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Purchasing Privilege
When the college admission scandal broke a couple of days ago, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. (I’m known for my brilliant predictions.) I thought, “We’re supposed to be offended because kids are getting into colleges that they would not normally qualify for? Call me when we dump affirmative action. Then, maybe I’ll get offended by this.” But this has been a huge story. It’s all my patients want to talk about on our office visits. So people clearly got more upset about this than I anticipated. I just couldn’t figure out why. So after giving it some thought, I have a theory. I’m still not sure I understand this, but hear me out…
Again, my confusion arises from the fact that we admit unqualified applicants all the time. Depending on the college, it can be 30-50% of the incoming class. The classic example is a black male college applicant. The qualifications he needs to get into, say, Stanford, are a lot different than the qualifications that would be needed for an Asian applicant. You might say, then, that black race is a qualification for college, just like a high SAT score or a high class ranking. That is objectively true, but I look at it slightly differently.
Blacks are a privileged class. At least in terms of college admissions. More so than being a legacy at Harvard or having a famous parent. And it’s understandable to treat the privileged differently than everyone else. Such is life. Nothing new there.
I think what offends people about the college admissions scandal is that certain people are buying privilege that should not be for sale in their view – it is so precious a resource, that it should be controlled and regulated by the government, like ground water or liquor licenses.
Leftists don’t trust capitalism and personal liberty because it is unpredictable and uncontrollable. What will a phone look like ten years from now? Impossible to say what private industry will come up with. But Social Security hasn’t really changed in nearly 100 years. That is comforting to some people. In a free society, who will be the winners? Who will be the losers? Hard to say. And it’s not always fair, at least not by my reckoning. Wouldn’t it be better to have government control things? At least we can vote on our leaders, rather than subjecting ourselves to the rule of Bill Gates. Who chose him? Power should be controlled by the people.
Of course, there are a few problems with the, um, logic in the previous paragraph. But a lot of people think this way, to varying degrees. It’s one of the few things that Democrats can talk about these days that actually resonates with people. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t talk about banning air travel or killing babies. She talks about Bill Gates. It’s standard simplistic populism, playing off the jealousies of the masses. It’s not pretty. But it works.
What I’m getting at is that we don’t mind taking black students who normally couldn’t get into Ohio State and putting them at Harvard. That’s ok, as long as we all voted on it. Affirmative action is the law of the land (…although I think it’s also illegal, so, um, work with me here…). We’ve agreed as a society that the races should not be treated equally, so it’s ok to use race as a qualification for admission, even if it may not seem fair.
But if someone buys such privileged status – that is different. We didn’t get to vote on that. It’s ok to vote on unfair advantages, but it’s not ok to sell it to the highest bidder.
I was kind of hoping that this would make more sense once I wrote it down. I often don’t really understand my own points until I take the time to write a persuasive essay. That didn’t really work this time, which means either that I’m not writing very well today, or I’m full of crap. Perhaps I should set this aside and think about it a bit more.
Ha! Just kidding! I’ll just post it and let you folks figure it out for me. Much easier.
So what do you think? Are people offended by the purchase of government regulated goods? Or do you have a better explanation? Again, we admit unqualified college applicants all the time. Why is this different?
Published in General
Churchill is always the go-to guy for this. :)
Apparently, Cambridge thinks the original quote was “bloody nonsense”.
https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/11/14/churchill-on-prepositions/
Well, just to be accurate, the schools weren’t selling the admissions. Individuals working at the schools were selling them and pocketing the money themselves.
And for starters:
The parents’ money buying the admissions was sent to a fraudulent charity – illegal on the part of the charity. The parents then took those payments off their income tax as a charitable contribution – illegal.
A lot of people are saying “we have much bigger problems to worry about.” But I think that when something is demonstrably illegal and egregiously wrong, it’s a good thing for people to see the perpetrators being punished.
I also have no trouble admitting to some gleeful schadenfreude over the “elite” folks who pretentiously lecture the rest of us (in public and in private) getting publicly smacked.
Concur. Just like the “broken windows” theory of policing. Prosecute the little stuff because the perps are likely involved in bigger stuff. And pour encourager les autres.
Yes – sorry I missed yours the first scroll through!
I have to agree with that because I majored in Physics at Penn and got a Ph.D. in Physics at Cornell :-) My freshman physics prof won his Nobel Prize that year and we had to have view a class taped beforehand because he had to go to Stockholm. (Last I heard he was in prison in California.) Cornell was objectively a little better overall, although certainly not in every field of physics. But this was back in the days when universities were actually institutions of higher learning. My wife is currently a professor of astronomy, and I hear stories, but she mostly teaches an online intro course these days so I have no first hand knowledge of how bad it is these days for actually motivated students.
As far as the topic goes, I still think personally this is a big yawn. I think the thing that galls me the most is that one of the girls involved (I neither remember or want to remember her name) said something to the effect that she doesn’t care about college anyway, and I see that she and her sister have withdrawn from USC. Her parents might just as well have asked her if she wanted to go and saved some money. It’s clear that they did this for themselves, not for their daughters.
I attended Tech as well – New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology when I was there – for just long enough to discover that I lacked the self-discipline required to maintain my generous academic scholarship. (Also, I had a counter-productive fascination with girls. Still do.)
They were very polite when they asked me to take some time off to think about my future.
We all know schools chase money. That’s why they are so adamant about cultivating alumni. So why wouldn’t the celebrity of the parent (and the child) automatically give them a leg up? That’s why I’m confused by this whole thing.
There are “legacy admissions” and “vanity admissions”. Vanity admissions are just legacy admissions on the cheap — except for this particular set of parents it ain’t going to be cheap.
There are a lot of children of celebrities in these parts.
We used to joke that if you took the “NM” out of NMIMT, you got “MIT”. ;)
@drbastiat I was kind of hoping that this would make more sense once I wrote it down. I often don’t really understand my own points until I take the time to write a persuasive essay. That didn’t really work this time, which means either that I’m not writing very well today, or I’m full of crap. Perhaps I should set this aside and think about it a bit more.
Many of the above comments are insightful, but your essay is delightful! I laughed out loud at your musings. What I can’t understand is why any parent would spend millions to buy their offspring admission to a school the young person doesn’t want to attend.
As far as I’m concerned the private schools should take care of themselves. If their employees break their policies they can be fired. They can go to civil court to recover the money their former employee pocketed as well as the fraudulent parents involved.
It’s a little bit different with the public schools involved. But maybe not much. Public universities that are also considered elite are a sticky wicket as far as I’m concerned. That their admissions policies are so subject to whim bothers me. As far as I’m concerned, a public school should have straightforward standards for admission. Take a competitive test, and if you pass you get admitted. Any public service operated by the state should have that limitation.
No resumes including your high school participation, no essays showing how much of a victim you were, just a test with a score.
If there’s a cheating scandal then the students themselves will have to be complicit, and they can be banned from attending a public school, until say, after 10 years.
In general, these elite institution have legal resources, endowments, and very smart people managing them. They don’t need a federal U.S. Attorney to look after them.
And even if these people should get prosecuted, it should happen under state law, not federal.
The celebrities are the key to the story’s appeal, not “our right to education” or “fairness.” Take away the pretty actresses with actor or rich businessman husbands and the story goes away without a trace. Every article pictures Loughlin and Huffman. Every one.
We like to see them squirm. It’s cathartic.
I have a feeling this is the tip of the iceberg. How long has this guy been in business? How many others has he “coached?” How was he able to find so many people at such diverse schools who were so easy to suborn? I’ll bet there are a lot of les autres who are feverishly conferring with their agents, lawyers and publicists in anticipation of the release of his client list and “donors” to the “charity.”
Again, no. The wire and mail fraud was by it’s definition a federal crime. Ditto the tax evasion.
Don’t just leave us hanging with that little gem!
Smart as every one think? The only people that think smart people are in academics are the academics themselves. They think they are smarter then everybody else and spend much of their lives resentful that the rest of the world does not view them that way. In my world the saying goes those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach. Those that can’t teach, administrate.
Wire fraud? What’s that? A gotcha law? Why is it against the law to lie using one form of communication but it’s not against the law to do the same lie using another form of communication?
It’s up there with obstruction of justice, another gotcha law. And tax evasion? With our complicated tax laws it’s easy to fall afowl, especially if you’re rich. Are these laws that are not normally prosecuted in and of themselves? Could be.
If a prosecutor wants to go after you, especially a federal prosecutor, those might be laws he might look to do that. I’m especially suspicious of wire fraud.
I’d be interested to know how much tax they evaded. Was it just incidental to their lies? I doubt they were actually trying to evade taxes.
Again, whatever harm was perpetrated to these institutions, they were either private or state. Both have their own resources to go after these people.
That a federal prosecutor can find something against these people shows that the feds have too much power.
It’s really sad for the minority students who really did earn their way into school. Everyone assumes they are an affirmative action beneficiary.
So here’s the thing. The real selection step in Medicine is getting admitted to medical school.
Once you are accepted the schools will drag you through by the hair to graduate. It’s almost impossible to flunk out of med school. I had a classmate who repeated the entire first year, and still failed to move on to the second year. She was given a 3rd try at passing. Special tutoring, extra time on exams, etc. I don’t know if she finished, as she fell further behind our class and I lost touch.
A quick Google search will turn up the story. He’s the S in BCS. A quick look at Wikipedia shows that he’s still alive and long out of prison.
Fifty years ago, Peter Drucker asserted that one of the major advantages America had over Europe was the absence of a narrow educational funnel, in the form of a few ‘elite’ institutions, through which future high-level leaders must pass:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
We as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above.
more here
If people are really paying $500K to get their kid in school, don’t you think the schools will work hard to increase the number of students they let in? (Increase supply) Rather than the kid taking a seat, the parent might be creating 5 more seats next year.
Seems the smart move will be to create a legal channel where students / parents can purchase $500K to get in.
Thus the leftist jujitsu move of constantly screaming about WHITE privilege , pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. They are always doing exactly what they’re accusing you of.
Thanks.
Yes, if the money was going to the school and not as “fees” and “bribes” to individuals involved.
Absolutely wonderful.
My Mom was an English teacher. So I really try with the grammar. But sometimes it’s impossible.
Is what they are doing now illegal? Donations to a school are legal, right? Don’t they have the discretion to pick based on what benefits the school economically?
@davidbergeron, I think you skipped over a lot of detail in the indictments, the OP and the comments. What the parents are alleged to have done was illegal. They could have made donations to the schools and sought to influence admissions in that manner perfectly legally. What is alleged is that they made payments to a fixer who variously (1) bribed coaches to give scholarships on less high profile teams, (2) bribed college testing officials to ensure high enough, but not too high, testing scores to qualify for admission to target schools, and (3) paid individuals to actually take the college admission exam in place of the student or aid them by correcting erroneous test answers. The fixer, allegedly with the assistance of some of the parents provided false documents (including photoshopped images of the child in athletic events in which they did not actually participate) for the admissions process. At least some of these payments, allegedly, were made to a “charity” controlled by the fixer that the parents then deducted on their tax returns. The prosecution’s burden is to demonstrate that an indicted parent understood the falsity of the process and the various illegal acts that they were funding.
The schools themselves did not gain a financial benefit by student A attending rather than student B. Individuals pocketed money.
Probably depends on their admissions policies which are far from transparent. That includes public schools, which should be totally transparent.
Leaving out the race issue, which is fraught, I think they can let anyone in or out for any reason. I”m talking the institution. Their employees have hidden policies to follow.