![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Varsity Blues
Mar. 17th, 2019 06:52 pmVarious articles and opinions have come out in reaction to the story about prominent parents using bribery and fraud to get their offspring into prestigious educational institutions. One point that has been made is that other rich parents accomplish similar things in ways that are not illegal, whether by making large donations to colleges, or by enabling their children to attend prep schools, practice particular sports and musical instruments, go on supposedly altruistic missions to help poor villages in Africa, take preparatory classes for the SAT, or hire consultants to help them write their personal essays. Another point which various commentators have made is that we should not complain about affirmative action for members of favored minority groups when much greater injustices are committed through affirmative action for legacies and other children of the rich.
I agree that it is not fair for the children of the rich to have advantages getting into prestigious universities, but I see no way to abolish this form of unfairness entirely without doing greater wrongs in other ways. I do not want to see all incomes equalized, or no education permitted except that provided by the state authorities, or the family abolished. As to affirmative action, there are a number of arguments against it which are not refuted by pointing to the advantages of the children of the one percent. For example, I do not think that we should divide and categorize people by ethnicity; also, an affirmative action admission is more likely to be a black child from a middle class family than a slum kid from Detroit who was effectively denied any chance at getting a good elementary and secondary education. Affirmative action also produces mismatches, where the applicant who could do well at an average state university is admitted to an Ivy League institution where he has to compete against young men and women with better brains and educational backgrounds, and therefore flounders. Then, while there is a moral case for giving a descendant of slaves a boost in competing for a place in college against a descendant of the people who owned his ancestors, and then kept them down with Jim Crow, there is not such a case for discriminating against the child of Indochinese refugees, or of working class white ethnics whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War. Discrimination against Asian Americans is another academic scandal.
What can be done? One thing might be to emphasize that college isn’t for everyone. If you are neither strongly interested in the life of the mind, nor pursuing a career that genuinely requires tertiary education, you should not be pushed to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend a college where you probably won’t learn much, and may drop out without a degree, but with debt. You might do better to learn a blue collar trade, or attend coding boot camp. This would have to be accompanied by decreased use of college as a filter and form of signaling required or strongly encouraged to be hired for jobs that don’t actually call for a college education.
It might also be a good thing if college admission offices tried to do less, and only sought to judge applicants by their test scores, high school grades, and other tangible factors, to determine whether they seemed to have brains, prerequisite knowledge, and self-discipline to benefit from college, and not try to assess their personalities, mandolin playing, canoe-rowing, or semi-ghostwritten personal essays. This might reduce the ability of the rich to assist their not especially bright teenagers in standing out. I wouldn’t attempt to force the same standards on every college, though; some could emphasize grades and test scores, while others would be free to offer admission to a mandolin prodigy, or a young person with other evidence of real accomplishment that could not be reduced to numbers.
I agree that it is not fair for the children of the rich to have advantages getting into prestigious universities, but I see no way to abolish this form of unfairness entirely without doing greater wrongs in other ways. I do not want to see all incomes equalized, or no education permitted except that provided by the state authorities, or the family abolished. As to affirmative action, there are a number of arguments against it which are not refuted by pointing to the advantages of the children of the one percent. For example, I do not think that we should divide and categorize people by ethnicity; also, an affirmative action admission is more likely to be a black child from a middle class family than a slum kid from Detroit who was effectively denied any chance at getting a good elementary and secondary education. Affirmative action also produces mismatches, where the applicant who could do well at an average state university is admitted to an Ivy League institution where he has to compete against young men and women with better brains and educational backgrounds, and therefore flounders. Then, while there is a moral case for giving a descendant of slaves a boost in competing for a place in college against a descendant of the people who owned his ancestors, and then kept them down with Jim Crow, there is not such a case for discriminating against the child of Indochinese refugees, or of working class white ethnics whose ancestors immigrated to the U.S. after the Civil War. Discrimination against Asian Americans is another academic scandal.
What can be done? One thing might be to emphasize that college isn’t for everyone. If you are neither strongly interested in the life of the mind, nor pursuing a career that genuinely requires tertiary education, you should not be pushed to borrow tens of thousands of dollars to attend a college where you probably won’t learn much, and may drop out without a degree, but with debt. You might do better to learn a blue collar trade, or attend coding boot camp. This would have to be accompanied by decreased use of college as a filter and form of signaling required or strongly encouraged to be hired for jobs that don’t actually call for a college education.
It might also be a good thing if college admission offices tried to do less, and only sought to judge applicants by their test scores, high school grades, and other tangible factors, to determine whether they seemed to have brains, prerequisite knowledge, and self-discipline to benefit from college, and not try to assess their personalities, mandolin playing, canoe-rowing, or semi-ghostwritten personal essays. This might reduce the ability of the rich to assist their not especially bright teenagers in standing out. I wouldn’t attempt to force the same standards on every college, though; some could emphasize grades and test scores, while others would be free to offer admission to a mandolin prodigy, or a young person with other evidence of real accomplishment that could not be reduced to numbers.
