I that’s the game you want to play: It turns out that gall is spelled with two ells.
Now, can we get back to arguing like adults?
When you say:
…this is quite simply not true. He says it is a source of fraud.
He’s saying that many systems have some degree of fraud or corruption, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole thing is bullshit. It’s not, “look at those poors stealing our stuff.” That was pretty obvious to me.
Maybe the message is not so much “look how much cheating happened in this system”, but “rich people try to use their money to cheat every system – prepare for it.”
He’s saying that it isn’t so bad that rich people cheat to get into better colleges because poor people cheat to eat, too. It isn’t so bad because, in his view, in neither case does the cheating break the system. My point is that the cheating of rich people is worse than that of poor people, because rich people don’t need to cheat, and poor people probably fucking do, and because the plight of the poor is tolerated by the myth that the poor have an equal chance to those better colleges; so that cheating by the rich explicitly breaks that promise.
It also starts with the basis that the entire system was fair to begin with… which how can it be. How many topics have we had on education before this one? No. If we thought the current system was fair to begin with we wouldn’t be demanding free school for everyone. What does free school do, remove advantages of having money. Why is this necessary if the rich aren’t getting an advantage on a regular basis.
No, that’s not what he’s saying.
While i feel this is a pointless waste of effort, i will explain, because I’m stuck sitting in the airport.
His use of welfare was not intended as an example of fraud. It was intended as an example of a system where some use the existence of trivial amounts of fraud is used by some to attack that system, and accuse it of being broken.
Folks on the right wing attack welfare and describe it as broken, based on the existence of fraud, ignoring that fraud constitutes a trivial portion of the overall cases.
He points out that this same type of argument is being made against the college admissions system, where you have 50 cases of fraud, in a system that handles millions of cases.
What happened, is that you recognized the reference to welfare as having fraud as the common right wing talking point, but didn’t notice that he was using it as an example of a false argument.
Harvard (I think) still has more reserved “legacy” admission slots than slots held for minority and scholarship supported students. A lot of the old barriers to entry are still there.
I think you are reading the anger from the left as just being based on 50 cases of fraud. If you read the rest of the posts in this topic, you will see that the anger, the fed-up responses… that’s not due to one ring being caught.
It’s not about just 50 cases. This is just icing on top of an unfair system.
Yes, I understand that. By extension, he says that the college system is not broken by the few rich trying to cheat it, just as the welfare system isn’t broken by the few poor trying to cheat it. But he is wrong, because for a rich man to steal a loaf of bread is not the same kind of wrong as for a starving man to do so. It’s a whole different kind of wrong, because it is an unnecessary wrong. When the rich cheat, they destroy the idea of meritocracy in a way that cheating by the poor cannot do. So, cheating by the poor is irrelevant to the question of the harm caused by the cheating of the rich.
Now, do you still want to argue that I don’t understand what he meant, or that I haven’t articulated clearly why I object to it? To me, you seem so intent on telling me I’m wrong that you’re not actually reading what I’m saying.
You literally don’t understand what he’s saying, do you? Like, you honestly don’t understand.
Your whole rich man staying a loaf of bread argument is entirely immaterial. It doesn’t mean anything at all in this context. He’s not making any attempt to draw equivalence between someone defrauding this system and someone defrauding welfare. That’s not a factor, at all, in what he’s saying. He’s not making any judgement about the people committing the crimes at all. It’s immaterial.
His statement is entirely about the fact that you have a small set of fraudulent cases in a system where millions of cases are processed.
I do. He’s saying there is fraud in both cases, and in both cases the incidence of fraud is small and doesn’t break the systems. Isn’t that what he said? Isn’t that what I said he said?
The short answer is yes I do. Before posting this I spent about 45 minutes review several studies on the subject to see if anything significant had changed since the publishing of the Bell Curve, which spent a couple of chapters showed a high correlation between test scores and high school GPA a college graduation rates and compared it similar studies of the 1960s.
I’m not going to waste my summarizing it for you. Do you have evidence that’s not the case?
Admissions Scandal: When Entitlement Buys Acceptance
Rationalizations are the excuses we give ourselves for not living up to our own moral standards. They dull our sense of responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Humans are creative rationalizers and one of the most common categories of rationalization recognized by psychologists is “appeal to a higher loyalty.” These parents knew that they should not lie or cheat, but they also felt that their highest loyalty was to their children’s well-being. This made their cheating seem justified. Wouldn’t parents who truly loved their children do all they could for them? Isn’t that what good parents would do?
Besides, what these parents were doing may not have seemed that wrong to them. Because of the conformity bias, people tend to take their cues as to what is right and what is wrong from those around them, and there is substantial evidence that the admissions process, especially at elite universities, is hardly a meritocracy. If poor kids and minority kids are getting in because of affirmative action (and let us quickly editorialize: this scandal makes it clear that affirmative action is decidedly notthe problem with college admissions), and if really rich kids like the Jared Kushners of the world are getting in because their parents are donating entire buildings, and if athletes get in just for being athletic, well then how bad can Photoshopping my kid’s face onto the body of a real tennis player be? As the mastermind of this operation, Rick Singer, explained to parents: there’s a front door to colleges (merit), a back door (donating a building), and he’d created a side door. Just another door. Everybody’s doing it.
But @nesrie and @scottagibson don’t want to engage with that argument, so they’ve gone full disingenuous troll and are shitting up the thread instead. Don’t play their game, ignore their disgraceful bullshit, and engage with the people who are interested in an honest discussion.
The problem is that a lot of the resources aren’t available to the poor. We should really have more resources available to all students.
Now this would probably mean higher taxes, especially higher property taxes, but I think its worth to have a more fair merit based systems. And I think we can all agree, that is worth it.
Top 2% is very little, though. While it’s true not everybody needs or should go to college, if we are talking about meritocracy vs privilige, you should look at the majority of the students, not only those who have previously excelled.
Moreover, the likelihood of a poor kid having a 1400 SAT is much lower than a rich kid having that same score.
A correlation exists also with parent’s education, which again correlates to social class. So even if the US system used exclusively SAT scores for admissions and scholarships (which is how many European universities work, a single, comprehensive test and you are placed or not according to your relative position with other candidates, full stop, no more considerations given except perhaps some affirmative action or reserved spots for minorities -to compensate for the aforementioned correlation-) there would be factors making it less meritocratic (I’m not arguing it’s not meritocratic at all, only that it’s not fully meritocratic and maybe nor meritocratic enough, given that are countries that have stricter, more objective admission systems).
I don’t think you can look at a single point in an interlinked system (college admission and scholarship within the system of meritocracy through an education) without taking into account factors that could have influenced that point beforehand.
@Timex @Stepsongrapes, I apologize for the tone of my posts last night. I still have the objection that I think I’ve articulated clearly, but there isn’t any doubt I could have made it less contentiously and I regret that.
@Strollen, same apology to you. To be clear, I wouldn’t argue that the education system in the US has no element of meritocracy to it, as it clearly does have some. But neither would I argue that it is exceptionally meritocratic.
First, because the examples of wealth advantage tipping the scales (legacy admissions; admissions based on legal donations; the wealth advantage in accessing college prep mechanisms like tutors, test prep services etc; the wealth advantage in getting into private primary and secondary schools; the relative differences in the quality of public schools between wealthy and poor school districts, etc) are widespread and well-known and seriously unmeritocratic.
Second, for it to be exceptionally meritocratic, you’d need to compare it to something else which is reasonably comparable. Is the university system in the US substantially more meritocratic than it is in other countries? I have no idea.
Malcolm Gladwell did some excellent research into the issue of college admissions, meritocracy and disadvantaged students. He explained it in a podcast. The key facts (as I recall from hearing this two years ago):
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Many top universities (including the Ivies) will offer a complete free ride to any disadvantaged student with great grades and SAT scores.
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They can’t fill those spots. There appear to be very few of those students. Where are they?
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Malcolm looked into the reasons behind this, through the narrative lens of a poor kid from LA
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Poor kids with amazing potential exist in large numbers, but you can’t wait until they’re 16 years old to find them. By that time, the social pressures they face (gangs, pregnancy, dropping out to work, etc) have turned them away from any future involving academic success
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You have to find them in third or fourth grade. If you start then with a comprehensive set of interventions to keep them on track, then you find that pool of students Harvard and Yale cannot identify for scholarships. The meritocracy works great, if you start the competition at a point where the rich kids don’t have an insurmountable head start.
Link below. His whole “Revisionist History” series is great.
It’s not a made up or new issue. They just got a lot more ballsy about it
But many of its more affluent readers embraced it as a “how to” guide. For years afterward, they inundated me with questions like, “How much do I have to donate to get my son (or daughter) into Harvard (or Yale, or Stanford)?” Some even offered me significant sums, which I declined, to serve as an admissions consultant…
I see the insults keep flowing, makes everything better.
Don’t summon me unless you intend to engage.