I’m ok with it as long as it’s explicit. $X will get you in. No tax write-offs. I wouldn’t necessarily be against it being classified as some sort of purchased admission. People hiring Harvard grads are generally not hiring them because they went to Harvard- they’re hiring them because they got in to Harvard.
So then you believe that schools only get donations on a quid pro quo basis. That’s sad. Then maybe those donations should never be tax deductible. After all those are businesses, not charities. Non-profit status should never be allowed to be applied to such a university or college.
Nope.
Could be.
Agreed.
Even if 95%+ of the revenue going in or out is not meant for gaining favoritism in acceptance?
Not ok.
You get into university (and power) because you’re from a particular background, not because you’re competent. Would you accept it if your brain surgeon got qualified because their daddy was rich and their tutors were discouraged from giving them low marks? If no, why do think having these people in other positions of authority will have a better outcome?
I read an interesting article about college budgets last year - but Google isn’t turning it up - it was about needs based vs. needs blind admissions. Basically, its a not so secret that Universities without huge endowments (which is almost all of them except Harvard), need some students who pay full price, they need some who will donate (or their parents will donate) because these are the students that keep the university functioning - they provide the extra dollars that maintain buildings, fund visiting professorships - and they help fund the scholarship students.
I’m a little baffled by your logic here.
Normal students are not being helped when somebody else pays for their little idiot’s admission. It’s pretty obvious that the spot that that little idiot fills will not be available for another student. So the little idiots are making it more difficult for other students to get admitted.
And there’s the larger picture. The value of the university system to society is that it produces better educated people who will use their knowledge to produce benefits we’ll all enjoy. That’s how most people benefit from universities even if they never attend one. But the little idiots aren’t going to produce the same kind of benefits after their graduation that a genuine student would have produced. You might be able to bribe a medical school to push your kid through the system but he’s not going to be a good doctor.
So it’s the parents who are doing this who are hurting the larger group. Not the people who are trying to stop it.
Right. I feel like many people in this thread are skipping the real moral dilemma for a strawman. It’s actually not that common for a ragingly unqualified student to get in simply because of their parents’ money. I mean, it happens, but there aren’t so many of those kids that it has much of an impact.
On the other hand, what happens all the time is that you have a slate of perfectly qualified students. All can do well and will be a credit to the university. Within that pool, the super-rich will do the best: partially because the school will explicitly chose full-pay kids, but also because they are likely to have “hooks” on their resumes not available to other kids: I crew! I went to Phillips Exeter! The dean was my dad’s roommate! My mom went here!
So there are tons of cases of what are more qualified kids not getting in because richer kids got priority. But those richer kids aren’t unqualified by any means. Just less qualified. It’s just a lot more nuanced than drooling-idiot has parents write a check.
Not only do schools need someone willing and able to pay full freight, schools also benefit by having students who aren’t that strong academically.
It has been awhile since I was an university instructor, but I cringe at the thought of teaching a classroom full of high school valedictorians who’ve never made less than an A+ their whole lives. Yeah, I would want to work with smart kids. Who wouldn’t? But I would also want to have an opportunity to inspire someone–someone who might be on the aimless, low self-confidence-having side. Someone who might think they aren’t “good” at the subject I’m teaching, but who changes their mind by the end of the semester. A student like that isn’t the straight-A valedictorian type. They tend to be the student who makes more Cs than As, who doesn’t test very well, and who no one has ever seriously called “smart”.
I think I’d also like teaching a student who wasn’t all that concerned about their career prospects or getting into a professional school. A student like this will never come into your office with angry tears in their eyes, demanding you explain why you subtracted two points from their otherwise perfect paper because they are trying to get into medical school and that will be impossible unless they get their two points back!!! A non-competitive student will accept whatever grade you give them.
Schools have never been a perfect meritocracy, and I don’t understand why people believe they should be. The “real world” isn’t a meritocracy. Isn’t school supposed to prepare students for the real world?
It’s more nuanced than that. For one thing, 10-20% of the students at elite universities come from households that earn over $650k a year. So it’s hard to say that policies that encourage admissions of more wealthy kids make the school “like the real world”. That’s about as far from the “real world” as it gets.
Past that, though, the highly selectives don’t just select for type-A grade grubbers. They want kids with experiences to share. The want a certain number to be crazy-smart, but they want others to be entrepreneur-types, social justice types, quiet reflective types, divergent thinkers, etc. They want kids who have had first hand experiences with poverty, with disease, with different cultures and religions. Within that swirl, there will be plenty of kids who will need varying levels of academic support–though no one who really can’t do the work. They are pretty good at seeing the difference.
The problem with money-for-admission is that you risk getting kids who contribute none of that. They struggle academically and they don’t offer much perspective or energy that isn’t being provided already. I mean, how much East Coast Boarding School do you need?
Again, I’m not worried so much about the handful of real corrupt pay for admission cases. I worry a lot more about the cumulative impact of all the benefits that streamline admissions for elites.
I think people mistakenly equate “credential” with “basic requirement”. A high SAT score is a credential. It is an indicator of smartypantsness. But a person doesn’t have to be a “smarty pants” to make it through most college programs. Even college programs at elite schools.
The credentials that are used to gate-keep college admissions seem to get loftier with every generation. But I doubt the difficulty of college curricula has increased at the same clip. For one thing, instructors are always going to be folks who were “screened in” using standards of yore, not the standards their students were/are subjected to. If the student who didn’t meet the high SAT score credential of their particular school can be characterized as drooling idiots, then so can their professors who didn’t attain that score because it wasn’t a credential they were held to.
Reminds me of my graduate advisor (a proud Cornell alum), who frequently bragged about how she managed to escape the calculus requirement while she was obtaining her biology degree. She is an intelligent person who made big scientific contributions throughout her life despite her lack of exposure to calculus, and yet I would not put it passed her to judge a student who had not taken calculus as “unqualified” for a graduate program. So I’m wondering how many of us are judging “unqualified” development cases (or students admitted through Affirmative Action, for that matter) against standards we weren’t held to ourselves, as well as against standards that aren’t even relevant to one’s ability to do college coursework.
When speaking of SAT/ACT specifically, I think the issue is that everyone has gotten so much better at taking them. Test prep makes a huge difference, so among elite applicants, the goalposts have shifted.
In my personal experience, relatively weak scores matter a lot more to schools in the second and third tier than in the top. Harvard or Williams or whatever are a lot more likely to take a chance on a kid with a lower score because everyone knows they could have all 1600s if they wanted. In my experience, places like Rice and Notre Dame are more stats-aware.
That said, there is a point where it’s clear someone may struggle to do the work. Admissions people put kids in “buckets” based on projected GPA/likelihood of graduating. There is a “very unlikely to graduate” bucket. For a typical selective university, that bucket has a 3-5% acceptance rate. These are kids accepted for “institutional reasons”.
I wasn’t really talking about elite universities. There’s nothing “real world” about an elite institution, which is why those places are so elite. I think that kind of goes without saying.
But it seems like many posters in this thread think that all universities/colleges (not just the very elite ones you’re talking about) should have merit-based admissions, where only the smartest, most ambitious students should get admitted. People seem to think there could possibly be no benefit to choosing the “less qualified” student if it means the “more qualified” student will be rejected.
I’d be very concerned if medical schools were used in that way, and if it were shown that there was favoritism to admission to medical school, and especially to graduating from medical school and then getting certified for being wealthy, then that’s a bit of a problem, but one that is extremely unlikely to ever develop.
Little Johnny doesn’t want to be a brain surgeon, he wants to work for his daddy and take over when daddy retires/dies. If he hangs out and parties with some greek buddies for a few years, and they give him his MBA so that he can be an executive vice president of procuring paper clips for the breakroom, then whatever. The dumber he is, the bigger the library that bears his name.
Normal students do get access to that new library or lab or science hall or the dorm or whatever else it is that they donated. This increases the capacity of the university, and increases the educational experience for all the students.
More students are taught better because you let little Johnny’s dad give you a bunch of money to strongly consider enrolling his son.
Most of these admits are actually going to be qualified students, just not the best of the best that the rest of the applicants need to be.
It would be foolish to push them into a field they cannot handle where there actually are real metrics to be obtained, where they would fail. If they are stupid, they wouldn’t just not be a good doctor, they would not be certified, and therefore, not be a doctor at all.
The joke is, “What do you call someone who graduated dead last in medical school? Doctor.” But that is because the bar is set high enough that the person that graduated dead last in medical school still outperformed 95%+ of the rest of the population.
If we can figure a way to get the same funding from taxpayers as we get from donations from “development” cases, then we can certainly look into doing that. As is, though, it does seem as though the system does benefit all the students. It’s not the best system imaginable, but it may be the best system that is currently practical.
The current scandal, where individuals are pocketting bribe money, not so much. That only enriches some individuals at the cost of qualified students who were passed over.
I agree with you there, though I prefer to think of it more as “students can have more to offer an academic community than academic excellence or ambition”. If a school is selective at all, it’s selecting for lots of things and not all students have to check all boxes.
“Generally”. Look up Begoña Villacís (she comes up without the fancy squiggles too). And anybody who’s discounting someone for being the wrong color is, well, I’d say “both a racist and a moron” but being a racist requires being a moron.
And since wealth is inherited, you also make that reign permanent.
It’s glaringly evident if you think it through for just 10 seconds. A university, given a choice between middling student A with a big bag of cash and great student B with empty pockets will most likely pick student A - either for laudable reasons like improving the university itself ever further, or because that way the Dean of Admissions gets himself a fancy-ass new car. Soon enough the only ones getting in at all are student As. So all of the jobs gated behind higher education go to student As, too.
Congratulations, you’ve just turned into a rigid class/privilege society. May I interest you in some second-hand guillotines to solve this “new” problem ?
What’s the good of money if you can’t use it to your advantage? Sure, donate a wing, get your kid in.
Honestly, prestigious schools should just auction off slots and take the money directly. The benefit of admission then goes to whomever values it the most. If that means my daughter has to go to a state school instead of Harvard, then I’m okay with that. UofM isn’t all that bad.
Yes, I didn’t mean to imply that France and the UK has a problem with students getting in through their parents money. The financing and admissions tend to be very different in Europe.
But the problem with a lot of the governing class coming form a limited number of educational backgrounds is an issue in both nations I think. The US would worsen the problem if that restricted talent pool is diluted with students that should never have made it to university.
Except your daughter didn’t get in because Smith Jr. took her spot.
Sure, but that sucks worse in some sense, than mere admissions shenanigans. It’s like a double-whammy.
I mean, when you’re at a highly regarded school, but not “elite” like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc… and your school doesn’t engage in much grade inflation, you’re fighting that much MORE of an uphill battle against the students at the elite schools.
Hiring Manager: “Johnny here went to University of Florida and got a 3.2, but Billy went to Harvard, AND got a 3.9! I think we’ll interview Billy and circular file Johnny’s resume”
All this despite Johnny actually being the better candidate, but he doesn’t have the luxury of having professors not giving less than a B+.