented and the economically disadvantaged are rowing or playing squash or fencing or golfing or diving at the level where this would matter? Sure, there are ways of making this equitable, but that's not solved by the scope of this argument. The fact is that athletics has been a backdoor for admissions, and always used to exclude, not to include, those outside the upper class. The college admission scandal showed as much, with the Stanford sailing coach. It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students, and it's currently used to exclude Asian students among maintaining a proportion of elite students. Certainly, it looks like price fixing, and I don't have a problem with that argument, but I would prefer is more universities took courage to actually focus on academics like chicago, caltech, mit, etc.

brian_cunnie 4y ago
> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian. > athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class. The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result. >The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class. Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Need blind admissions at my alma mater died 25 years ago. Were the Ivy's still pretending they weren't? That's actually good news. Oh, you aren't blowing money on ancillary things like big time college football and other academics-undermining activiites? Sounds like a smart move by the Ivy League. The Ivys have been admitting scions and the like under the table? You don't say. Does that provide the Ivys with prominent influential alumni and the like? Yep. Is EVERYONE else with even a remotely significant reputation doing this with rich Chinese and others? I know all the Big10 is. Christ, the CARTEL is the NCAA not paying EMPLOYEES what likely is 1? 10? 100? 1000? BILLIONS that could have been made by revenue NCAA athletes over the last 50 years. Now THAT is a cartel worth writing about. In football, they likely left a million students or more with lifelong injuries with no healthcare or compensation that played big time football for the bowl schools.

gehwartzen 4y ago

I follow college basketball a good bit and one interesting development is that the NCAA now allows student athletes to make money independently from scholarships (ie NIL name, image and likeness). Soon a lot of athletes (and programs) won’t require the schools funding for scholarships. Of course they will still fill up applicant spots

duxup 4y ago

As far as I know the Ivy League football has attendance well below 10k a football game in general. They have no significant TV contract money compared to the "P5" conferences. I suspect many of their football programs barely, if at all support themselves with the income they have for that given sport. I doubt their other sports are much more profitable... So what then? Force them to offer athletic scholarships? I feel like this lawsuit is trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

ouid 4y ago

if we're talking about cartels, The NFL using the university system as its private farm team system seems like far more of a problem. Especially given that student athletes are often bringing in large amounts of income to the schools they represent.

synergy20 4y ago

This is how Ivy works the best: 1. A group of smart people to sustain the academics and ranking. 2. A group of elites to benefit from the brand mostly created by step 1. 3. Adding some diversity to shut up complaints, for political correctness too. This is called holistic strategy and has been working all the time. After graduation they help each other to keep the brand, for those who become more "successful", they donate back to keep this pattern strong and probably feed their own next generations to step 2 above.