The reason that the schools aren't liable is because it wasn't built into how the school did normal admissions. There were a few people who acted wrongly. However, that is different from what was going on at Harvard where Asians were being discriminated against on a regular basis.
If you paid Bruce Lee to take you as a student when you lack any natural qualifications- would that diminish him, or any of his other students abilities or achievements? A scandal of paying for grades or graduation is a bit different than one of admissions. You still have to do the work- in theory- to be certified up to the standards of the organization. How exclusive admissions is to a training program isn’t as important as the caliber of people it turns out. In fact it is a way that programs can “inflate” their status- by taking those of already high caliber it increases the odds that you will produce graduates of high caliber. It’s much harder to train a 300lb couch potato to be a navy seal than it is to train a top performing soldier. Weeding out the chaff also helps not waste time, resources, and limited training positions on people gauged more likely to fail.
However- IF that 300lb couch potato managed to graduate training and get into the shape and abilities of a navy seal- that person and the program wouldn’t be any less impressive for it. I’m not advocating for these people who cheated others who followed the rules out of a chance. But I am saying that the results produced aren’t effected by a loss of prestige- however trust in an institution IS damaged by such scandals. Take away the employees and a school is just a building, so the fact that one or all employees were taking bribes reflects on the institution. In business- you choose your contractors and employees. What they do is a reflection on your judgment and processes.
But a PATTERN is required to make a determination. If you go to a restaurant once and the service and everything is great except the food- is it a bad restaurant? If you go 5 times and all 5 the food is bad- how do you know the executive chef isn’t terrible and the chef cooking that recipe is great and did the best with a bad menu? Or the EC is great but you just got bad chefs? You don’t. But 5/5 you’re going to lose trust in that restaurants ability to deliver. That’s the key. Trust. So we ant say the schools are bad or produce bad grads because of one scandal- but we can note it and determine based on past and future behavior wether these schools can be trusted to have integrity to produce the results we expect.
(1/2) Ivy League already don’t have that type of reputation, at least to mine and my friends’ understanding. They are good for networking, so that is worth a premium (if you do it!). Otherwise it’s a school. Good school, bad school, depends on the program and professors. You don’t actually attend your college/university - you attend a discipline, program or department.
What with Ivy League schools being ESPECIALLY prone to hiring academic rock stars (who are well known but may not be good or engaged) and focusing especially hard on publish-or-perish: you could make the case pretty strongly that an old school with an endowment fund (that’s pretty much a good working definition of them) shouldn’t get an unearned premium in a student’s calculations.
Legacy students already could be imagined to dilute the average. That’s the entire point of legacies; to put kids to the front of a line their merit doesn’t.
2/2 Look, just think of Ivy League school as a good place to network, and if that’s not important to you, don’t bother. They are otherwise overpriced for their value, and everyone I know already thought that.
What this scandal MAY do is encourage people who place a high value on diversity (or solely merit, which automatically and obviously leads to more diversity) to decide the potential benefits are outweighed by the near-certainty that this type of problem, coupled with the above points. Or, for people who are solely status seeking, it may cause them to focus on schools not considered academically tainted. Since those people don’t care about the education, they’ll wait to see what effect this will have on the school’s reputation, and thus their prospects or bragging rights.
If I understand correctly, and please correct me if I am wrong, but the families were not bribing their way in, they were paying money to falsify results: having documents altered, having someone else take tests, etc. It sounds to me like the schools were as much the victim of this as anyone else was.
Edited to add: that said, if this was widespread, the schools prestige is going to take a hit.
11 university staff are implicated as taking bribes, 3 school have no staff implicated in pending or settled cases on this recent round of scandal. In most cases the bribes to the university personnel were paid by the “fixer” the parents hired to get their child in. A classic maneuver linked to “plausible deniability” in which a person gives another a task to be completed via “any means necessary” but isn’t privy to the means thus being able to claim ignorance and distance themselves from incrimination. Also- types of “bribery” are classic in higher learning. Schools target “legacy” families and donors as well as Try to get “development” students who come from money but aren’t yet affiliated so as to build them into a future donor and legacy. It’s common for rich parents to donate large sums to schools and then have their underachieving kids end up as students.
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What with Ivy League schools being ESPECIALLY prone to hiring academic rock stars (who are well known but may not be good or engaged) and focusing especially hard on publish-or-perish: you could make the case pretty strongly that an old school with an endowment fund (that’s pretty much a good working definition of them) shouldn’t get an unearned premium in a student’s calculations.
Legacy students already could be imagined to dilute the average. That’s the entire point of legacies; to put kids to the front of a line their merit doesn’t.
What this scandal MAY do is encourage people who place a high value on diversity (or solely merit, which automatically and obviously leads to more diversity) to decide the potential benefits are outweighed by the near-certainty that this type of problem, coupled with the above points. Or, for people who are solely status seeking, it may cause them to focus on schools not considered academically tainted. Since those people don’t care about the education, they’ll wait to see what effect this will have on the school’s reputation, and thus their prospects or bragging rights.
Edited to add: that said, if this was widespread, the schools prestige is going to take a hit.
Feel like you're simply salty cause you (your parents) ain't rich.