Not a good sign for Massachusetts that the press conference for the (latest) college admission scandal was held in Boston.(https://commonwealthmagazine.org/education/feds-bust-up-side-door-route-into-college/)
As reported in Commonwealth Magazine “The prosecutor’s office has not charged any Massachusetts college administrators or coaches with wrongdoing, but Bay State connections surface repeatedly in the court papers.”
Harvard, Northeastern, Boston College and Boston University were not charged yesterday, but they were named. This raises the tantalizing possibility of a new Beanpot tournament featuring only pretend athletes from celebrity or otherwise well-connected families. We will have to wait for more details to emerge to determine the sport–water polo?, pole vaulting? photo shopping?.
Whatever the sport, it will provide a welcome source of revenue while the four schools are re-applying for tax-exempt status. (Of course they will have to re-apply. You don’t think bribery and racketeering qualify for a tax break, do you?)
No wonder the schools are already issuing statements. “We are not aware of any impropriety in connection with any Northeastern admissions decisions.” I think that’s supposed to be a denial. My advice is to stop issuing statements and start tweeting “NO ADMISSIONS COLLUSION, WITCH HUNT.” There’s a lot at stake.
When we tell ourselves that college, and only college, is the path for happiness, social status, wealth, prosperity, and all the rest…….this is part of the result.
I interpret this to mean “let’s restrict access to college more than we already do” and disagree.
Also: “this” is a result of corrupt and corrupting wealth. Period.
Not sure why you interpret it in that way. I can say that such an interpretation is far from what I was trying to communicate.
There is enormous pressure placed on super wealthy children to attend college, and prestigious colleges at that. What is behind this pressure? Why would seemingly affluent parents break the law to place their children in exclusive universities?
There is enormous pressure placed on working class children to attend college, and prestigious colleges at that, why?
Is the message, “Without college, and a prestigious college at that, one is worth less than others?”
I would never support any restrictions on entry into college, anymore than I would restrict entry into a library.
I interpret your post to say that those without a college degree are not worthy of our respect and the work that they do is not not worthy of an elevating and sustaining wage; they are somehow, lesser citizens.
I guess I misunderstood John’s point. It still eludes me, though that is probably on me. As I said above, I think the “why” on this is pretty simple.
The answer is pretty clear to me – there are fewer and fewer opportunities today for a guaranteed “good” lifestyle. The American Dream is supposedly a situation where the children do better than their parents. This pressure isn’t just on the super-wealthy – it exists from the upper-middle-class on up.
I think that if you grew up near Boston, you may be somewhat insulated from the decline in opportunities. As someone in Western MA, I can tell you that there is a lot less opportunity here than there was when I entered the workforce, and substantially less than when my parents entered it. National statistics even show that our society is shifting from one where most people are in the middle class, into one where there are more opportunities in the lower-upper class, but more in the lower class as well. In other words, while your kids’ odds of becoming upper-class have increased, their risk of becoming lower-class has also increased.
Now there may be great opportunities in Silicon Valley, or Seattle, or New York City – or even Boston – but that isn’t something that I see every day. I just see the latest round of job losses [Smith & Wesson moving its distribution center from Springfield to Missouri, just 30 jobs, but triggering worry for the 1,600 other employees in Springfield]. Or I see MassMutual opening a R&D facility in Boston instead of at its headquarters in Springfield, which will create or move 1,000 jobs to jobs-rich Boston, and sets off worry that the 3,000 existing jobs in Springfield may be either moved or the facility downgraded to non-headquarters status,
So as I watch these opportunities get fewer and fewer, the message I get is “my kids have to be better and better in order to get one of those opportunities”. It ratchets up the pressure, and causes people to do stupid things.
I would argue that this philosophy is 100% baked into everyone’s psyche – it is why we have incredible economic segregation and high housing prices which are almost 100% tied to the “quality of schools”, why there is such a huge focus on youth sports (seen as a way a kid can get an advantage into getting into college), and why there is so much emphasis put on training kids to test well.
P.S., here is an article from Salon talking about the ever-increasing expense of tuition that explains this perspective a bit:
https://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behind_the_three_decade_scheme_to_raise_tuition_bankrupt_generations_and_hypnotize_the_media/
I find this to be the most insightful quote:
Since your “interpretation” has absolutely nothing to do with the comment, it illustrates yet that this canard is entirely your own. You repeat it everywhere, and it makes no sense anywhere — because it flatly false.
I’m more sympathetic to Johntmay’s argument than usual. The whole concept of “elite” universities throws shade on the whole idea of college. I have felt for a long time that colleges should set minimum standards for admission and leave it at that. If there are more applicants than places have a lottery.
How smart do you have to benefit from an Ivy League education? My opinion is that you don’t have to be that smart; just about everybody I’ve seen on BMG would be smart enough (with maybe one or two exceptions). MGH doesn’t demand that only the healthiest people can use their hospital. Instead they concentrate on having the best doctors. Harvard by all accounts has the best faculty. Shouldn’t that be enough?
Harvard expends enormous resources looking for applicants who don’t need them. You know the ones I mean–the ones who you could drop on a desert island with a pocket knife and a piece of string and would come back in three years with a doctoral thesis.
We need a triage system to keep those kids on desert islands where they will do just fine. We can also eliminate some who just don’t have the capacity, mostly the children of the rich and famous. That leaves the rest of us. Let’s have a lottery. This meritocracy stuff is just fake, as this latest scandal proves.
Thank you.
I try to avoid making things personal with anecdotes, but I will make an exception on this subject. Our oldest son was in the top 5% of his class and meant that he received special seating and designation at graduation. I did not think much of it until I learned why we were told this just days before graduation when the grades had been in the system for quite a while. It turned out that another student had false transcripts from the school they transferred from and once the real grades were discovered, our son replaced the one who provided false grades.
Our son was also awarded the Scholar Athlete by the school, a distinction given to only two students each year
When it came to choosing a college, money was our biggest concern. We were offered scholarships at several schools (why don’t they just call them what they are: discounts?) Still, they were all very expensive. He applied at MIT and was not accepted. Maybe if his mother and I were wealthy enough to fund a new science lab, things would be different.
In the end, he went to UMass Amherst and in five years, graduated with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering. When we told other parents that he was going to UMass Amherst, the reaction from every parent that knew him was universal, “Why not a better school, given his grades?”
He now works with graduates from MIT, RPI, RIT, and the rest, many who are under his supervision.
As for me, I worked in a factory right after high school, to save up money for college. My first two years were at Monroe Community College in Rochester NY. Back then, the college was mocked by many as “a high school with ash trays” since smoking was allowed and it was the impression that only the lower students went there.
While attending MCC, I met several professors who laughed at the idea that this was somehow a lesser education. Many taught at local universities as well (RIT, University of Rochester). My statistics professor wrote the book we used, the same book that was used at RIT and U of R.
All I lacked was the status.
A few years later, I was the general manager of an advertising agency (long story) and part of my job was to interview and hire people. They all had degrees in communication, marketing, and so on. Me? I had a BA In History. Everyone I hired was floored when they learned that the guy they were actually working for had NO formal education in their field of study. I lacked the status for such a position, but someone saw past that.
I wonder how many others are being held back?
Congratulations, John.
One of the lessons I learned at UMass Amherst is that education is not just job training and the value of an education is not measured only in salary level after graduation.
And it seems to me that your study of history, which you disparage in another thread, just keeps on proving the value of a liberal arts education.
UMass Amherst is a fine school, as is UMass-Boston. My youngest son will, with any luck, be graduating from UMass Amherst this May.
During my early years as a hardware engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (in the 1970s when that company was a rising star), we actively recruited engineers and technicians from Worcester Polytech and Northeastern (the latter a struggling “minor” school at the time) because we found those schools graduated professionals who had their feet on the ground and came to us with both experience and knowledge.
We also found great success at hiring veterans who graduated upon their return from service. Our experience was that these returning military veterans demonstrated enormously valuable professional and personal discipline, in addition to their education, that made them consistently valuable and sought-after members of the many development teams we formed at Digital in those years.
My five children will all enter their careers with college degrees. Of the five, two have graduated with a degree in Fine Arts (that offers ZERO job prospects) and one with a degree in International Affairs (like History, a classic Liberal Arts degree). I note that you worked hard and successfully to make a college degree available to your children. Congratulations.
In my view, this unfolding scandal demonstrates the corruption rampant within the ranks of the ultra-wealthy and with the “elite” schools who so eagerly court them.
I will probably offer a different thread about the central role played by college sports in this scandal. We’ve already had some exchanges elsewhere about this. I think this scandal demonstrates that our pervasive and intentional mixing of big money, athletics, and academics corrupts all three.
Maybe I was being too subtle. My point is that the solution to this is staring us in the face. Colleges may plead, in so many words, that they need wealthy alumni to contribute and therefore favoritism to the wealthy and privileged is a reasonable quid pro quo.
That is a lie.
What these institutions need is their tax-exempt status, and the various other subsidies that are granted by the state, local, and federal government. If those subsidies are contingent on their good behavior, and on providing a level playing field, they will find a way to behave properly.
Agreed.
I suggest that a central aspect of that is to erect a firewall between big-money sports and academia. It appears to me that all of these are driven by an explosion in academic costs happening at the same time that the government has been slashing both education and research funding — and while private industry has essentially stopped funding basic research altogether.
It’s a complex issue, and I see these abuses as symptoms of our underlying refusal to fund this vital aspect of modern society. America led the way in funding public education through high school, in no small part because Americans realized that a well-educated electorate and society was enormously beneficial to our long-term national interests. In today’s world, a college degree is comparable to the high-school diploma of the 1940s.
Part of why we are utterly failing to address the climate change catastrophe is that our media, our electorate, and too many of our elected officials are unable to follow the math, statistics, and basic science. American style representative democracy demands an electorate able to keep up with the relevant issues. Today’s electorate fails to meet that standard, pretty much across the board.
The GOP led the way in dismantling all that during the Reagan years, and I think it’s long past time we undo that damage.
In many fields today (not just STEM), a relevant graduate degree (at least a Masters if not a PhD) is bare minimum entry requirement. I’m thinking of things like health care, social work, psychotherapy and so on. I think those degrees should be as available as a high school diploma currently is.