vtsnowedin wrote:BOSTON (AP) — Fifty people, including Hollywood stars Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were charged Tuesday in a scheme in which wealthy parents allegedly bribed college coaches and other insiders to get their children into some of the nation’s most elite schools.
Federal authorities called it the biggest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department, with the parents accused of paying an estimated $25 million in bribes.
“These parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in announcing the results of an investigation code-named Operation Varsity Blues.
https://apnews.com/2450688f9e67435c8590e59a1b0e5b47My first question is how did the colleges not soon see that some of these students were not half as smart as their test scores and flunk them out?
A college that wanted to rise above this would announce that incoming freshmen would undergo a battery of on campus testing and those found deficient sent home and their places given to academically qualified applicants still in line.
This is something that has been a known problem for at least 4 decades, since when I took the SAT's in '76, it was a concern. I didn't understand why concerned looking people were carefully checking ID's, and then someone explained people pay other people to take the test, etc.
But if institutions cared, it's not like they couldn't check correlations. Why did this supposed genius get B's and C's in high school? (Of course, if they were cheating in high school, there's that.)
Like many problems, the folks in charge really don't care much, or they'd do something about it.
...
When I started at IBM in mid '81, they were hiring a lot of newly minted college grads with Computer Science degrees, as there was a lot of demand for programmers. Six months later a number of these folks suddenly disappeared. Turns out (management confirmed this) that they had simply made up their degrees, their grades, which colleges they went to, etc. and it took IBM 6 months of giving them more chances and checking on their background to decide they had grounds to fire them.
This stuff is nothing new.
What surprises me is that the powers that be don't seem to care much. How much can it cost to get official transcripts (which IBM demanded for me -- and the college would ONLY send directly to the employer, not to me)?
All sorts of experiments in behavioral economics in recent decades prove that a large proportion of the population cheats if they believe they can get away with it. Even if it's only literally less than 50 bucks at stake. So it's not difficult to imagine that over a career, if it's potentially on the scale of $millions, that people will be strongly incented to cheat, unfortunately.
When I come across stories like this, I'm reminded why I have become so cynical as I age.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.