Getting fired or expelled = punishment. Not being hired or accepted = you aren't owed anything.

I was lurking in a reddit thread this morning that was focused on the student that Stanford U. just expelled because it has been discovered her father had paid $6.5 million to secure her admission.

There were a number of comments expressing sympathy for the student that basically boiled down to “She shouldn’t be expelled for something her father did. She shouldn’t be punished.”

Is being expelled a “punishment”, though? Like, what if this student is clearly unqualified and wasn’t even eligible for a community college? Would it still be wrong for Stanford to kick her out? Why is she more sypathetic than the thousands of applicants who followed the proper channels and were rejected? Is the act of expulsion more “victimizing” than non-acceptance?

I hear similar arguments when it comes to people being fired from their jobs for their own stupid behavior. Like spewing racist or sexist shit on Facebook. You will frequently hear someone opining that it is wrong to “punish” these people by firing them, because free speech, man.

But these people don’t seem to think that it is a “punishment” to not hire someone. They agree that it is not “punishing” to refuse a relationship with someone who is a stinky bastard, but they somehow believe it is “punishing” to sever an existing relationship with a stinky bastard.

My opinion is that these acts are morally equivalent. I am curious what you think.

I’m not too sure about your argument, but if I am innocently given a watch which was later deemed to have been stolen by the giver, I’m usually not allowed to keep the watch.

In this specific case, she was expelled because of false sailing credentials on her application, and had actually met with the sailing coach (who pled guilty to accepting the bribe). This wasn’t one of the cases where the student was completely unaware of what was happening. She may have not known anything illegal was going on, but she absolutely submitted an application with false data on it.

It’s not so much punishment as it is “our reputation would be tarnished by continuing to associate with you, so out of an abundant sense of self-preservation, we are terminating your employment with us. Sorry, but you gotta go.”

Same spin: “it’s not in our business interests to associate with you (by hiring you).”

And again: “you are a stinky bastard, and it is not in my interests to start/continue associating with you.”

I agree. That the fired/unhired/rejected person suffers is not punishment; it’s just an unfortunate consequence of the other party’s decision to distance themselves.

Expulsion is often used as a punishment, which may explain why it’s commonly interpreted as a punishment even when it’s applied for non-punitive reasons. As muldoonthief points out, in the present case the student was complicit in the falsification of her admissions application. But even if she hadn’t been, an expulsion would still be appropriate because her real qualifications apparently would not have been adequate to justify admission in the first place.

I’ve noticed this too. Perhaps it’s a type of cognitive bias that someone has already coined a name for, I don’t know. If not, it needs to have one.

The reason that not being accepted isn’t punishment is that there are usually many people competing for a job or opening, and not being the best for the job is just a fact of life. But there is an assumption that the competition is fair. The only way to keep it fair is to undo the acceptance if fraud is involved.
Not to mention that the application surely states that the applicant agrees that the information is correct, and the admission can be withdrawn if the information is found to be false. So she knowingly lied, and can’t complain.
In this case, since I think the parents are in China, the only punishment for them is the shame of her coming home kicked out of college.

Not being hired or accepted (or cast or elected) isn’t necessarily any reflection on you; it just means the people doing the choosing found someone else who they thought was a better fit. Being fired or expelled is about you. (If you lost a job through no fault of your own, we’d use a different word, like “downsized” or “let go.”)

I think yall are missing the point of the OP. Take two scenarios:

  1. Student applies to college and is rejected after the admissions committee did some googling and saw that the student has bullied people on Facebook.

  2. Student is kicked out of college after the administration discovers the student has bullied people on Facebook.

In either scenario, the reason for the school’s action is exactly the same. But people are much quicker to cry foul about the second than the first. The question is why? Are they morally different?

I dunno. Simply being rejected maintains the status quo, being booted out is a negative change. There’s also a difference in consequences; not being hired or accepted isn’t something the interviewer for your next place would know about, but if you’re applying to somewhere else, having just been expelled or fired might well be.

I’m not sure I feel any sympathy for the kid in the OP, who is hardly going to end up with no options regardless of the reputation damage, but I’ve been rejected from any number of jobs, it’s a much more normal part of life than being fired.

Why didn’t dad just pay $6.5 million for a library annex like everyone else?

I think psychologically it is harder to lose something you’ve had then it is to never get something. Giving a small child a popsicle and allowing them to lick it and think its theirs and then taking it away will result in more crying then just telling them they don’t get a popsicle.

For the kid in college you’ve made friends and probably have a lease on a place to live and now you’ve got to leave them and move your stuff. That’s a lot harder then thinking about going to college and then going to a different college. With a job its something similar being rejects just maintains the status quo but if you’ve received the job and have made decisions based on having the job where you live how much of a car payment then losing that job is a lot harder.

You could make the counter argument that being in prison and having your parole denied is worse than being released and then being rearrested for skipping too loudly by the end of the block away from the prison. Maybe the 5 minutes of freedom was worth having it taken away but that’s about the only example I can come up with there it isn’t worth to have something taken away then never being given it.

I agree that the consequences are different, but I fail to see why that should matter to the aggrieved party.

If a person tricks me into thinking they are honest, trustworthy and competent and I later find out the truth, why should I care about how they are going to pay their rent after I fire them? Maybe they shouldn’t have lied to me in the first place if paying rent on time is so important.

Absolutely true.

This idea was played for good effect in The Bourne Identity: Bourne offers Kreutz $10,000 for a ride to Paris, tossing a bundle of cash to her. This ostentatious display demonstrates his sincerity, but more importantly it also puts the cash in her hands, giving her an immediate (if subconscious) sense that it belongs to her. After some thought, she refuses the offer - that is, until Bourne asks her to give him back the cash, at which point she reconsiders and agrees to the deal.

Because a library annex is more like $65M.

@ the OP: I’ve often felt the same about the term “passed over for promotion,” as if somehow someone was entitled to a promotion and was denied a rightful promotion by not getting one.

They are in no way practically equivalent. Someone expelled from Stanford has lost their time going there, has lost the chance to go to other schools (I assume this student applied other places. After all, the bribe might not have worked. This student likely had acceptances in hand for perfectly legitimate “safety schools” that aren’t Stanford but would have provided a similar quality education.)

Now, this student will need to reapply and the applications for other schools will demand to know all previous schools attended. The student can simply leave Stanford/the expulsion off, and there’s a chance the new school won’t dig deep enough to find out, but it’s a substantial problem they now have. Either they mention the expulsion and some percentage (probably the majority) of schools will throw their application away, or they don’t mention it, and some percentage of schools will find out about Stanford by searching certain databases.

One messed up thing is a school expulsion is not a court proceeding. They can be arbitrary, the evidence can be shit, due process can be flagrantly denied. Yet this expulsion will be seen as “legitimate” by other schools, no matter how it might have been conducted.

Maybe another example would be making it to the big leagues in sport? I can’t say I’ve experienced it myself, but I do remember the scene in Bull Durham where he talks about making it to the show.

If you are working for a company or attending school, you typically enter into an agreement to perform according to specific requirements and meet certain behavioral guidelines. If you fail to do so, then you have broken the agreement and they can separate from you.

Getting hired or accepted into a company or school is not guaranteed because presumably you are competing against similarly talented individuals in a selection process for limited spots.

That said, while you aren’t “owed” a specific job, I do think it is a reasonable expectation that if you meet the requirements (degree, work experience, etc) you should be able to find SOME job.

The word “entitled” gets thrown around a lot, as if people don’t have a reasonable expectation to be treated fairly and honestly. If you put in the time at a company, are doing good work and are meeting all the requirements, it is not unreasonable to expect that you would receive a promotion to the next level. Much in the same way you would expect to move on to the 12th grade after completing all the requirements for the 11th grade. Now, that may change once you reach a certain level and promotions go from simple “title bumps” to where they are looking to pick someone for a single, important role. Presumably a person might be competing against similarly talented individuals from both inside and outside the company. In that case, they aren’t necessarily a shoe-in. But, yes, if you were being groomed for a particular role and suddenly it went to some outsider at the last minute, I think you do have a right to feel slighted.
It works both ways too. If society doesn’t “owe me a job”, or more accurately “owe someone a way to financially support themselves legitimately”, then does that person owe society to not break into homes, sell drugs or murder people to survive?
Similarly, employers seem to take this attitude that because they are paying you, you should be at their beck and call 24/7, do whatever inane or demeaning thing is asked of you, provide your own training and career growth and otherwise figure out a way to make yourself valuable. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect companies to provide employees with some level of guidance, training and support (without taking it to the extreme and turning their employees into a cult of robots).

One reason in favor of the “punishment” view is that an expulsion or firing can harm your opportunities outside the relationship with the school/business. For example, your next application will probably include a question about why you left your previous institution, and adverse information will disadvantage you relative to other applicants.

The institution isn’t thinking of punishment, just accountability. But when you’ve messed up, accountability feels just like punishment.

So what are you saying here? Stanford shouldn’t expel this girl because she’ll have a hard time getting into another school?

I agree that having an opportunity yanked out under your feet is a different experience than having the door to an opportunity closed in your face. But if the opportunity was only available to you because of deceit, then why should your personal hardship be considered when deciding whether to revoke that opportunity?