“This spring, the country has watched, aghast and astounded, as celebrities, business leaders and other wealthy parents have been charged with scheming to fraudulently secure college acceptances for their children at some of our nation’s most selective institutions. Who knew the lengths that some will go in pursuit of admission, status and the perceived guarantee of success? It also raises an interesting question: Just how much is an elite acceptance worth and how far would you go to attain one for your child? Would you assume 10, 20, 50 or 100 thousand dollars in debt? Would you work three jobs to help your child receive the best education possible? Would you write their college essay? Would you pay off a coach, admission officer or another university official if they could guarantee an acceptance? Would you help your child cheat on standardized testing, or might you look the other way if you knew they had plagiarized or cheated in school? What if your child could be admitted if you agreed to pay the tuition for two less fortunate students? Would you donate a kidney if we opened up a national “organ for college” exchange?” …
Since the people being charged have done almost every single one of those things (except donate a kidney), the answer is that, yes, some people will do all of that for the perceived prestige they will gain from having a kid in an “elite” college, or because they believe that being accepted to an “elite” college is their kid’s golden ticket.
My only question is: how did people decide how much money it was worth to spend on getting your kid into an “elite” college before USANews rankings started?
I mean, should a bride to an official at Yale be higher or lower than a bribe to an official at Princeton? Is acceptance to USC worth more than acceptance to Northwestern? How can somebody know this without comparing their relative rankings, right? It was probably a lot cheaper to bribe people then, since if the coach at Duke wanted $500,000, you could always tell them that Notre Dame’s coach was willing to take $250,000. What could he say, “well ND is not as good a college”? You’d just respond that it has a better reputation, and the Duke person would not have any way to refute your claim. It’s not as though they could pull out their trusty USANews rankings and show that Duke is more highly ranked that year than ND. Without the ability to put pressure on you to increase your bribe, they’d have to either match ND’s bribe or forgo the cash.
Seriously, USANews has made it impossible these days to bargain down the bribes people demand to get your kid accepted into their elite college.
I think the whole USANews things is making everything very toxic. How are they even ranking it anyways; I’ve always wanted to know this.
@HKimPOSSIBLE Ranking is done by looking at things that money can buy and inventing a scoring system for them. You then throw in a minor factor that “proves” that you care about other things, something like having 5% of the score based on how many kids who graduated had higher income than their parents.
The most important thing is to make sure that your ranking systems places the colleges of the “important people” in the higher levels. Basically, you decide that the richest colleges, which teach the kids of the rich and powerful, are the best, and you develop a ranking system that puts them on top. Look at what the rich parents like about the Ivies where their kids go, and set those up as the criteria for ranking.
All that rankings determine is how similar a colleges is to one of the “elite” colleges. The elite colleges are, of course, very similar to themselves, and so they always rank the highest.
Oh, add a couple of criteria positive feedback, like popularity (also known and “acceptance rates”), and “reputation” according to university administrators. With the former, the more popular a colleges is, the more kids apply, and the lower the acceptance rate is. The lower the acceptance rate, the more popular it is, and on and on. With the latter, administrators determine the reputation of other colleges based on their USANews rankings. So the higher the reputation, the better the rankings, and the better the rankings, the higher the reputation. On both of these measures, the ranking go up and down without any changes whatsoever in the colleges themselves.
@MWolf That’s kind of the idea I had. It’s funny to think they rank schools based on post-graduation “success” and social mobility considering all the things…
Whenever I think of rankings, I always just think of Rutgers University - it could’ve been an Ivy, and it sure as hell would’ve been a T10 school had it accepted its Ivy League status back in the days. Now it’s “just” a public university.
@MWolf Hi m!
Even the income test can be rigged. If all of your income comes from an irrevocable trust in the form of tax free income. Guess what. Very low agi. And no assets to claim. lol.
Not only would any job out of school at the family factory for Thurston Howell VII show a leap in earned income -you might even get really good financial aid to go to your hpysm of choice. lol.
Also interesting to note. UW has the most Fortune 500 CEOs with 14. MSU for the fortune 100 with 5.
Hmmm.
Hi @privatebanker! You are right, of course.
Yes, that is good for Wisconsin. Quite impressive.
Then, if you adjust for the number of living alumni (probably should) Princeton, Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Yale move above Wisconsin and the other public schools on that Forbes list.
Not necessarily, @bloomfield88. Fewer students from those schools seek corporate careers to begin with; more pursue academia. And when you add in the tech companies which are quickly rising to the top of the corporate index, those companies have hired based on tech skills which Stanford and several publics have in abundance but were not a focus at Yale until quite recently. I do not think the corporate leaders of 2040 will resemble those of today much anymore.
@roycroftmom What? More Wisconsin alumni are in academia than those who are in the corporate world? Obviously wrong. Look it up. It would also be wrong if ‘those schools’ were the private schools mentioned. Academia is a small fraction of employment in every country.
The technology sector is 8.4% of the current Fortune 500. The percentage hasn’t even doubled in the past 10 years. Just facts.
Then, you are going to gaze into your crystal ball and tell me you know anything about 2040.
@privatebanker stated a fact. I stated a fact, which put his fact into context.
@roycroftmom contributed hyperbole to the dialogue.
Do the tiniest bit of research before making grandiose statements that are clearly wrong.
Not sure what is your point relative to
My factoid. H
More UW alum, with 14, lead the world’s most elite organizations than so called elites leading elite companies.
On cc, these roles and industries are used as rationale for school x over y. Just pointing out some counter intuitive information. Not sure what this has to with academia. They can coexist.
@bloomfield88 Not really. The number of MBA students in Harvard’s Business school is over 1,800, while at Wisconsin, it’s 442. So I am pretty sure that the number of Harvard alumni with MBA’s, the degree held by about half of all CEOs, is far, far larger than the number of Wisconsin alumni with MBAs.
So, all 14 of Wisconsin’s Fortune 500 CEOs are Wisconsin MBAs? I see your point.
@bloomfield88 If undergraduates from Wisconsin’s business school are beating out the same number of Harvard MBAs for jobs as CEOs, that definitely means that Wisconsin is the better deal…
@MWolf You understand following your logic of your threads leads you right back to the total number of alumni rather than the number of MBA alumni as the denominator. Thank you for agreeing with my point. That was easy.
@bloomfield88 Ummmmmm, no. You can misread what I write as many times and in as many ways as you want, it still won’t mean what you want it to mean.
Alumni of Harvard’s Business school (living): over 85,000 total, 46,846 MBAs
Alumni of Wisconsin’s Business school (living): 43,592 undergraduates + MBAs
So, I guess that you are wrong on this count as well. Not only are there almost twice as many Harvard Business school alumni as there are Wisconsin business school alumni, but there are more Harvard MBAs than there are total Wisconsin business school alumni.
But yet there are more fortune 500 CEOs from Wisconsin.
?
A lot of MBAs I know from working on wall street deliberately didn’t follow a track that would lead to employment at a fortune 500 firm, because that wasn’t 'fast-track" or lucrative enough, by the odds, for them. They went into investment banking. So that even if they didn’t make CEO they would still get rich.
Possibly.
@MWolf Again, you are cherry-picking. " the degree held by about half of all CEOs," Your words, not mine.
So, what about the other half that are not MBAs that you allude to?
Oh, I see, the other graduates don’t count, because it doesn’t fit your silly narrative. Then, you cherry pick Harvard MBAs to suit your narrative. The other schools I listed don’t have nearly the MBA alumni Harvard does. You are far down the rabbit hole.
In reality, if you are a student at one of the schools I mentioned, the odds are higher you will be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company than any public university, full stop.
I would also mention that taking such a small sample size, 14 people at most for any school, out of thousands upon thousands of alumni, does not make a university a success or failure. I was just adding the proper denominator to the original quote about U of Wisconsin having the most Fortune 500 CEOs.
Then, the peanut gallery chimed in with rubbish.
If you put worth aside(which is different for everyone depending upon income, expenses, savings, debt, financial aid, merit scholarships and loans etc), are there any other disadvantages in attending elite colleges?