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Confessions about Admissions

2019-03-12 17:36:26.474083+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

I guess the scandal here is that they were able to do this for ten or twenty grand through a broker rather than a million dollar endowment directly to the school? And if this scheme got the kids in and they did okay, what does this say about the relative value of the information taught in school to the filtering process of the admissions? (Hint: It lines up with previous research that suggests that, except for extremely low-income students, the value of college is filtering, not education.)

Of course this also depended on corrupt sports coaches. Given the recent revelations about how deep those sports coaches are willing to go to cover up sexual assault, it should come as no surprise that a little graft to work around admissions is all in a day's work...

FBI accuses wealthy parents, including celebrities, in college entrance bribery scheme.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture History Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Currency Education ]

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#Comment Re: Confessions about Admissions made: 2019-03-13 15:45:57.244253+00 by: Dan Lyke

Written while posting https://www.facebook.com/jaimie.leigh23/posts/10157142958293485

See, the thing is that this dude singles out the rich kids, but ... a long time ago, in another state, I took a take-home test for a student because... a couple bucks was a couple bucks, and was there really any reason a nursing student needed to know the ins-and-outs of dBase in order to demonstrate computer competency? It was a "computer fundamendals" kind of class, in the '80s, the test was horribly written, so I had no compunctions: the whole thing wasn't about learning useful skills; the teacher obviously had no particular clue or idea, this was just another obstacle in the course. Where I had questions about the "right" answer was about what opinion the teacher had expressed in class.

If we're going to make the argument that college prepares you for life, then, yes, figuring out who to hire to do the work for you, and how to game the meta-system, is way more productive than doing the work yourself. If this is shocking and disturbing to you, that's because you bought into the lie. This is a good portion of why I never bothered to finish college. I mean, I didn't learn the lesson very well, I'm not good at delegating and hiring, and frankly I'm kinda willing to trade my dignity for that.

And if you read the outrage from various sectors in the power structure, the real crime here was that administrators were leaving money on the table. It's kinda the same argument made against ticket scalpers: That money could have been going into administrative costs for the venue...

(Because you damned sure know that money was never going to make it down to the individual professors, or the artists...)

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