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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
So which is better? Would we rather see the institutions benefit or the individuals? (We’re in favor of individualism, aren’t we?)
I’m not very sympathetic towards these institutions, and don’t favor a federal prosecutorial role in this.
But individuals should follow ethical rules, and these parents didn’t. I’m far from sorry for them.
One thing that has been pointed out, is the low impact these elite schools would have on their kid’s future. If they’re smart enough to get in, and don’t, their opportunities going through second tier institutions aren’t significantly affected.
It’s actually why I’m not that worried about Asians not getting into elite institutions. If they end up going through second tier institutions, the opportunity cost is negligable, which means the injustice is negligable. And the effect of these institutions that discriminate in this manner is to reduce their prestige, which is fine by me.
I’m mostly hands-off on all this. The modern college admissions game has been smoke and mirrors for decades.
But I assert that my hands-off approach is a truly conservative approach. And I’m all in favor of their taking another hit on their reputations. The damage has been done. No need to do anything more.
Best comment on the topic.
Affirmative action, according to it’s supporters, is an effort to increase fairness. Maybe some don’t see it that way, but it’s a formula that many find acceptable.
Legacy admissions have a certain logic to them. They are the scion of faithful and supportive graduates who are by right deserving of some consideration, and the universities have every incentive to encourage loyalty in their alumni across multiple generations.
But this payola for false admissions is something else. There is no benefit for the universities in this, they are being fooled with false application materials and test scores. Their reputations are being harmed, and the value of a degree from those schools is impacted. The cheaters are screwing around with one of the great paths to privilege in this country, and people don’t appreciate it.
It didn’t take long for people to start whispering things like, “Well, we know how he got into Yale.”
For anyone who is or who seeks to be an Ivy League graduate or who has striven honestly for their children to become one this is a bitter pill.
And for parents who seek to teach their kids to cheat and take shortcuts to get ahead, well, it remains to be seen what the impact will be on them.
They will be successful. The way of the world is shortcuts, cheating, etc to get ahead. These kids will be our next leaders. It is almost impossible for them to fail.
Agree.
I get it now. Thanks.
The cheating wasted the time and resources of applying students who didn’t cheat, and who frequently don’t have the advantage of money for tutors, or the advantage of alumni parents or racial minority status.
Mr. Caplan is caught on tape saying this to Mr. Singer: “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here…”
I read this in the Wall Street Journal and remembered my child, as a high school student, working in the heat and freezing cold of an open air flea market when she wasn’t babysitting or waitressing. We were really close to poor then. My daughter paid for her clothes, her school field trips, her second hand car and, yes, the fees for her college applications, while giving up a lot of social activities, and sometimes sleep, to study for her excellent grades.
Kids whose circumstances were like my daughter’s were also applying to these colleges. I’m sorry Mr. Caplan didn’t trouble himself over the moral issue of using his money to bump one of them out of a spot through fraud. I think the schools should, at least, have to refund the application fees of the students who were denied acceptance at the same time that the cheats were let in.
That was a joke on the TV series “ER.”
“What do you call the person who graduates last in their class from medical school?”
“Doctor.”
Indeed, we’ve already been seeing the results of this in Congress and elsewhere, for decades.
No college could possibly admit EVERY applicant who simply passes some kind of entrance exam.
But, I doubt many if any of the students involved were actually not smart enough for the schools their parents targeted. None of their test scores were THAT low. What their parents were basically doing is extra-gaming the already-corrupt system where students were not admitted based really on academic merit, but on a panoply of other “Affirmative Action” criteria such as “activities.” Where the kids of rich parents already have a huge advantage because mom and dad can pay for them to spend a summer in El Salvador or wherever a particular college might think somehow makes them a better person or student.
Or, maybe someone could explain to me how being a FAKE football player is less relevant to admission to USC or wherever, than being an ACTUAL football player would be?
Race is also an issue. Those schools all admit less-qualified students by race.
The overall admissions are “zero sum” in that if they have a hard limit of X admissions, if one person games the system and gets in then some other person who isn’t gaming the system quite as much doesn’t get in. But those who game it more aren’t therefore “unqualified.” Unless you want to claim that somehow the school has determined that only those X students out of the whole country/world are really “qualified” and the X+1th person and beyond are just too dumb for college. Or at least for THAT college.
My wife’s answer to that when we both worked at the same ER was “Dr. G_____.”
I said competitive exam. If they have 50 positions open, the top 50 scorers on the competitive exam gets in.
And talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel: A few years ago, colleges seemed obsessed with discerning and preventing microaggressions. Test and application fraud and cheating seems to me a lot more discernable and preventable.
We’ve had it in the Presidency – a legacy and an affirmative action President.
It does remain to be seen by someone. Not that we’ll see. I’m thinking: for the daughters of the television star, this scandal might be the rupture of an enclosure that was blinding and smothering them. Who knows ?
I expect significant numbers of applicants would have identical scores. That’s how things like “GPA Ranking” work too. Even back in High School, I wrote a program for the school administration to generate a list of students in order by GPA and assign rank. If you have, for example, 20 students who all had perfect (at least back then) 4.0 GPA (now you can have GPA of 5 and above…), all 20 were ranked #1, and the next-highest GPA(s) had rank 21.
So, let’s say 1000 applicants go after those 50 positions, and 100 of them all have the same high score/average. (Just for example. That particular case isn’t likely, but you may have a total of more than 50 who equally qualify based on your entrance exam.) How do you then determine which 50 of the 100 get in? Your objective, competitive exam can’t tell you that.
You see, it’s not completely simple even right from the start.
When I started thinking about this point that you raised, I tried to think of an example of a person in academics, and came up with: my sister.
To begin with, I’m certain that she does think she’s smart, in the sense of having strong critical thinking skills, though she’s never mentioned it.
My guess is that she thinks she’s smart because she is smart, has lived for a long time, and is perceptive.
It’s like b-ball. She’s watched a lot of Duke hoops over the decades, and she knows that Zion is a better basketball player than she is. Smartness is the same way. If you pay attention long enough to people’s skill level in some area, you eventually can tell who is better, and who’s worse, at that particular skill than you are. That is true whether it is critical thinking skill, basketball skill, TIG welding skill, skill at perceiving how other people feel, computer programming skill, or skill in running a business.
My sister isn’t too resentful, I don’t think.
Just as you chose some course in life because it suited your personality. She didn’t try climbing the corporate ladder, or starting a business, or chemical engineering, because these didn’t suit her personality as well as academics.
Really, you need to be “smart” in a general sense to do well in any of those things, and she knows that perfectly well, and admires others who are smart and do well in those things, or have other beautiful qualities even if they aren’t as smart as she is.
Something we can agree on. That is indeed the saying. I’ve heard it myself. That people believe it doesn’t mean they aren’t smart, they just don’t spend a lot of time with teachers like my sister.
I don’t know where else to put this, and I’m not going to start a thread.
But I noticed that the Chair of the NCAA basketball selection committee is Bernard Muir. Mr. Muir was Athletic Director at Georgetown during the tenure of a certain tennis coach accused of taking bribes in connection with this scandal. He is presently Athletic Director at Stanford, the home of a certain (now former) sailing coach accused of taking bribes in connection with this scandal.
Nothing in this should be taken as suggesting any involvement by Mr. Muir.
No, an admisssions’ agent in that position with take the top 48 then invite the three (or four, or ten .. whatever) who are tied to come back for a followup interview and sort them that way. And for the next admission cycle they’ll add some more questions to the original test to make it more fine-grained. Not exactly trivial, but definitely simple.
That really doesn’t solve the problem. Unless you can come up with a 1000 question test that 1000 people can take and each get a unique score from 1 to 1000 correct, you’re going to have overlap. Unless you’re lucky enough that the top 50 are completely separate from the rest of the applicants, you’re going to have to do something else besides the exam. The implication of Al Sparks’ post was that just a competitive exam would do it all, without having to do anything else subjective such as interviews. But it just won’t work. So the question then becomes, who does the subjective part, and what kind of rules can you have for it?