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This is stupid. We can just demand, or even mandate, that colleges not suck so hard. They've basically turned into hedge funds at this point, we have quite a bi
by CPLX 3y ago
This is stupid. We can just demand, or even mandate, that colleges not suck so hard. They've basically turned into hedge funds at this point, we have quite a bit of leverage as a society and we don't have to let all this stuff happen.
I'm exhausted by the current narrative that says we can't demand excellence from public institutions.
Like why not. Why can't universities, the police, the department of homeless services, or the guys who regulate airplane safety not be competently run and effective at improving society? Why can't we improve them?
- endisneigh 3y agoBy what criteria do they suck? Regardless, it doesn’t seem relevant to what I’m suggesting. Even if colleges were perfect there were still be disparities if only due to the student demographics and the problem in the OP would still exist.
- CPLX 3y agoThey hoard tens of billions of dollars tax free and use that money to fund private equity firms who buy and destroy American jobs, while becoming an increasingly bloated service firm for the richest American families, and are almost complexly divorced at this point from their original public purpose of academic progress and educating the next generation.
- endisneigh 3y agothis seems completely irrelevant to the article, and still has nothing to do with school quality. what you're saying could be true and still be an academic powerhouse.
- CPLX 3y agoI was responding to this: > college name be no longer required as a criterion for job applications By saying maybe we could, instead, try to improve the reputations of our best colleges so the signal would be valid.
- endisneigh 3y agothe point is that even if the signal was valid, the college admissions ploy described in the OP would still be true. fundamentally the signal should be in the actual quality of a specific candidate, not some approximate proxy for the school name.
- CPLX 3y agoWhy would it be true? Colleges could, in fact, not reward the bullshit resume padding of wealthy families. They could also fire literally half the admin staff, which is approaching an astonishing 1:1 ratio of staff to students at a lot of these prestigious colleges. They don't reward this bullshit resume padding because they are confused they do it because they want to. The incentives for college administrators are basically all financial at this point, it's about tuition and donors. Like I said, academic culture has been overtaken by the culture of financialization. Consider this thought experiment - what would you do if you wanted to publicly say you did "need blind" admissions where you really promise not to look at the actual financial status of applicants at all, but you actually wanted to avoid admitting too many people who weren't going to pay full price? If those were the incentives you were facing, then you'd try to come up with signals to use as a proxy for just asking applicants if they are rich. Can we see what's going on here now?
- endisneigh 3y agosorry but you're going on a really off-topic rant.
- CPLX 3y agoThe topic of this thread is a bullshit rich person “college admissions ploy” so pretty sure my comment is dead center on point.
- mistrial9 3y agono - there is a "Bell curve" at least.. many colleges post-covid are in freefall in the USA.
- pdonis 3y agoWe can't improve all of these institutions because they are either directly run or mostly financed by governments, and governments are driven by politics.
- CPLX 3y agoSeems to me that everything completely went to shit when we turned over activities that governments have traditionally done to private sector grifters.
- pdonis 3y agoThat's not what we did. Governments certainly hire private sector grifters as contractors; but those contractors still rely on the coercive power of the government to force people to comply with whatever rules they are operating under. So the grifters are still government actors in the sense that matters: people can't choose to just ignore them or not deal with them, as would be the case with a true private sector company.
- woooooo 3y agoBillion dollar endowments are not run or financed by the government.
- CPLX 3y agoAbout 30% of them are
- woooooo 3y agoFine. 30% is a big walkback from the original framing. Clearly the topics in this thread are more of a "university" thing than "private vs public" thing.
- CPLX 3y agoI meant 30% of the money, since we inexplicably let people write it off on their taxes when they bribe elitist colleges to let their various family members in.
- hgsgm 3y agoPublic institutions are great. They have classes for the gamut of abilities and majors. What's not great is privilege->credential laundering through grade-inflated "elite" private schools, where the education is irrelevant to the scheme.