US College Bribery Scandal

suicide_circus wrote: »

it devalues the institutions certificates but im not sure a crime has been committed, this is not a state body

steddyeddy wrote: »

There's more prosecutions on the way it seems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/college-admissions-scandal.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

schadenfreude eat your heart out.

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

"Stanford rescinded the admission of a student who has not been publicly named who worked with Mr. Singer and whose application, prosecutors say, contained fabricated sailing credentials."

To reiterate the main point here. The crimes are bad enough, but the real question needs to be, why on earth would a college application contain your sailing credentials? It's hilarious to me that people in the college administrations are worried about the "integrity" of their applications process when absurd stuff like that forms a part of it. It would be hilarious if it weren't so shameful.

People complaining about affirmative action need to explain the benefits of one's sailing credentials to a merit-based application process.

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

wally79 wrote: »

Stanford has a sailing team and the coach was fired and is facing racketeering charges

Apparently there’s some link between student above and a 500k donation made through same sailing coach

No I get it alright, my question is with the logic of people being admitted into colleges based on their ability to participate in sports. Sport has a place in a college, I think, it's important that there are avenues through which to forge communities, and even to express a sense of identity with your college. But that's not what colleges are for. Sport should be something you do with your spare time at college. I think in Ireland we actually have the balance right on this front: sport is important in the identity of the college, and there are even scholarships for folks to participate in them, but you don't get admitted into the place for the ability to play.

Ultimately they are about knowledge and ideas, and if someone can get in on their sailing ability, while someone else who is academically superior is being excluded, I think that's a really bad idea, and serves as a leg up for the already privileged. I would go further, and suggest that the main purpose of such athletics admissions is to give a leg up to the already privileged.

Because for sure, nobody is actually watching the sailing team. But even with sports that people do care about, like football, the colleges at least pretend that football isn't why someone is in the college: after all, that's why they aren't paid, because ultimately they are supposed to be students first, athletes second. Right? Now we all know that's absolute horse-****e, but the football team is an exception because it's something to which people are paying attention, it defines the school's identity, and most of all it is supposed to help raise money. But they keep up a pretence that academics come first, sport second, for those kids.

So why on Earth should your sailing credentials be part of why you are admitted to a college? Surely the college can cobble together a sailing team with whoever they have admitted that happens to care about sailing? I mean, if they turn out to be terrible at sailing, who honestly is ever going to give a ****e? What, ultimately, is the benefit to the college of having a good sailing team? I think the answer is in the ability to give a leg up to the wealthy, which brings its own financial benefits. But of course such people never need to recognise that they were given a little leg up, and they can spend their lives convinced of how they got where they did on merit, and look down their noses at people who didn't get those opportunities, or worse still, the dreaded affirmative action students.

/rant

It’s important to be aware that the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association (ICSA) doesn’t allow for college and university sailing competitors to receive scholarships or financial aid based on sailing ability. So, if you plan to compete at the collegiate level, you’ll need to look into college scholarships based on other qualities, like academic achievement, financial need, volunteer service, and other characteristics.

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

I didn't say they did. I said that one's sailing credentials can be, and are, used as the basis for admission to elite colleges, for no good reason. I think that's a bigger scandal than someone faking sailing credentials.

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

Thats not how their recruitment policy works. Extra curricular activities are not just used to separate otherwise equal candidates, they can significantly leverage an application. I've mentioned this earlier but Harvard for instance, grades people on a six point scale. People with a four usually get accepted at a rate less than one per cent. This jumps to 33% for people coming in to play several prestige sports. The way you are portraying it is that grades come first then other things are factored in afterwards. It is not done that way, a huge amount rides on things like legacy candidacy, application essays, campus interviews etc.

Even setting all that aside though, the argument that it is something they just do isn't very convincing when my problem to begin with is the fact that it is something they just do.

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

Sorry, I'm not sure what the point of the link you've posted is, it's very long. What I've read seems to bare out what I'm saying.

So why aren’t creative alternatives like this even on the table? A major reason is that popular writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, pushing a leftist or heart-above-head egalitarianism, have poisoned their readers against aptitude testing. They have insisted that the tests don’t predict anything, or that they do but only up to a limited point on the scale, or that they do but only because affluent parents can goose their children’s scores by buying them test-prep courses.

764dak wrote: »

This Harvard professor says the admissions people don't want one-dimensional dweebs: https://newrepublic.com/article/119321/harvard-ivy-league-should-judge-students-standardized-tests

Candamir wrote: »

Actually that’s not quite true. Many Irish universities gives sports scholarships with reduced points requirement for college entry.
Achieving at a high level in sport requires a huge amount of dedication and commitment, and these same traits transfer well to the academic sphere. I do think that’s a good balance.

The heads of Britain’s private schools are really feeling the pressure. How else do you explain their desperate plea to be left alone because super-rich parents are saving the taxpayer billions of pounds a year by sending their offspring to Eton and Harrow? This self-serving study in public school economics published by the Independent Schools Council (ISC) was given pride of place in at least two national newspapers last week. It’s an old argument that was first shot down in 1968 by a panel of academics and private school leaders set up to “integrate the public schools with the state system”. The Public Schools Commission found the claim that parents who chose to pay for their child’s education were being hit with a double taxation “unimpressive”, likening it to a childless couple asking for a tax rebate because they weren’t drawing any benefit from the schools system.

Similarly, the Charity Commission in 2009 considered the same contention to be specious when it was challenged by private headteachers over plans to make their schools perform their charitable function. A more modern analogy might be a Russian oligarch boasting that, by using his helicopter to get to work, he is saving the British taxpayer thousands in road maintenance.

The Guardian view on private schools: motors of unfairness
Read more
But in its latest report, the ISC has gone even further by claiming that the “induced impact” of its schools boosts the country’s GDP by a massive £13.7bn. This figure includes the employment of armies of teachers, grounds staff, caretakers and catering staff, together with all their personal expenditure. The misplaced assumption seems to be that, should the private schools pass into state ownership, they would stop making a contribution to the national coffers. Of course they wouldn’t.

This is desperate stuff. But perhaps the schools feel they have their backs to the wall. Heaving into view is the very real prospect of a Jeremy Corbyn government and a pledge to impose VAT on private school fees – a tax that would make a genuine £1.5bn contribution to the national coffers. Even the Tories, once loyal friends of independent schools, have vowed to remove charitable status from those that continue to do nothing charitable.

I’ve been told that next month a newly formed parliamentary group will call for the phasing-out of our private schools. The group wants to replicate what Finland managed in the 1970s when all-party support was gained for creating a national education system – under which its children continue to dominate the OECD education outcome tables.

If the cold winds of change are blowing in the direction of the independent school sector, then its headteachers only have themselves to blame. The writing was on the wall as long ago as 1940; when Winston Churchill called on the president of the Board of Education to fill public schools with “bursary boys”. Since then the sector has had countless opportunities to reconnect with local communities. Instead, today just 6,000 (one in 100) privately educated pupils are on 100% bursaries