Bribes to Get into Yale and Stanford? What Else Is New?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19368815" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19368815</a>

This is why, to me, the entire debate about affirmative action at elite colleges is a complete red herring. The amount of kids, regardless of race, who can be considered &quot;deserving&quot; of a spot has been reduced more so by legacy admissions and these bribes than by any effort of individual institutions to even out racial or gender demographics.

From the article: &quot;It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as your son is applying — which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him — and illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over accomplishment.&quot;

Meritocracy for thee, but not for me.<p>As the upper echelons continue to cordon off segments of the economy and education for just themselves, will the &quot;Bootstraps and Personal Responsibility&quot; mythology finally start to die out?

My company foolishly donated data to Stanford for nearly a decade.<p>We asked them for an &#x27;in kind&#x27; license to OpenNLP and were basically completely rebuffed. They&#x27;re taking in money hand over fist.<p>We need to stop thinking of these as universities anymore. They&#x27;re cash cows...

A smaller subset of this problem is paying people to take standardized tests for you. I graduated from an ivy and had a couple peers who got a perfect score on their SAT&#x27;s but could only speak broken English. If you&#x27;re willing to pay someone to cheat on standardized tests, I&#x27;m not surprised you&#x27;re willing to bribe someone to gain admissions also.

I used to have a lot of friends in the MIT admissions office. They felt tremendous pride working at a school that didn&#x27;t give precedence to legacy admits or children of donors (the quote I remember was &quot;if you give a building, when your son or daughter is turned down for admittance you get a phone call from a Vice President telling you the news&quot; instead of just a form letter).

Just reinforces my belief that an ivy league degree is much more an indicator of socioeconomic class than it is intelligence or aptitude.

It&#x27;s exciting that the national conversation is finally becoming directed at classism.

American society functions on bribery, and anyone that thinks otherwise simply has their eyes closed.<p>&quot;Contributing&quot; to a congressman is literally giving them money so they make decisions favorable to you. That is identical to me giving a policeman $50 to look the other way.<p>Unlimited campaign contributions is just newspeak for &quot;legal bribery&quot;.

I personally know some that have paid 100k+ to get into ivy league school

Out of all my classmates that went to really prestigious schools, like 20% were genuinely a cut above the rest. The other 80% just gamed everything, taking easier AP classes to boost GPA, random &quot;resume&quot; building activities, these folks just left a sour impression on me.

The discussion about &#x27;who deserves a spot at a prestigious university x&#x27; misses the issue. Acceptance at one of these universities is not based on who is the most intelligent, hardworking, or accomplished. These universities, just like any other institutions, have their own goals and agenda. They accept you not because you deserve it or you have earned it, but because accepting you promotes the kind of ideals that these institutions espouse (e.g. money, but could also be racial diversity). Inferring someone&#x27;s intelligence based on their university, therefore, is highly unreliable at best.

If the goal is to graduate alumni which will donate the largest amounts, then a large donation up-front from a well-connected individual is one such filter which achieves that goal without delay.

I&#x27;m sad to say that I know one of these students that had it arranged for them through what might have been this service.

Is it really surprising that the upper class is isolating itself from the rest, as the gap gets bigger and bigger in time? That happens in all areas of life, school included. The admission system of many universities just makes this very easy.

What does this mean for the future of fake sports that no one watches or cares about that exist purely to help students from a certain class get into prestige schools?

This seems inevitable to me when your university is funded by private money and donations.

Its called a &quot;return on investment&quot;. You don&#x27;t &#x27;donate&#x27; millions of dollars, and have a building named after you out of love for education.<p>You do it for your name, your legacy, and to guarantee spots for your family.

The whole plot seems pretty stupid to me. I mean if I am a college admissions official for Yale and I see an application with an essay about what the real story of growing up as William H Macy&#x27;s kid is - the kid is getting in regardless of how stupid a standardised test makes them appear to be.