<p>I am now sorry I ever brought Penn State into this. I was hoping someone would help me understand why a school, Emory, which has purposely mislead the public for years, should not suffer some form of sanction. Except for one comment, which I have responded to, this has not occurred. My mistake.</p>
<p>But since you have worded your response the way you have, I will say that the way we use words is the key: At Wittgenstein says: “we are the limits of our language”. But rather than move off into philosophical abstraction I would like to ask you about the term you use; “administrative issue”. I guess I want to ask you what this refers to. </p>
<p>Are you talking about a systematic cover-up of child molestation? That is the issue that is going on at Penn State. So you and I differ on terms. Which is more useful to our overall discussion in the court of opinion. Not for me to decide, certainly. Yours makes it seem faceless and not at all violent. Mine is in your face and confrontational. </p>
<p>I think molestation should be called what it is: A predator preying on very young boys who are in a position of powerlessness. Am I inaccurate, in your opinion, in this description? If not, then does the systematic coverup of these acts rise to more than an “administrative issue”?</p>
<p>One of my heroes is George Orwell. His “Politics and the English Language” is one of the best essays on writing in the English language. It is not read enough from what I can tell. Or at least we have not listened to it. But in another essay, he basically summarizes the point in one sentence:</p>
<p>“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Most books, at least to me, do not contain the wisdom of this one sentence.</p>
<p>As to why a student would choose Dartmouth over Miami, even if <em>they</em> believe the Harvard expert saying that Miami is “better” – reputation. Not necessarily US News ranking, but what employers think of when the see the name of the school on your resume. Reputations do not come from rankings. (Ideally rankings would be based on reputations.)</p>
<p>No NCAA rules were broken, some administration however did break laws or school rules</p>
<p>Thank you for going off on a tangent about one part of my post instead of telling us why you think Penn State deserved the death penalty or even attempting to rebut my point.</p>
<p>Parke, the school should be re-ranked according to true data. If possible going back to prior years as well. </p>
<p>I can see no purpose to arbitrarily subtracting 20 from their ranking --everyone would just mentally add it back in.</p>
<p>USNews could refuse to rank them in the future. Again, I doubt it would hurt them much. There would be some debate here and around the country about what their ranking “would have been” but not being ranked when people still know its approximate ranking level wouldn’t matter, most likely.</p>
<p>Really the only appropriate “penalty” I can think of would be that current and past students might have a case to sue for fraud/false representation. Perhaps there will be a class actions suit?</p>
<p>I think the point to start here might be to ask where do reputations come from? Daniel Dennet, one of those genius guys in the northeast, has coined the term meme to describe how bits (pun intended) of information flow through humans. We pass them on. Harvard was Harvard way before anything was almost anything in this country. It educated the elite ad was the single most important place to get an education. Some might quibble but let’s just say it was at or near the very top. Thus the meme was born. It still moves through our culture.
But let me just cite a recent example. In the previous issue of the Atlantic, a just graduated Harvard undergrad dismantles the way a student can learn the language games (a phrase from Wittgenstein) of certain departments and assure himself an A. It is really pretty dramatic. Now this is one guy but believe me I have followed up with people at Harvard and lots of other places, and at least behind closed doors, this is a dirty secret. Certain forms of discourse are taught to be valued within the academy. These very bright students learn them quickly an apply the template. The philosopher Jacques Lacan (and Slavoj Zizek after him) calls this ‘the quilting point’ in which ideology is centered. Everything else extends from the central spoke.
Abstract but I think I am supposed to keep this short.
So should the reputation of Harvard be so great after this? Or any elite school? These are not questions I can answer. But I can say any school, Harvard or Harvey Mudd or Harvey Wallbanger U will not be for everyone.
I always tell students never go to the best school you get into. Go to the best match. The first ‘best’ refers to reputation (which every survey ever done shows is the single most important fact a student chooses when making an enrollment decision) But the pressure from parents, friends, and media make choosing any other school that s lower ranked exceptionally hard. I had a guidance counselor tell his student that if she choose another less selective school over Princeton it would ruin the reputation of the high school and no one else would ever get in. Those are the stakes out there in terms of ranking. And yes, the student chose Princeton.</p>
<p>Hi Barrk123,
Thank you for the chance to clarify myself. what I had originally written was on the situation at Emory.If I had to say anything is a tangent it is the whole Penn State issue That is why I apologized and I will do so again. I am very sorry I brought it up. If you want to discuss Penn State let’s do it on a different thread. Is that suitable? I am more than happy to keep the discussion going but as I said it has detracted from the original issue. Do you want to start the thread?
But not tonight. Off to bed. Thank you for your words.</p>
<p>Great comments mathmomvt.
Lots to think about. Very quickly though. So sorry, past my bedtime. Why do we assign certain lengths of time for certain crimes? Isn’t it arbitrary? If so, then an arbitrary drop in ranking of 20, or whatever points does not seem out of joint. And if people know they committed fraud, I think they would not just add the 20 back. they would not know the ‘real’ ranking .Then it is punitive, and any other school would be very cautious to follow suit. But a class action suit, if lost, would ruin the school. That is not my goal.
Thank you for some great insights here.</p>
<p>I’d argue that learning to “learn the language games” needed to succeed at a given task is a more valuable skill than any particular bit of content one might learn at an institution of higher learning. Being about to figure out the game and play along, and to tailor one’s message to any given audience, is a powerful set of skills.</p>
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<p>Sometimes the idea of “fit” takes on mythical proportions. Sometimes a 17yo really knows what she wants, and sometimes she has no clue. So how does one determine which school is the “best match”?</p>
<p>In the absence of strong preferences, or major financial discrepancies, choosing the most highly-reputed school is a pretty reasonable strategy, IMO</p>
<p>It seems “out of joint” to me because the ranking is not otherwise about the honesty/integrity of the school. Maybe the “right” thing to do is add a factor for that to the rankings? </p>
<p>But right now if they said “we’re subtracting 20 from their rank for cheating” everyone would know their “true” ranking. If they didn’t say anything and just did it, then (a) it wouldn’t serve as much of a disincentive to other schools because the “punishment” would be secret, and (b) the ranking wouldn’t correspond to the published methodology. Just randomly subtracting 20 (or any number) makes one school’s ranking mean something it’s not purported to mean.</p>
<p>ROFL. The vast majority of high school seniors in this country who are going to college don’t pay any attention to USNWR. They select based on what they afford, what is closest to home, and specific programs they are interested in. They aren’t pining for “the very best” college at all; top colleges are simply not on their radar screen. CC is not at all representative of most students in America, let alone the world.</p>
<p>I’m amazed that CC seemingly has forums for everything from computer selection to AP test preparation but no Rankings forum. Why, people could go there to discuss rankings to their little hearts’ content. Think of all the fun topics:</p>
<p>– Why does US News hate X University???
– Why did Y get ranked #6 by Washington Monthly!!! It has a 50% admit rate!
– Y University is ranked #3 by AWRU but #32 by US News. Help! Is it a good or bad university???
– Z College was ranked #15 last year but #16 this year…is it declining in quality? I was thinking about applying ED, but now I’m not sure.
– Let’s rank the rankings!</p>
<p>2) “death penalty” for SMU was for repeated violations of the FB dept (paying recruits, etc.) and included the disbandment of the FB program for 4 yrs (I think). PSU FB is having many previous years wins vacated, being banned from post season play (and its share of conference bowl revenue), fined and other actions. It is very debateable whether this is appropriate or not. The way you describe, you liken this to a wrist slap. Your analogy about admitting to stealing money is not appropriate b/c a serious amount of penalties are being levied against PSU.</p>
<p>So, assuming there are 2000 HEIs in the US, that means that for me there’s roughly 1-2% of HEIs in the US are elite; and for Alexandre, it’s something like 3%. SOMEBODY’s attending those other colleges that compromise the other 97-99%. I doubt that most of them, or perhaps even a majority, would be concerned with how universities they’ll never be able to attend do on rankings.</p>
<p>I could not agree with you more. You are saying what a great man, Lloyd Thacker, who runs his non-profit, and I have talked about in private conversation. It is the tail wagging the dog. But if you glance around at CC you will certainly see that a great deal of energy and time, needlessly I think, goes into the ratings/chances/strategies of getting a ride on the tail of the dog.
All this will change in a decade as courses at MIT etc will be seen as an alternative to all this. If I had my way, all the universities in the country would get their courses up on line for free. Open sourcing. And then get tutorials for students to work with people. Instead of building monuments to their own magnificence (Yeats) the schools would invest in education that is cheap, the best in the world, and cooperative between colleges and universities. If schools were in it just for the common good this would happen soon. But they are businesses.</p>
<p>I guess I have to disagree with you. If most people knew which schools they were getting into then CC would likely not exist. Or private counselors. Or much else that trades on the fear and uncertainty of the process. If you can tell who is going to be admitted to Princeton from looking at stats then stop whatever you are doing give your knowledge for free to others. It would save them immense amounts of money and time.</p>
<p>Hi T26E4,
Thanks for the link. I will read it later and try to comment but I have a kid to drop off at college so I may not get back immediately.
As for NCAA I have asked that a new thread be started to address these questions. I still think you and I and some others are talking at cross-purposes. For me, it seems a moral (not legal) judgement has been made to say that football is more important than the lives of boys who were violated sexually, emotionally, and in just about every other way. But as they say in Mafia movies, and that I quote quite a bit: It isn’t personal. It’s business. It is the ethos of this country to let banks walk away from ruining the lives of millions, and for football programs to ruin lives too and pay some money and give back some trophies. No jail time? Why?</p>
Yes. If the USNews methodology is flawed, then what is the impact of Emory “cheating” the ranking? You’re saying that many families pay attention to USNews without understanding what it means; I’m prepared to agree with that. But those families are not getting any useful information from the rankings anyway. It’s all a farce even if the numbers are accurate.</p>
<p>I agree with noimagination. I just wish the general media wouldn’t hype USNWR and other ratings so much. Oftentimes they treat it like it’s a sporting event and there are winners and losers. ie.</p>
<p>The impact is (possibly) that Emory got more applications than it otherwise might have based on families putting weight on the rankings where Emory’s position was dishonestly elevated. And by extension, perhaps other colleges that were “incorrectly” ranked below Emory in this meaningless but nonetheless highly-influential ranking, may have gotten fewer applicants than they “should have” during the same period. </p>
<p>I almost wonder if this is a situation that ought to be handled by existing false advertising laws.</p>