Seems a bit conspiratorial sensationalist. There's probably some subtle bias (humans are fallible, impossible to be purely objective) common to reviewers that could be brought to light with large-scale stastical analysis. Admissions have a tough job because they are inundated with candidates that appear good but the signals of quality, if known, would tend to be easily simulated... Defeating their use.

I don't care that much what admissions offices do, to be frank about it. If they want to put bigoted "holistic"/nonacademic bullshit into their admissions processes, then that's about #43,207 on my concerns list. I don't have kids so I'm at least 18 years from this being my issue and the whole fucked-up mix will be different by then (better? worse? who knows?) I don't think the fault is mostly with the admissions offices themselves. The academic signals they get are not always reliable; high-school grades are hard to standardize, and the SAT is pretty preppable and doesn't go high enough on the math. (The SAT-M should have harder problems that extend it out to ~1000-1100. Or AMC/AIME scores can be given weight in admissions.) But right now, the SAT is too preppable and the relative lightness of academic merit in the admissions process isn't the officers' fault. They are, as you've noted, working with crummy data. In order to believe they're doing better than they would at a dartboard, they have to convince themselves to "see things" in a bunch of 17-year-old strangers.

What would be of value is to reduce the importance of these brands in the world at-large. It's not that I give a damn either way about Stanford or what it does. I do think the pedigree whoring that has crept into "tech" has been to its detriment. Twenty years ago, Silicon Valley was much less pedigree-obsessed. You didn't need a Stanford degree to raise capital. These days, we see pedigree being the most important factor in the Valley determining who gets to be a founder and who is merely "Engineer #2" on 0.1% of a $5M company, and we see absolute shit founders like Spiegel and Duplan tapping into that private welfare system. A bit of reversion-to-truth in the power given to brands might be a good thing... not only for the world, but also for elite universities, which would be pushed in the direction of using academic merit again, because the mystique they get in admitting rich idiots and making admissions appear "holistic" would be blown. That would be good for them, because it would force them to admit better students.

Thiel and others would probably agree with the value of brand point. http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

Get more than one (1) IITian on a ski/gambling trip, and it's rank and test war stories the whole way. :) (I aced (800) the SAT I math section without studying a single minute, no prep classes... Not a lie.)

One thing I noticed is how anything that disess Ivy/Pac 10 always gets down-voted. Doubting the value of pedigree is tantamount to Siné out of Charlie Hebdo for poking at a certain religion I guess. People might be down-voting because they hate the circumstances and then do that the same as down-voting a video containing something newsworthy but horrible on (video platform).

Perhaps I'll try an evidenced-based comment sometime with generous, neutral language and let the audience make up their mind.

On the plus side of (undergraduate) academia, it signals completion of a large task.. Which has some value.

(Bias: I've worked at a big brand uni on both the research and business sides.)

>"This has the potential to be really devastating"

First - Devastating for who? If the most powerful brands in the USA are incorrectly perceived as being uncorrupted, would it benefit society if the truth reveals their corruption?

Consider an example: Pennsylvania State University's reputation is likely tarnished beyond repair for the current generation. This is a good thing - because the University's representatives endorsed and covered up years of child molestation. Society benefits as a whole when corruption is revealed. People are able to make better decisions when they have sufficient information.

Second: I think your estimate about the lack of perceived corruption is far high. University admissions is perceived as highly as the NSA is today. People understand that while academics and test scores might get you in the door, the system is broken by unofficial (and official) favoritism and quotas. Unfortunately, the political dividing lines in the USA are such that half the voters endorse (directly or indirectly) such 'broken' non-academic admissions policies. As such, there won't be any breaking news about revelations that university admissions are broken.

I think you're overestimating the effect of the exposure of corruption. Take for example, your example, Penn State. I'm not sure how much hard data there is one these things, but I'd bet that applications are as high in quantity as ever [0], job opportunities after graduation are as good as ever, and Penn State revenue has been barely affected [1].

Or perhaps people are just willing to isolate their judgement and only mentally penalize those actually involved with the scandal instead of all the professors and students.

[0]: http://onwardstate.com/2014/04/30/penn-state-application-num...

[1]: http://www.statecollege.com/news/local-news/penn-state-footb... Note on source 1: this only shows that Penn State's football revenue, most likely the hardest hit area hasn't declined much.

Edit: I see you only said Penn State's reputation was tarnished beyond repair. Question then is if there are no practical consequences of that, is the reputation really tarnished?

Maybe they even stack rank.