Academia: what is the scandal?

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1. Tyler Cowen writes,

these bribes only mattered because college itself has become too easy, with a few exceptions. If the bribes allowed for the admission of unqualified students, then those students would find it difficult to finish their degrees. Yet most top schools tolerate rampant grade inflation and gently shepherd their students toward graduation. That’s because they realize that today’s students (and their parents) are future donors (and potential complainers on social media). It is easier for professors and administrators not to rock the boat. What does that say about standards at these august institutions of higher learning?

The fundamental scandal is that elite colleges are a positional good for parents. The whole process is built around that. Colleges go all-out to recruit applicants in order to issue large numbers of rejections and thereby show that they are selective. As Tyler points out, when it comes to deciding who gets to graduate, these same colleges are hardly selective at all.

Imagine a different world, in which colleges abolish their admissions departments. Let anyone apply. If demand exceeds the available slots, then use a lottery. Grade rigorously, so that unqualified students flunk out. Parents who think too highly of their children will end up wasting tuition money. That seems like a more just world to me.

2. Daniel Klein on the ideological groupthink of academia.

There are many important points, including the tendency that once you have a solid majority with one viewpoint, they tend to lose touch with and demonize other viewpoints.

Pointer from Bryan Caplan, who seems to think it doesn’t matter, because nobody listens to those silly professors, anyway. I think Bryan is wrong on that. Some day, he may find himself living under an authoritarian regime because enough people do listen to these leftist professors. He may even find himself not protected by his own bubble.

In my view (2) is the real scandal. What I resented most when I saw the “admissions cheating” scandal was that these parents actually wanted so badly to get their kids into these schools. I think that the worst mistake that I made as a parent was sending my youngest daughter to one of the more prestigious colleges. If I were given a do-over, I would bribe that admissions office to issue a rejection.

29 thoughts on “Academia: what is the scandal?”

  1. Perhaps you could provide some reasons why for the final paragraph. That is a pretty strong statement to make and then just stop.

      • Can we not infer? They have indoctrinated Arnold’s youngest daughter in the ways of social justice progressivism and she is now politically dead to him.

  2. Elite colleges & universities are doing a great job at satisfying their customers desires (status, late teen/early adult entertainment, sheepskin) at prices (exorbitant) they are willing to bear. We may not like what the customers’ want, or the government subsidies involved for both institutions and some families, but this is the market system working with ruthless efficiency.

    • Perhaps we need a government program to convince young people that going to a selective college is uncool and a bad deal, like we have programs trying to convince them of the same thing about smoking. “People who go to selective colleges are disgusting elitists”–that sort of thing.

  3. Colleges have been discriminating against hiring Reps & Christian professors for years. For decades. This “open secret” discrimination has led to the current demonization of Reps.
    Such schools should lose Fed research money. Fed loans for their students. Tax-exempt status should be revoked. They are doing indoctrination, not education.

  4. Regarding liberal indoctrination:

    Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has argued that the US Supreme Court is a mechanism by which liberal notions of dubious validity and legitimacy become imposed on the citizens of the US. It’s hard to disagree with his basic point. Which is this:

    By the time you jump through all the hoops to be eligible for the track to the US Supreme Court, you have probably spent a lot of time in a liberal bubble. And what’s worse, we’re not even sure what’s being learned there, is it rigorous and demanding? Studying ag or engineering at Michigan State or SUNY Oswego or University of Northern Iowa is not a fast track to the Supreme Court, but Yale is a good start.

    We can note a contrast:

    The US Army has OCS and ROTC–a variety of tracks to become an officer, so that you don’t have to go to West Point to rise to top brass. It would be nice to see something similar for those who end up serving on the US Supreme Court or in the Presidential Cabinet.

    if you’ll pardon the polemical example, this example from Ralph Peters (I’m not a big fan, btw) makes a parallel point on the same general theme regarding narrow elite recruitment:

    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/putin-vs-the-preppies-and-the-ph-d-s-outsiders-not-insiders-change-the-world

    • The same progressive ideology is taught at virtually all law schools, including those in Michigan, upstate NY and Iowa. So the problem would not be solved by putting people with degrees from places other than Harvard and Yale on the Supreme Court.

      Also, for some strange reason, the people nominated for the Supreme Court tend to have gone to law school, not agriculture or engineering school.

  5. I suspect it would be better for society if one half (say) of college slots were simply auctioned to the highest bidder.

  6. I am having trouble caring very much about this scandal. The elite schools have been bastions of the wealthy for a long time. I’d be willing to bet that the median wealth of families with a kid in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc in 1919 was a great deal more than the national median. It has always been a marker of social status. A bright working class kid went to CCNY. The status marker worked to some extent, but there were bright kids who succeeded and Ivy Leaguers who fell short.
    Our current scandal consists of rich, 25 to 100 million dollar, people trying to get what really rich, billion dollar people, get for their kids. The billionaire who gives 100 million for a building has no trouble getting their kid accepted, and the folks who can only afford to give a million tried to leverage their kid into a similar position. Not the most horrific crime in the world.
    Like other Veblen goods, I wonder if it’s worth it. A $5000 wristwatch does not make me more punctual than a $25 one. If I need a doctor in Philadelphia, I doubt that a U Penn grad is better than a Penn Stater.

    • Agreed, except for the Penn Stater part. I’ve known too many of them to go along with that. Pick the Temple grad, instead.

  7. #2: Here is a relevant perceptive quote from Eric Kaufmann’s recent book “Whiteshift”:

    > The left modernist sensibility spread from a small elite to a much wider section of middle-class society in the 1960s with the rise of television and growth of universities, taking over as the dominant sensibility of the high culture.

    > As it gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade but to institutionalize itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity. This is a subtle but critical shift.

    Bryan Caplan is completely wrong to say this has little impact.

    #1: I see three points:

    1.a: Separate education/coaching from grading/scoring/evaluation. Consider test prep education like Kaplan: they give academic coaching. The grading is done by a completely different institution, that test prep services have no authority over. You could move most standardized education like accounting, calculus, science etc to this model.

    1.b: Low-performing student scenario: Let this resolve as naturally a possible. Consider private piano lessons/classes. The schools are not selective, they never refuse to sell coaching services. But students are highly selective in that they only buy classes when they seriously want to learn and expect to benefit. Students are free to buy as many classes and as much coaching as they want and improve their ability as much as they want. We can teach accounting or calculus the same way.

    1.c: “If demand exceeds the available slots”: capacity can scale to meet demand like in every other market driven service.

  8. People already flunk out of STEM majors, but there will always be a “subjective” major at a college that they can pass.

    Isn’t the scandal (I leave aside cheating on the SAT) basically about the fact that parents cut out the schools? You can still get junior in by donating a dormitory. Isn’t paying a much smaller bribe directly to the admissions officer the same thing at a bargain price? I can see why the schools don’t want to be cut out.

    I guess they also cut through the zero sum extracurricular padding nonsense.

    I have to be honest though Arnold, isn’t your last line a bit of virtue signaling. There is absolutely no way anyone is turning down a chance to send their kid to Harvard. The gains are too damn obvious, and they can still go on and lead whatever life they want after that. It’s not as if a stint at State U would be any less indoctrinating.

    As for Bryan, I think he surmises that whatever state the world takes is beyond his ability to control, and thus all he can really do is prepare his personal resources as best he can. If they prove insufficient then that is fate. It’s not as if he would have had an easier time changing the zeitgeist.

    • There is absolutely no way anyone is turning down a chance to send their kid to Harvard.

      My wife’s boss’s daughter got into Harvard and decided to go to a smaller school instead. He completely supported her. BTW, she’s pretty happy there.

  9. Bryan Caplan will die before he repudiates or regrets his belief. What will happen is that he will not be replaced.

  10. It should matter because one of the more prominent institutional structures in our society has a significant amount of ethical and legal corruption baked into it, and how it exposes the fact that acceptance of this corruption has fully crept into our wider society. We all deserve this.

    Of course, its also an excellent scaffolding for projecting pretty much any opinions anyone has about the rich, crony capitalism or any number of problems with higher education in general.

  11. As a parent of college graduates I can empathize with Dr. Klings do-over comment. It is sickening to think I helped fund the circus by paying tuition dollars. And my kids would have found a way to thrive without losing 4 years of their lives to hate camps.

    I paid my higher education bills using education benefits from military service. A very long time ago. And I loved college and graduate and professional schools. Learning is such a joyous experience it is a shame that politics and bigotry are denying the opportunity to experience genuine learning to so many college students. A hitch in the military would undoubtedly be much more educational, mind-opening, and rewarding than time at a college for most recent high school graduates.

    Reform has to come from both inside and outside the schools.

    Separating evaluation from education is important. At the federal level the acceptance of a degree as qualifying evidence of anything needs to be halted completely. The whole federal personnel system is tilted towards rewarding diploma mill institutions with any degree qualifying a graduate for a GS-5 or, if the institution had severe grade inflation, a GS-7. A masters will get you a GS-9. Just stop that now. Employment eligibility should be based upon objective testing. If a job requires knowledge of accounting or some specific subject, test for it, do not accept hours in the subject on a transcript. There are plenty of testing services around that can determine the level of mastery a candidate has in any given field and they can do so at competitive prices. No excuse for simply accepting a diploma since a diploma signals not a heck of whole lot anyway.

    Related to this, the federal government and the states should both stop paying to advertise and sell college programs. They do this by legitimizing and recognizing accreditation bodies. Stop that now. Educators accrediting educators is the biggest waste of money imaginable. If the government has to be involved in recognizing accreditation bodies, at least require that independent outsiders not involved in the education industry participate in and review accreditiaton activities.

    Employers should also be banned from considering educational credentials in making hiring decisions for the exact same reasons that the Supreme Court used to ban IQ testing in Griggs v. Duke Power. If the governments don’t to do that but still want to stay involved, they should mandate graduation testing, something along the lines of getting a 600 on the GRE a requirement for the award of a diploma. Or require institutions to offer two levels of diplomas, certified diplomas and non-certified diplomas, with only certified diplomas being allowed to be considered in employment decisions.

    Antitrust issues need to be addressed as well. Tens of thousands of tutors offer perfectly fine teaching and mentoring services but are banned by the government from offering degrees because they state-regulated accrediting bodies won’t accredit them. This must end.

    For example, lets say 10 of us got together and offered Dr. Kling $200,000 per year to meet with us 3 nights a week, 36 weeks a year for 4 years, for the purpose of advancing our learning, knowledge, and thinking skills, at the end of which he could choose to, or not, confer some appropriate credential. Such an experience would undoubtedly be worth at least as much as any diploma on offer today, yet it would not be recognized by government or employers. By then being allowed to verify our educational achievement by means of a GRE-like or specialized examination, that experience would gain equal legal standing.

    Finally the power of entrenched interersts has to be dissipated. The best means of this would be by immigration reform allowing open borders for foreignors able to pass examinations certifying achievement at the graduate level, for the purposes of teaching. Student loans would only be available to study at institutions that replace tenure with at least biannual competition for professor positions. And no more teachers hiring teachers. Who thought that would ever work? To avoid favoritism, placement of faculty would be by independent boards.

    A modest proposal to be sure, but one that might redirect help redirect the USA from the road to perdition upon which it rolls now.

  12. So we making it scandal of elite parents benefiting their kids versus the super-elite that make legal bribes?

    I still the anti-university crowd need to think of young people signaling to employers? Society has always had signals for this. (ie in 1960 being a white married male with 2 – 4 years in the military was the right signal.)

  13. I am reminded of the line “Caught Up in a World of Uphill Climbing,” from Barry Manilow’s song Mandy, which says it all about those enmeshed in the admissions scandal, which in turn reminds me of a Billy Graham apothegm that might be directed at those inclined to seek, by whatever means, the unearned: “If you lose your wealth, you lose nothing. If you lose your health, you lose something. If you lose your character, you lose everything.”

  14. Daniel Klein’s point about how apex Harvard grads are filling so many of the professor slots in other colleges makes me conclude that Harvard, especially, needs to be changed.

    Possibly a class action suit against Harvard for discriminating against Reps for so long, and providing “indoctrinated” professors to other institutions.

    Personnel is policy (a Trump weakness, so far; the Dems want to cripple him further).

    Edgar has good ideas, but no more practical than my own fantasies. Especially his
    “Separating evaluation from education is important.”

    Actually, this could increasingly be done by AI testers. Convert the books and lessons into thousands of multiple choice test questions, and give all students who get credit for the course a computer randomized set of 200 (100? 500?) of the questions, scoring them on their answers. This would not be a “truth” test, but it would be a “book” test — did the student understand the book material?

    Reps should be pushing AI evaluation of “education” / knowledge, so as to better evaluate applicants — both young and old. We need more specific certificates, less “degrees”.

    For all the top Ivies, pushing them to have 50% or more of their students with incomes at the median or less; 90% of their students with parents of incomes of 80% (20% richer); and no more than 2% of their students in the top 5% (95% richest). A LOT more equality than they have now. This could go for all the “richest” endowment per student college, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and others.

    I’d also suggest a “shock” treatment of ending Harvard’s tax exempt status unless they have at least 20% of their tenured professors being public pro-life or registered Republicans. Given the reality of discrimination, I support immediate government correction. I understand that taking away all gov’t advantages is likely, over time, to change — the reason to support gov’t force is to get change faster.

    The polarization and “hate” in America, the Democrat Derangement Syndrome we see (called Trump DS now; was also Bush DS when coined by Krauthammer in 2003; was Reagan DS, Kavanaugh DS, Sandmann (Cov. High) DS — is Dem DS); the Dem DS we see is enabled by the Harvard indoctrinated professors now embedded throughout the colleges, and churning out grads who also indoctrinated.
    Into hate against Reps.

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