However, the daughter was rejected outright due to a multitude of factors. She wasn't violent, or addicted, or lazy. Nothing like that. She just wasn't ahead of the other applicants.
Well, you can imagine that the parents were none too enthused. All the love they had for that college, those dreams for their daughter, gone. There were phone calls and in person visits. Still, the daughter was not what they were looking for.
In the end, things have gone alright for everyone. The building still has their names on it, though the donations have ceased. The daughter is doing just fine at the school she is now at. The college is dealing with it's own issues just as it ever was.
Though there may be corruption at many universities and colleges, there are still a fair number of places where merit and fair decisions still reign. I'd look to those schools for the graduates to hire. Integrity is still in high demand, just as it will ever be.
My Alma-mater gave me access to leaders, hiring and referral opportunities, and even a life long partner with similar ambitions. I can probably name a good long list of of people I can call and get a a little help from now if I was in a bit of a pinch or need a little perspective.
Granted, I went to a smallish regional state school. The experience there, or at, say, Small Liberal Arts College, may be very different from Big State Engineering or Pressure Cooker Elite U.
Sometimes though, we need instruments to do science, so that's another major purpose for undergrad work. Occasionally. But if the undergrads decided to all take online courses one day, it would sure help the grad get work done.
Probably? Personally my first semester at uni was depressingly dull other than the novelty and the subjects (well, mostly dull there too but the future semesters looked interesting and I was programming for the first time). By chance I was walking through a club recruitment event when a single person stopped to talk to me and tried to convince me to join and come to a meeting that night. They got my email too. Well, I didn't go to the meeting but a few days later an email showed up saying the first practice will be tomorrow. I figured why not, I'm not doing anything, and showed up. I stuck with it for four years, taking on duties over time until I was president, it was most of my social life (e.g parties, hanging out) and I made most of my friends through it, shifted my lifestyle from videogames and procrastination to working out, having fun with sport and mastering it, having flow/mushin consistently, and getting work done ASAP, and other considerations.
I've never felt the desire to donate to my old college, but certainly I already have donated to my old club and have considered doing more for it. I assume folks with very good experiences were part of some sort of organization: my high school friends that stuck together in college without branching out had a good time but was overall meh.
Sorry to hear that. What are some ways to cheat school? (waste of time)
Edit: apart from catching on your reading (listening) and scrolling on hackernews.
They provide a service, and they charge money for it. The university operates as a business. I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?
Why wouldn't you instead endow a scholarship for students of your favorite college? Instead of giving cash to Wal-Mart, buy prepaid Wal-Mart gift cards, and pass them out to fellow customers. The university doesn't need your donations. It is fully capable of building its own buildings outright, begging for state funding, or at least issuing bonds backed by future tuition. If someone is so keen on having a building with their name on it, perhaps they should instead construct some off-campus student apartments, and make some nice signs in the same general style as the university signage.
Many people do. They also give money to improve football facilities, bring speakers to campus, and endow a chaired professor position.
> I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?
Because a university is a nonprofit that exists only for the purpose of improving the world. (Not necessarily the employees, who work there as a job, but it's why universities exist.)
You probably don't see a lot of donations to the University of Phoenix or other for-profit universities.
For something like fifteen years of my life I owed well over a hundred thousand dollars of non-bankruptable debt because of the fees this "non-profit" charged.
A "non-profit" university exists for many, many reasons. Giving the dean a million dollar salary is one of those reasons. Student education is likely third or fourth on the list.
It is a tax status (actually, a group of them), but the name has substantive meaning, since to qualify for any of them there must be no one with a claim on the entity’s accumulated earnings.
> That actual charitable causes happen to be non-profit is a coincidence.
It's not a coincidence, it's an actual legal defining characteristic of the kind of nonprofit to which donations are tax deductible.
When it's time for my children, I want the organization that will be teaching them about professional and ethical conduct in the real world to not only not be corrupt, but also demonstrably free of all prejudicial biases in the applications process.
Which is to say, I want my children to be assigned a randomized identifier and their personally identifiable information anonymized, before their application is given to an admissions officer, so that irrelevant qualifications like the amount of money parent alumni have given to the organization are not and cannot be used for an admit/no-admit decision.
I'm fine with your kid getting a 2nd-floor room in the posh dormitory, and first bite at class scheduling. You can pay for additional conveniences, but not to deny someone else an opportunity earned by their own hard work.
If my kids aren't going to get preferential status then there is no reason to be a sponsor of that institution over any other.
Given that your top comment is, "I don't understand why people donate to Universities," I'm not sure that you're in a great position to say that others shouldn't receive priority admission. If everyone did what you did then our University system would collapse.
Actually, in the US, at the vast majority of universities, the primary job of faculty involves teaching, extension/outreach, and forms of service like mentoring students. Most universities have research expectations, but that is not how faculty spend their time.
> and tuition doesn't pay for research.
This is a STEM-oriented view. In a lot of fields the primary cost of research is faculty time, and it is often paid by tuition.
While I don't doubt there are colleges out there that primarily function of tuition, I'm fairly confident that the schools that the GP was talking about which take in millions of donations, are not funded by tuition - STEM or not. Endowments are practically tax-free hedgefunds. There are several liberal arts colleges in boston with billion+ endowments - where the return alone on the endowment rivals the total revenue from students (assuming they were all paying the full 50k, which they likely aren't).
Because endowing a scholarship is setting up a charity and donating to a University (the kind anyone donates to, at any rate—no one is endowing chairs at the University of Phoenix) is giving to an existing charity; the two probably have similar tax, feeling of giving back, and status/ego benefits, but the former is more work.
As charities, universities massage their financials to make themselves look better. They set the tuition rate. They determine the scholarship amounts. They bring in dollar-denominated donations, but the actual "charity" they provide is a nebulous value for the amount of additional knowledge and education the student would have been otherwise unable to acquire without paying more out of their own pocket in tuition. The university decides what that is worth anyway. They move $50k from one pocket to another, and then say they gave away $50k worth of education.
A private scholarship charity can't play those games, because the costs of education are set by someone else.
If you are perfect at setting up and managing a charity, perhaps, but then if you are concerned with education, and what something perfectly aligned with your values, may mean you need to set up a university, not a scholarship fund.
> whereas the highest paid employees of the existing "charity" are probably the president and the men's football coach
You assume that this conflicts with, rather than reflects, the interests and values of the kind of people who donate money to the universities. I think that if you explored the issue you would find that it is not the case, and particularly that the variation in whether or not that is true at any particular university correlates very neatly with the values of the people who donate to the university. (As far as causal explanations, I would assume that there is a two-way feedback loop; donors who value football will make a school more likely to pay the football coach well which will attract more donations from people who value football and less from those who do not, etc.)
> A private scholarship charity can't play those games
Yes, but that's just another way of saying that a private scholarship charity has a lot less control of what actually gets delivered as education than a university.
Not sure that's a reason to support the former over the latter, though, especially when the choice is taking the additional effort and cost to set up the former; its just another way of saying "less bang for the buck".
Now, you can argue that incentives sometimes get messed up, but that is the case for ALL charities/non-profits.
It is possible to set up a non-profit business such that the money that comes in goes out through different ports than the ownership outflow pipe. A typical setup for a corrupt non-profit is for managers of the business to earn above-market salaries, and to own for-profit businesses that "compete" for service contracts with the non-profit entity.
For example, Jack Grift establishes a non-profit charity for orphan children with fantods. He works the circuit and manages to fund it to the tune of $1M per year. He leases a nice office space in a building owned by Jack Grift AAA Office Space, and contracts with Jack Grift Janitorial Services to empty the trash can, and sets the charity's salary for CEO at $250k/year, and Chief Revenue Officer at $100k/year, plus a bonus of 5% of incoming donations. Jack, of course, holds both positions. He gets $250k as CEO, $150k as CRO, $100k as his own landlord, and $50k for taking out his own trash. He rolls $440k into uncapturable overhead, marketing, and fundraising efforts, and still has $10k left to supply orphans with copies of both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
The finances of universities are even more obfuscated, but it is undeniable that some university employees have the power to spend the organization's money for their own personal benefit. Catered faculty luncheons. Campus beautification in and around personal offices. Settlements from the university to forestall civil suits based on personal indiscretions. Premium parking spaces. These expenditures may, in fact, be justified by the mission of the university, but it is impossible for me to audit any given university's accounting books to make that determination for myself before deciding whether I want to give them more money than they demand on their invoices.
There are a lot of outflow pipes for business revenues. Non-profits only close one of them.
This is a little overgenerous.
> In this case, we're talking about bribery of specific employees to act against the interests of their employer. That's simply corruption.
Perhaps. What crime is it?
I went and looked at the charges that were filed, here: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admis...
(Kudos to patch.com for actually including a link to the charges in their coverage. Middle finger to the Washington Post.)
Charges are divided into three groups, which appear to correspond to different roles in the bribery. At the top are four people "charged by information". William Singer and Mark Riddell are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. (And some other charges.) Based on the media coverage, this is because some payments in the bribery system took the form of donations to a nonprofit operated by Riddell, and this is tax fraud. (One of those other charges is "conspiracy to defraud the United States".) Rudy Meredith is charged with wire fraud, the catchall crime that everyone in the country is guilty of. John Vandemoer is charged with racketeering.
The second group, "charged by indictment", are all charged with racketeering, except for David Sidoo who is charged with mail and wire fraud. I don't know what these people are supposed to have done. I'd like to think that a racketeering charge requires the organization you're involved with to have committed a crime; that would imply that what they're really charged with is helping the sham charity commit tax fraud.
The third group, "charged by complaint", are the parents. One and all they are charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
It doesn't look to me like paying an admissions officer to admit your child is a crime at all. Similarly, bribing a maitre'd to seat you more quickly is bribing a specific employee to act against the interests of his employer, but it's not a crime. Taking the bribe might or might not be a crime. All of the charges here that involve a crime relate to using a sham nonprofit for tax benefits.
I have not had a chance yet to look properly at the case, but I'd assumed the "fraud" charges are for precisely the act of paying an admissions officer to admit a child. Do you have reason to think that's not the case?
> bribing a maitre'd to seat you more quickly is bribing a specific employee to act against the interests of his employer, but it's not a crime
It's petty enough you wouldn't expect anyone to be prosecuted over it, but are you sure it's not a crime?
> It's petty enough you wouldn't expect anyone to be prosecuted over it, but are you sure it's not a crime?
It looks like the legal status of commercial bribery (no involvement of a public official) in the United States, while often illegal, is not always clear-cut: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_bribery
When the mails are used in the course, the federal offenses that appear to be involved from the charges in this case are “mail fraud” and “honest services mail fraud”; the bribing of the officials would probably also be criminal frauds (against the university) under State law.
> It doesn't look to me like paying an admissions officer to admit your child is a crime at all.
Then why are people being charged with (or pleading guilty to) criminal fraud (or patterns of racketeering activity where the concrete racketeering activity includes criminal frauds) for doing that, conspiring to do it, or facilitating other people doing it? Yes, the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over mere fraud, so it's the use of the mail that is key to the federal charges on this case, but the basis of the charges here (other than the money laundering and tax fraud related to concealing the quantity and source of the profits from the main scheme) are all about bribing school and test administrators.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
There are portions of what schools are doing here which are perfectly normal. There are portions which may not be (I imagine public funding may preclude certain admittance options, but I'm not sure). If the school is willing to put up with now the public perceives these actions and how it affects their business (because it is a business), then that's their decision.
My intent was to demonstrate that whatever is going on is hush hush for a reason, and not comparable to a legitimate transaction where a private business owner chooses to sell a product or service to someone at whatever price the two agree upon.
I would say that every donation carries with it the possibility of some benefit to the donator, no matter who does it. There's always the public relations or social benefit or being seen as "doing a good thing". Without this benefit, some amount charity might go away. Does it matter that people or organizations give because they see benefit to themselves in it? I think not, and I think the tax law is set up specifically to turn a blind eye to this. In that respect, it's not fraud at all, it's how the system is designed to work to promote charitable giving.
Also, since to my understanding most of this "advertising" for donations which results in naming a building is to individuals, it also depends on how you classify advertising. Is establishing a legacy for yourself so you're looked on favorably after you're dead advertising? We generally don't call it as such, but even it is, so what? Does is promote more good or harm to society in general? That's the only metric we should measure it by.
What if it's a hospital or clinic in an area? Are those people being stolen from or left worse off for it being possible in their area because someone gets their name there?
I can't help but feel you're being both far too pedantic in wanting to prosecute a crime that doesn't seem to actually hurt anyone (and actually benefits large groups and communities), and also completely misidentifying it as a crime when it's allowed by tax law.
I mean, at least part of the purpose of the law is to encourage people to give their wealth for the good of society by encouraging additional benefits (write-offs) in addition to the benefits that have always existed (recognition), so all I see here is a system functioning as designed, for the good of all. I'm not sure how you're seeing some great miscarriage of justice here.
The simplest argument, however, is that the purpose of taxes is to provide the services that a society wants, theoretically indicated by the way it votes. The services and products that the taxes buy should benefit everyone in the nation. If the country has a budget of $x and needs to levy a tax of $y (obviously must be calibrated to ability of one to pay), then why are we allowing adjustments to this?
Why open up the door to abuse? If you want to donate, then donate, what difference does that make to the money needed for government expenditures? The fact that we would even need a donation to a hospital is indicative of a broken system.
The end result of the tax deduction is that we have abuses, and we now have to spend more resources to police the abuses. And the only way to stop the abuses is to close the loophole that allows it.
All of the complexity of the tax laws simply enable more and more corruption. We should be aiming for transparency and simplicity, and instead we end up playing this "steal or be stolen from" game where you try to suck more out of it (but don't make it obvious) than you put in. How does donating millions to Harvard or an art museum benefit society? And even if it did, why would we want to give up our democracy's power to democratically spend the tax receipts the way we want, and instead give that power to a single person to spend however they want?
The reason you're having trouble identifying who is hurt in this case is because very, very few are, but the people who benefit are generally a large group.
In the worst case of the story in question, if someone donated a large amount to a school and their child was given preferential treatment, the loser is possibly a child whose spot is taken, but the beneficiaries are all the other students of the school, and possibly an additional amount of future (or current) students that would not have been able to attend, if those funds are used to allow more applicants.
> The simplest argument, however, is that the purpose of taxes is to provide the services that a society wants
This is a tax program used to incentivize trade of non-traditional goods, and trade generally benefits all involved. What we have are people that are not benefiting society in a way they could (people saving money that's not being put to use in the economy, but specifically more so than needed to safeguard their safety or way of life), and a program to incentivize them to use it in exchange for goods they desire (recognition, genuine altruism) but might need a push to pursue. That push is the government subsidization of the transaction to some degree.
As subsidies go, encouraging wealthy individuals to give money to causes that have to prove they aren't doing it for profit is probably my favorite. Sure, it can be abused by unscrupulous individuals or organizations on both ends, but I'm confident the social good achieved (over people just hoarding wealth longer) far outweighs the negatives.
> All of the complexity of the tax laws simply enable more and more corruption.
Non-profit deductions are simple. You'll have to do much more to convince me that a few anecdotal misuses outweigh what I see as one of the major causes of redistribution of wealth from the wealthy to the less wealthy over many decades.
The pragmatic approach is to attempt to measure who is hurt and by how much, and who is helped and by how much, before making an ultimate decision on whether this is good or bad. I doubt keying off anecdotal media stories about misuse of a tax law will yield better results than that.
> So, to recap, paying someone to steal my car is bad, but paying me to give you my car is fine. Got it.
It feels like having a purely merit based population of students would create a very stagnant and dull environment.
It feels like having a purely merit based population of students would create a very stagnant and dull environment.
'This university sucks! Everyone here is a nerd.'
OK, you probably did not mean it that way but I can't resist having a little fun with this. If all you want to do is shake things up, why not just draft random working class people via lottery? For extra amusement, make them go even if they don't want to. True, we would not learn anything about the perspective of the super wealthy, but they already have billboards and TV stations to inform us of their opinions.
Yes, there's a system available to the masses that the super-rich are bypassing using their wealth. The same is true of anyone who flies by private jet, or anyone with private health insurance in a country where the vast majority of the population uses the public health system. Are these things "corrupt"? What's different here?
If there's no dishonesty and nobody is harmed, what's the moral issue? Why are universities, unique among all society's institutions, required to operate as perfect meritocracies?
Short answer: The difference lies in the transfer of wealth to the next generation and our meritocratic values.
As a society, we have a value system that we implicitly adhere to. At least in the US, meritocracy is big part of our value system.
We believe that if you work just as hard and contribute just as much as your neighbor, you deserve to enjoy the same quality of life.
So, let's look at some examples:
Example A) Person A works his/her ass off and becomes rich off the fruits of his labor. He then spends his riches on private jets and private health insurance.
Does this conflict with our meritocratic values? No. He deserves a higher quality of life because he worked his ass off.
Example B) Person A then purchases access to an elite university for his child, who as a direct result, enjoys a better life than his poorer peer who works just as hard.
Does this conflict with our meritocratic values? Yes. His child didn't deserve their higher quality of life because they didn't work their ass for it.
You don't have to agree with meritocratic values, but it explains the difference.
One of the reasons people want to go to these schools is because they have lots of resources. If you ban wealthy parents and alumni from donating, the school wont be outstanding, so the University has good reason to accept these.
https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/AAU%20Files/Key%20Is...
"charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational"
Obviously a university is scientific and literary, and a college is educational.
Actually, they are publicly subsidized (by tax deductibility of donations made to them) because they are private charities.
Undergrads are pretty much irrelevant to major research institutions (e.g. my undergraduate alma mater MIT spends only about 16% of its budget on undergrads who are actually subsidized -- tuition is about 14% of revenue). Grad students are what matter and apart from the B school they are mostly paid (barely) to attend.
Research, including scientific research, does happen at institutions that aren't "research universities."
I think it's a corollary of their misguided "money is speech" interpretation of the 1st amendment. A university admissions bribery case is unlikely to benefit from such 1st amendment arguments.
>>It may not be meritocratic, but it's not corrupt
Its just dampening the effects a little, but its the same though. Donating X, just means the person who bought in the donation gets promoted or gets awarded some bonus or gets rewards by their employer(university). Instead of receiving the bribe directly.
This is a classic trick from corruption handbooks used by ace corrupt people.
When you trade something for something which could be wrong, only stupid people directly do it through exchange of money. Clever people trade through favors and indirect profit/help. They also call this lobbying in places like politics. In many other places they call these things incentives, commissions, brokerage or whatever.
This is really one of those classic problems with defining corruption. Books and stories can always be cooked in a way to make anything look good.
I agree that the practice of university donations in exchange for college admission is neither legally corrupt nor dishonest.
However, it is still wrong according to our societal values.
That is, we have a value system that we implicitly adhere to and meritocracy is big part of our value system.
At least in the states, we believe that if you work just as hard and contribute just as much as your neighbor, you deserve to enjoy the same quality of life.
When parents purchase access to an elite university for their child, they are conferring an advantage to their child over the child's peers that is unearned and unfair.
Elite college admissions is a zero sum game. There are only a certain number of spots available and purchasing a spot for a kid who slacked off in school necessarily takes the same opportunity away from a more deserving kid.
Sometimes, alumni give to their alma mater for charitable reasons! And some USC grads do better than some Yale grads, I'm sure.
But maybe the IRS should try to brush back the most conspicuous cases of donating to receive admission. I'm seeing stories of admissions officers being pretty open about it at Ivy League schools.
Maybe not in the 1800s, but doing that today violates any number of published school policies. It likely also violates several laws, especially if the school receives state/federal funding (they all do). Violating published policies, circumventing established admission systems, and denying a spot for a qualified candidate in order to accommodate a wealthy donor, that is the definition of corruption.
A few, most famously Hillsdale, refuse government money in order to protect their civil liberties (including as race-agnostic admission procedures, for better or for worse).
https://deanclancy.com/a-list-of-colleges-that-dont-take-fed...
In this case, we're talking about bribery of specific employees to act against the interests of their employer. That's simply corruption.
They might be equally non-meritocratic, but they're definitely not equally dishonest or equally socially harmful.