Puncturing the myth of the elite college

As an old college professor, I have a few secrets to reveal to you.

There is no such thing as an elite college. That’s something that rich colleges like to call themselves, and when other colleges claim that, all they’re really saying is that they aspire to be rich. Harvard isn’t a better educational institution than your local community college — in a lot of ways, CCs are better because the teachers are just as dedicated (they have to be, they’re getting paid a lot less) and the students may be more focused on actually learning something.

College is worth exactly as much as the student puts into it. I’ve had slacker students, and I’ve had enthusiastic, interested students. I’ve taught them both exactly the same things. Guess which one actually learns more?

The amount of learning isn’t at all correlated with tuition. It’s a funny thing, but paying more money to a school does not mean your experience will be upgraded. It may actually be the reverse. Big Fancy College will do most of their instruction with grad student TAs; Small Cheap College will expect the faculty to spend more time working with students.

What you’re paying for at an “elite” college is social status. That’s it. Not a better education, not better teachers, not esoteric knowledge you can get nowhere else. You get to hang out and make connections with other students from a socioeconomic background that can afford this overpriced place. That may be a valuable asset, but let’s not pretend that the school’s primary purpose is education, then.

Admission is rigged. Ever hear of “legacy” admissions? If a parent is an alumnus of a school, their children get preferential admission. It’s kind of the opposite of merit — you get in by accident of birth. Walk around some of the “elite” college campuses, and you’ll see all these buildings named after people. Sometimes they’re named to honor distinguished faculty, but more often it’s because some rich person dropped a few million dollars on the school. Do you think if the offspring of said rich fat cat applied, they wouldn’t be ushered in the door?

Well now, thanks to a major sting operation by the federal law enforcement, another layer of corruption has been exposed.

Federal officials have charged dozens of well-heeled parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, in what the Justice Department says was a multimillion-dollar scheme to cheat college admissions standards. The parents allegedly paid a consultant who then fabricated academic and athletic credentials and arranged bribes to help get their children into prestigious universities.

“We’re talking about deception and fraud — fake test scores, fake credentials, fake photographs, bribed college officials,” said Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

Lelling said 33 parents “paid enormous sums” to ensure their children got into schools such as Stanford and Yale, sending money to entities controlled by a man named William Rick Singer in return for falsifying records and obtaining false scores on important tests such as the SAT and ACT.

Singer was the middle man, but he facilitated parents who lied and cheated, and school officials who collaborated. A bunch of coaches have been arrested — they would lie and say the sweet little darling prospective student was being recruited for an athletic program, even if they weren’t, to give them an edge in admissions. (That’s another big problem: athletics is a fertile ground for bringing in inappropriately qualified students.)

Describing how Singer worked to present his clients’ children as elite athletes, Lelling said, “In many instances, Singer helped parents take staged photographs of their children engaged in particular sports. Other times, Singer and his associates used stock photos that they pulled off the Internet — sometimes Photoshopping the face of the child onto the picture of the athlete” and submitting it to desirable schools.

“Singer’s clients paid him anywhere between $200,000 and $6.5 million for this service,” Lelling said.

Rotten through and through. Athletics should not be a factor at all in getting into college.

And then there was widespread cheating on the standardized tests required to get in, with paid proxies taking the exams for the kids, or sitting right there with them in the testing room, feeding them the answers.

Other defendants in the case include university athletic coaches and college exam administrators — some of whom are accused of accepting bribes. Court documents state that the scheme targeted these schools as part of a “student-athlete recruitment scam”: Yale University, the University of Southern California, Georgetown University, UCLA, Wake Forest University, Stanford University, University of San Diego and the University of Texas, Austin.

“There will not be a separate admissions system for the wealthy,” Lelling said. “And there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.”

Yeah, right. There has always been privileged admissions for the wealthy. Does anyone want to break the news to him about our criminal justice system? It’s funny how the color of one’s skin is a major factor in admission to our prisons.

By the way — next time someone whines about affirmative action and how it lets in unqualified black students over superior white students, just haul off and punch them in the mouth. The system is set up to favor unqualified rich students over intelligent poor students.

“These parents are a catalog of wealth and privilege,” said U.S. Atty. Andrew Lelling. He said they “knowingly conspired … to help their children cheat or buy their children admission to elite schools through fraud.”

Prosecutors allege that Singer instructed parents to donate funds to a fake charity he had established as part of the scheme. Most of the parents paid at least $200,000, but some spent up to $6.5 million to guarantee their children admission to top universities, authorities said. The parents were then able to deduct the donation off their income taxes, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

They can afford to drop a million dollars to smuggle their kid into school, and then write it off their taxes? Oh, America.

I was all prepared to cut the kids some slack — they may not have known what their parents were doing. But then I read about Olivia Jade Giannulli, daughter of Lori Loughlin (an actor?), who paid half a million dollars to get her into USC. Olivia Jade’s interests are fashion, beauty, instagram, and YouTube, where she has acquired almost 2 million subscribers who listen to her prattle while she puts on her makeup.

Juggling school, a personal brand, and a YouTube channel isn’t easy. In her first week, for example, Olivia Jade had to travel to Fiji for a work shoot. “I don’t know how much of school I’m going to attend, but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all,” she said in a vlog beforehand. “But I do want the experience of game days, partying…” She paused. “I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”

She doesn’t care about school. She’s there for football games and parties.

Fuck.

You know USC is a very good school, right? (They’re all good schools.) But apparently they are rather indiscriminate in the riff-raff they allow in. And this cheesy, shallow twit is taking up space that someone who could really use the educational opportunity would find productive.

And she has 2 million subscribers to her vapid channel? I’ve been experimenting with YouTube myself, you know, and I guess I’ve been doing it wrong. I’m gonna start recording my daily beauty routine — trimming my nose hairs, scrubbing the callouses on my feet, taking my Old Person Heart pills, while mumbling in a rheumy voice about getting off my lawn. It’ll be a hit!

Recall what I said about “College is worth exactly as much as the student puts into it“? That’s one of the biggest crimes here, that the system is rigged to allow rich students to waste the resources and opportunities of our educational system. And nothing is going to change because of this one-shot criminal proceeding.

More stories of the “students” who profited from this scheme are emerging — here’s Isabelle Henriquez, who gloated about how her parents had an expert flown in to hold her hand during the SATs, so she could get into Georgetown. Now her false pretenses are making expulsion possible.

Advice to children of rich parents who bought their way into college: shut the fuck up. Nothing you can say will help you, and everything you say is going to make others despise you. Lie low. Study hard. Prove you earned your education.

Some good news, kinda, from the upper midwest

The Minnesota house passed the ERA.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has had a simple purpose since it was first proposed in Congress in 1923: People should get equal protection under the law no matter their gender.

That’s as uncontroversial as legislation gets, but the ERA has struggled and failed for decades to get ratification nationwide. So legislators in Minnesota are trying (again) to get an amendment on the state’s books. If we can’t have equality all over the United States, we can at least have it here.

The Minnesota House voted on the amendment on Thursday. It passed 72-55.

55 voted against it. There was freakout by the Republicans over the phrase “equality under the law shall not be abridged or denied on account of gender”, and the sticking point was that one word, “gender”. The good news is that it seems to have finally sunk in that there is a difference between sex and gender, so they’ve learned something. They wanted to change that word to “biological sex” or “sex as it appears on one’s birth certificate”. The bad news is that they really, really want to be allowed to discriminate against people for their gender.

They also trotted out the usual, familiar, bogus arguments.

There was also concern about granting rights to trans men and trans women. They could possibly then use facilities that make them more comfortable, or, say, play on the boys’ basketball team if they identify as a boys. Republican Rep. Peggy Bennett worried that allowing trans women to play women’s sports would mean “the end of girls’ and women’s sports as we know it.”

Right. The basketball court must trump the civil rights of all Americans everywhere, in every circumstance.

They also argued that giving women equal rights might mean they have to stop controlling women’s wombs.

Then came abortion — a word that appears nowhere in the amendment. O’Neill argued that the ERA in other states has been used to strike down bans on taxpayer-funded abortions, and proposed that this right should be explicitly left out of the legislation. (Her amendment failed, as did others trying to change the word “gender.”)

At least the 55 regressives lost. Unfortunately, one of those regressives, Jeff Backer, is my representative. I voted as hard as I could against him in the last election, but despite my industrious efforts to mark his opponent as solidly and clearly as I could on the ballot, my vote still was only counted once.

Some memories never fade

March 11 is my day to feel depressed. I could never forget her birthday, because it was two days after mine, and she was my baby sister, 11 years younger than I am. I remember how she’d hold my hand as we walked down to the store for candy to celebrate, and how she would pop her head out the door and sing-song about how I had a girl friend when I was walking home from school with, OK, a girl, and sure, I would marry her several years later, but that was just premature. And embarrassing, as little sisters can be.

And then she died, and I’m stuck thinking of her every March, and more often. Dammit. Why doesn’t grief ever die?

One last walk to the candy store? I’ll get you whatever you want, I promise.

Sure is purty and slick, though

I am extremely impressed with this creator’s video editing skills. Nicely done!

I am less impressed with the content, unfortunately. The message is pure optimism: our progress in biology is so great that maybe someday we can hope to cure a host of psychological concerns, like anhedonia, misery, self-doubt, etc., with…gene editing. Got low self-esteem? Frustrated by the world around you? Finding yourself unsatisfied no matter what successes you achieve? We can fix that, someday! We’ll just reach into your genome and snip out the bits of DNA that make you question your happiness, and replace them with genes that’ll give you joy, no matter how miserable the world is making you.

Well. I guess you could aspire to that, but it sounds very 1984 to me. Maybe I like being who I am, and don’t think that jacking up my sensation of happiness artificially is entirely desirable. There are drugs I can buy right now that will enhance my contentment with things as they are without meddling with my genome in a permanent way, but I don’t think elevated bliss is necessarily the purpose of my existence.

But set all that aside. Why would anyone think your satisfaction with the status quo is genetic? This is naive biological reductionism and genetic essentialism in raw form. I’d recommend learning some real genetics, molecular biology, and neuroscience, except that if your goal is happiness regardless of the circumstances, maybe artificially maintained ignorance is what you need.

May have to give up spider research, since I’m not a spider

It’s true, according to Bible scholar Joel Green, who argues that in order to be a good Bible scholar, one must be a devoted Christian.

The best biblical scholars genuinely love Scripture, and come to its pages ready to hear God’s address. They exhibit both a certain posture vis-à-vis the text and their own formation in relation to it, and a commitment to the hard work of reading Scripture that takes seriously the nature of the text.

The former involves the life of discipleship, of Christian formation, of worship, and of prayer. As I have written elsewhere: “Formed by our reading of Scripture, we become better readers of Scripture. This is not because we become better skilled at applying biblical principles. The practice of reading Scripture is not about learning how to mold the biblical message to contemporary lives and modern needs. Rather, the Scriptures yearn to reshape how we comprehend our lives and identify our greatest needs. We find in Scripture who we are and what we might become, so that we come to share its assessment of our situation, encounter its promise of restoration, and hear its challenge to serve God’s good news.”

Huh. I’d argue sort of the opposite. The challenge of being a good scholar is to maintain some objectivity and ability to assess one’s biases. Being a devout Christian doesn’t help studying the Bible as a historical document — it also doesn’t preclude it, although it does generate many subjective obstacles. It also makes you a crap scholar if you automatically dismiss the contributions of atheist, Muslim, and Jewish scholars.

So I can keep studying spiders after all! Yay!

“We on the left”: Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, and Tucker Carlson

Here’s an excellent video that includes clips from various interviews with famous people saying stupid, hateful things about trans people. That part I’m warning you about; there’s lots of ugly cluelessness included here. But the video’s creator does a great job of tearing them apart.

Sam Harris begins his clip saying “We on the left”, which stopped me cold. He’s in an interview with Joe Rogan! What do you mean, “we”? Especially when he goes on to chortle over the very idea that a person with a penis might call themselves a “woman”. Don’t you realize that the biological reality of a woman begins with her uterus? The two of them sit there bonding over their shared contempt of the idea of trans people. I think it’s safe to say that they aren’t even vaguely liberal here.

It also includes a clip of Julia Beck on Tucker Carlson’s show, explaining that the “T” doesn’t belong in LGBTQ+, and also carrying on with the usual ugly stereotypes of fake men trying to get into women’s bathrooms to commit rape. EssenceOfThought dismantles that one, but I just want to point out that if you are on a Tucker Carlson show, and if you aren’t challenging him on his far right views, and if the two of you are engaged in a mutual back-patting kaffeeklatsch, agreeing that trans people must be excluded from civil society, you have swung way over to the right yourself. That’s a situation that ought to lead you to question your self-declared political orientation.

Especially when you consider that Tucker Carlson is a man who has contempt for even cis women.

Tucker Carlson refused to apologize Sunday after audio surfaced of him degrading women and airing controversial opinions about statutory rape and underage marriage on a radio program between 2006 and 2011. Instead, the Fox News host plugged his prime-time show and urged his detractors to come on as guests.

Carlson was widely criticized on Sunday following a report from the nonprofit Media Matters for America that compiled and transcribed more than a dozen instances of the host appearing on the “Bubba the Love Sponge Show,” a popular radio program broadcast from Tampa. In the segments, Carlson suggested underage marriage is not as serious as forcible child rape, called rape shield laws “totally unfair” and once said he would “love” a scenario involving young girls sexually experimenting. He also described women as “extremely primitive,” and used words such as “pig” and the c-word.

You know, Sam Harris and Joe Rogan and Julia Beck and Tucker Carlson can hold whatever views they want. I just think they ought to strive for accuracy and honesty, and instead of claiming membership in the Left, they ought to confess to being center-Right to Right in their regressive positions, and aren’t in any sense representative of a left-wing position. Conservatives would love their ideas, but I think they at least have a rudimentary awareness that that’s a club no one with any decency would want to join.

How about if Harris were to admit to his center-Right position and struggle to draw the looney conservatives a bit leftward, rather than falsely claiming to be a Leftist in order to pull progressives to the Right? He might actually do some good for a change.

First you struggle, then you get coopted by religion, and then you die

I just learned that the Art Institute of Seattle has closed. This is bad news — I knew people who went there and others who aspired to go there. It seemed like a good place, and the closure is doing deep harm to people.

The Art Institute of Seattle will close abruptly on Friday, leaving about 650 students in the lurch — without classes, professors, or possibly diplomas.

The Washington Student Achievement Council (WSAC), a state regulation agency, announced the end of the school’s 73-year tenure on Wednesday, just over two weeks before the winter quarter was supposed to end.

These are students who’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars into their education, who are probably still carrying daunting amounts of debt, and who’ve now been told they pissed away years of their youth and all of their investment and will get nothing for their trouble. How could this happen? How can the government stand aside and let this happen? This was an accredited institution which, one would think, was an assurance of quality.

One clue is in a few key words in this summary:

The Art Institutes, a group of art colleges nationwide, has struggled with financial troubles for years; the company that owned them went bankrupt in 2017 and Dream Center Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit, bought the schools. Court filings show that since the purchase, the schools have grappled with financial issues.

Oh, here’s another clue: A College Chain Crumbles, and Millions in Student Loan Cash Disappears. Somebody skimmed off a lot of cash in this deal, not just from the Art Institute, but a whole mess of struggling colleges that were snapped up by a religious entity.

The affected schools — Argosy University, South University and the Art Institutes — have about 26,000 students in programs spanning associate degrees in dental hygiene and doctoral programs in law and psychology. Fourteen campuses, mostly Art Institute locations, have a new owner after a hastily arranged transfer involving private equity executives. More than 40 others are under the control of a court-appointed receiver who has accused school officials of trying to keep the doors open by taking millions of dollars earmarked for students.

26,000 students? This is unconscionable. The first problem is that these colleges were bought out by Pentacostal evangelical Christians with no experience in running an educational institution.

Dream Center is connected to Angelus Temple, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist once portrayed by Faye Dunaway in a TV movie, “The Disappearance of Aimee.” It is affiliated with the Foursquare Church, an evangelical denomination with outposts in 146 countries.

Buying a chain of schools “aligns perfectly with our mission, which views education as a primary means of life transformation,” Randall Barton, the foundation’s managing director, said when Dream Center announced its plan.

But Dream Center had never run colleges. It hired a team including Brent Richardson, who worked on the conversion of Grand Canyon University to a nonprofit as its chairman, to lead the schools’ corporate parent, Dream Center Education Holdings. He stepped down in January.

Alarms were ringing from the moment the takeover was proposed. Dream Center’s effort to buy the failing ITT Technical Institutes schools had fallen apart after resistance from the Obama administration. When it asked to buy Education Management’s schools, consumer groups, members of Congress and some regional accreditors raised concerns.

The second problem is more secular: the gang of idiots currently running the country, who are engaged in a thrilling give-away of our assets to line their own pockets.

Led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Education Department has reversed an Obama-era crackdown on troubled vocational and career schools and allowed new and less experienced entrants into the field.

“The industry was on its heels, but they’ve been given new life by the department under DeVos,” said Eileen Connor, the director of litigation at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

Ms. DeVos, who invested in companies with ties to for-profit colleges before taking office, has made it an agency priority to unfetter for-profit schools by eliminating restrictions on them. She also allowed several for-profit schools to evade even those loosened rules by converting to nonprofits.

That’s what Dream Center wanted to do when it asked to buy the remains of Education Management Corporation.

Schools are just plunder to these people. One has to wonder, though, how the church’s “mission” would have been implemented in these secular schools, if they hadn’t run them straight into the ground.