In general I feel people (particularly Americans) undervalue or outright ignore the role that luck plays - from where and to whom you are born and beyond - plays in how your life plays out. I’ve not yet read Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy yet, but I’m familiar with the general contours of his arguments and suspect I’ll quite like and agree with the book.
But now, Piff said, the admissions scandal could cause a lot of people to reevaluate their beliefs about wealth and success, as Americans realize how rich people can buy things — like college admission — that others have to work hard to get.
“The moment we start kind of questioning the idea that this is a meritocracy,” he added, “our tolerance for economic inequality begins to kind of crumble.”
As more and more people realize that the rich are, have been, and will continue screwing over the rest of us, the closer we get to actually doing something about it as a society. At least I hope.
Well if we’re only going to hold the rich accountable when their population is the majority and ignore the fact their money is the majority, it’s going to be hard to get anywhere. This group that can pay 6 mil to get their kids into college for no other reason than social status, will always be small but that doesn’t make it unimportant.
I think that’s 90% of the posters on this thread. Even if they didn’t explicitly voice it, that’s the subtext behind the anger. It’s kinda like the straw that broke the camel’s back. Even in THIS way they cheat.
edit: It makes me wary thought, even as someone who’s been spouting Marxist crap for 20 years. The social system works best when people more or less assume there’s an order to it. When there’s a critical number of cheaters (corruption in this case) people say fuck it and join right in the cheating. Example, people cutting lines.
Aside from the fact that the camel is already on fire and hurtling down a black diamond slope with trollkin metal riffs playing in the background, yeah, this is well said.
I think I am outraged out on this one. Rich people wasting money to let their spoiled idiot kids get a degree from Fancy College X instead of State College Y?
Like, obviously this is awful and stupid, but I guess I am not marching to the barricades for this one.
Think of it this way. Someone pays 1M to get their kid into a school. Then they deduct it from their income for tax purposes because it was ostensibly a charitable donation. So not only do you have all the academic issues, you also have a large amount of money staying in their already full pockets that should have gone to the American people. Outright tax fraud in addition to the cheating on admissions.
This is true, and a good point. I don’t think that they tied all of the bribery to charitable donations, or I don’t know if all of the parents would have deducted it, but I suppose that is for the IRS to investigate.
This has been a hell of a news-cycle week, and I think I am out-raged out.
Yeah… the tax fraud is probably what will nail them. There’s no rationalizing your way out of that. It’s just stealing.
The colllege admission process in the US has evolved significantly in the last 50 odd years and I argue in generally a positive way. In the 1960s it was pretty much grades, connections, wealth, and athletics. In the 70 and 80s, test score were added to the mix and some case were the predominant factor. In the 1990 and 2000 that added a whole person approach. With the outlawing of purely race based quotes in the Bakke decision, started strongly factoring in socioeconomic status. So that poor student’s test score didn’t need to be as high as rich students. The also give preference to talents other than athletics, violin playing or environmental activism. As both my friend who went to Stanford and sent all three of his kids there, and another friend who is a college admission consultant explained a lot more kids who could do the work apply to these schools then are admitted. In Stanford case they whittle the number down to 5,000 using numbers primarily test score and grades. All 5,000 could do the work, there isn’t that much difference between kid with high school of 3.8 GPA or 4.2 or 1400 or 1500 SAT with respect to being able to graduate from the place.
My understanding is that the European system would be basically just take the top 2,500 kids by the numbers, which IMO makes it even tougher for poor kids to standout, because their parents aren’t paying for private tutoring lessons for exams etc.
The reason to focus on the 2% is because that very much the pool of elite colleges focus on, and the scandal consisted of mostly elite schools.
All that being said I agree with Malcom Gladwell (and Bill Gates and other makes the same point). waiting until the kids are 16 is entirely too late. However, that isn’t the fault of the universities,
The relevant metric is do universities evaluate the most talented high school senior and get them into the top schools? As his podcast talks adding a free tuition didn’t results in a lot more admissions to Harvard, because universities have been looking for smart kids for a long time. We can’t fault universities for a broken K-12 system.
an epidemic of affluenza cranial bone spurs I guess
Since most European school are federally funding, and not by property taxes, you aren’t penalized as much for being in a poor neighborhood as you are in US schools. And being poor in Europe is a bit easier because of the stronger safety net (so, more likely that parents don’t have to work 3 jobs, or that they might not eat at night or other distractions).
Yeah, I’m not really buying your argument.
Anyway, NPR podcast on the subject for those interested.
Here is an article that what is consdered a scandal in the US is considered normal in the rest of the world. There is a lot more to the rest of the world than Europe.
Yeah and it needs to be fixed there too, not sure what your point is.
Moreover, the European system (well, at least the Spanish one) does not really achieve meritocracy (although it does take away 99%of the economic burden).
Despite a pretty decent public education the correlation between academic success and socioeconomic status remains pretty high.
Schools can get funded, but the social environment of depressed areas do damage the quality of the education on offer no matter if they are comparatively well funded.
He seems to be saying that the differential grade boundaries based on social background are a good thing, so I’m not sure what part of his argument you’re “not buying”. I certainly don’t think he’s saying that education of the less well off in the US is as good as education of the less well off in Europe.
You would expect this in a perfect meritocracy, due to the heritability of “g” (general intelligence), as well as other traits the meritocracy selects for. Are the actual real world numbers higher than that can explain? I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m pretty confident the answer is yes. Still, you have to be careful when talking about statistical observations.
Indeed. There’s a lot of dispute about what to do about it as well, even between people who are quite keen to spend more money on education.
Money can help, but not only on education. You need to prop up the community to curtail the worst effects of poverty and also help changing the overall “culture” (by making education more socially desirable, and by tackling issues and conflicts in the community that provide friction for the student’s development -drugs, violence, abuse… sadly somewhat correlated with socioeconomic status too-).
In fact many education centers here have that as one of their missions (they don’t restrict themselves to just provide an education to the students, but see themselves as a tool for change and improvement of the community).
But the problem is vast and successes perhaps not enough.
Keep in mind that much of what is being discussed really concerns only the elite colleges. Getting into perfectly serviceable, affordable schools where you’ll get a perfectly good undergrad degree is not nearly as fertile a ground for outrage or inequity. It’s the top-tier schools where simply having gone there carries economic and social weight where all of this really plays out.
Most schools, mine included, use a complex matrix of things to select students from the applicant pool. Depending on programs, location, the applicant pool, cost, and a host of other factors, schools may weigh different factors, well, differently. Many are moving totally away from SAT or ACT scores, making them optional. It makes the admissions team’s job harder, sure, but it does mean that more and more diverse types of students are getting considered. Elite institutions do the same sort of thing; I suspect the folks implicated in this scandal were mostly putting their kids into slots that were pure gravy for the schools, full freight paying gold. The athletic stuff is much more icky, though, as those slots are limited by other things.
The idea that wealth has benefits is of course something that doesn’t really need to be said; Cephalus already told Socrates about this in Book I of Republic some 2500 years ago. The problem is what benefits. You can have a legit argument over whether getting into schools is something wealth should make easier, as opposed to, say, getting a fancier car.