Scenario A: The student isn't actually stupid, just lazy.
There is a huge difference in motivation between students from poor families and rich families when it comes to exams: the kid from the poor, working class family is often told that he needs to study hard, get into a top university into to get a good job and escape the fate that has befallen his parents. The kids from the rich family think, meh, whatever, I still have plenty of options even if I don't do that well for this exam. So technically, the student in this scenario isn't stupid but has simply failed to put in the requisite effort to get the top grades. Things did go wrong when the student realizes that he had done so poorly in his exams that no decent university would want to grant him a place, so his parents attempt to rectify the situation by bribing a good university - so whilst the act of bribery is wrong on so many levels, if they do get away with it, the student will realize that his parents cannot continue bribing their way through his degree. The student then makes a genuine effort at university to work hard and nobody even suspects that this student is associated with any form of bribery. Of course, I am assuming the parents of the student are also realistic - let's put it this way, even if you could bribe your way into any university, would you put your child in Harvard knowing that you couldn't buy your way through the difficult exams and he would be expected to keep up with their very high standards? No, that's why some of these admission scandals involved good but not elite universities like University of Southern California (USC) - that's not top ten in the US and whilst league table ranking positions change year on year, it is fair to say that USC is around the 30th - 40th band which is respectable (considering there are 4298 degree-granting institutions in the US in 2018), but certainly not elite like the Ivy League colleges. Therefore in this scenario the student (and his/her parents) get away with the fraud.
Okay, so in this scenario the student is admitted into a great university but fails to pass any of the exams despite the fact that his parents are paying for the best professional help that money can get. Let's assume that in this scenario, bribery is no longer an option because you would have to bribe a large number of staff within the department to change the F grade into a B or C, especially when the student have loads of peers who would realize, "hang on, what the hell is going on here? Elizabeth normally struggles in this class, how did she pass this course with such good results? We want an investigation." You can't even say, "oh I got lucky on the test" because at university level, you're not going to be graded with multiple choice tests when you still have a 1 in 4 chance of getting the question right when you don't know the answer - no, if you don't have the knowledge, then you're not going to pass, it is as simple as that. So by the end of the first year, the student fails his exams and is given the chance to repeat the first year (which is standard practice) but even after repeating the first year, there is just no prospect of the student meeting the pass grade and so he is advised to transfer to a university with lower standards, where he will eventually have a chance to pass the exams, finish his degree and graduate. Faced with these circumstances, the student then transfers to a university much lower down the ranking table, after having wasted two years and an insane amount of money - but then, his parents are so crazy rich so money is not the issue here. It is just a rude wake up call to his parents that their son is actually not as smart as they had hoped.
We have dealt with two straightforward situations so far: in scenario A, the student is smart, in scenario B, the student is stupid. What about a situation where the student is somewhere in between? Say the student isn't exactly stupid, he is smart but not as smart as the best in the world who have rightfully earned their place in one of the best universities in America then? So what the student does is this - he negotiates an exit to another university, but manages to persuade the other university to recognize some of the modules that he has completed in the university he is about to leave, he then transfers to a different course in another university with lower admission criteria with the credible story, "oh I tried that course at this elite university, but it wasn't for me. I wasn't enjoying it and I realized that the best thing to do was to cut my losses and consider a different course at a different university." This actually happened to a friend of mine (let's call him Jack) who dropped out of med school after two years at one of the top universities in the UK - he was struggling and then decided he didn't want to become a doctor and wanted to become a biology teacher instead, so Jack found a university lower down the league table (with a ranking around the 15th - 20th band) where he could jump mid-way into a degree in biology without having to start from scratch and no one questioned his motivations or choices because we just accepted that people like Jack are allowed to change their minds mid-way through a degree if they want to. So in scenario C, the student can pretend that he is doing what Jack did and negotiate a transfer without losing any credibility.
So let's deal with another scenario whereby the student is pressured by his parents to get into a certain course in a top university which is considered highly prestigious, such as law at Harvard and the parents are willing to get their son into that course by any means necessary including bribery. The students gets into the course but struggles at it because he is simply not interested in it and he fails the first year - after all, you really need to be motivated and interested if you want to pass those difficult exams and the student is neither motivated nor interested. So the tutor takes the student aside and confronts him, "I don't think you're stupid but you're just not interested in law - what are you actually interested in?" So the student tells the tutor that he is actually interested in a totally different field like anthropology or linguistics and the tutor replies, "actually we have a department within the university in that field and let me see if I can help get you a transfer into that course." The student is taking advantage of the fact that he is already a current student within the university rather than someone just trying to seek admission and either with or without the help of more bribery or 'donations' the student is allowed to transfer to a course which he is far more interested in - he then thrives in the new course and graduates, without anyone actually being aware of the amount of bribery that got him there in the first place.
Now you may wonder if there are any other possible loopholes for these rich but dumb kids to exploit - it is clear that even if you can bribe your way into a top university, you still need to be smart enough to pass the exams and graduate. Well, I don't think there are that many but if your parents are rich and influential, then we have to ask the question - what is the point of getting a degree from a top university? The answer is simple: to get a good job. You want to be able to apply for a job with that degree and get that job interview because the gatekeeper is going to say, wow this candidate went to this great university, s/he must be incredibly smart, we want to hire intelligent people like that. So the rich but dumb kid in question could go to a crap university but still score internships with impressive companies because daddy is pulling in loads of favours from his old friends and when it is time for the rich but dumb kid to get a job, daddy can once again use nepotism to get him a nice job. Note that whilst bribing your way to a place in a top university is illegal and can land you in jail, using nepotism to get your child a good job is completely legal. After all, a private company can decide whom they wish to hire for the job - so even if they were to make a bizarre decision like hiring the son of the boss's best friend (our rich but dumb kid) instead of a highly qualified, highly experienced candidate, then that's clearly a bad business decision but otherwise completely legal and this actually happens more often than you think in the business world. Thus by that token, if your parents can pull in favours like that when it is time to find a job, then these rich but dumb kids don't need a degree from a top university. So it is more a question of vanity to want to study at a top university.
So by this token, one does really wonder why these rich parents would to such lengths to bribe their children into good universities, despite knowing that it is illegal? Well, there are a few explanations - the first one is that they think they can get away with it. I was recently in Gdansk in Poland and I would hop on the tram for a stop or two without paying because I never saw any ticket inspectors when I was in the city - so I thought the chances of getting caught were low enough for me to take my chances. Regardless of whether their child actually does well in the course or flunks out of it eventually, they are assuming that they won't be caught and that there are no consequences for their actions (if money wasn't an issue for them since they are crazy rich). One can only assume that others have done it in the past and got away with it, leading them to believe that there's nothing wrong with going down the same path - it's the "well if they all managed to get away with it, then so can I" mindset. There are ways of course for many rich people to bend the rules without breaking them - for example, there is the whole muddy world of legacy preferences which gives preferential treatment to the children of the alumni of that institution. The rules vary from university to university, but it is often associated with donations and yeah, it is a legitimate, legal form of bribery extended to their alumni who have children who are smart enough to get into that university. The fact is we're dealing with process where so many people get to bend and break the rules all the time (a bit like the people who didn't pay for the tram in Gdansk), so all you can do then is to arrest a few you do catch red-handed, make an example of them and hope to scare the rest into following the rules.
Wouldn't the classmates of these rich kids who bought their way into the program start to realize that their rich classmate isn't that bright? I guess they do but there's no way to tell for sure. It's like when you have classmates/students who can barely speak or write in English and you wonder "How did they even get here?" And what about the teachers who have these rich dumb kids in their class? Won't they get suspicious?
ReplyDeleteGood question - allow me to try to address the issues you've raised.
Delete1. Are the classmates going to get suspicious? That depends on how good at covering up your ignorance. In a group discussion, if you have a good idea or if you know the answer to the question, then you're likely to put your hand up and want to speak up. But if you have not done your homework and can't contribute, chances are you'll sit at the back and just nod or smile a lot without saying a word. I remember this girl at my university - I don't think she's stupid, quite the contrary, just incredibly shy and if you don't make an effort to ask her to contribute, she'll just sit quietly without speaking up. I doubt she's stupid but if she is, she is hiding it by passing it off as shyness and hiding it well. I don't think I'm stupid either, but if I don't know the answer to the question, I would never put my hand up - I would hope that someone else would answer the question and then I'll say something like, "ah yes, I was thinking about that too, I agree with you." That would give people the impression that I also knew the same answer, but that my classmate had said it before me. Believe you me, if you have some social skills, it is pretty easy to hide how ignorant you are - but if you're truly stupid, then would a stupid person have good social skills? I doubt it.
Furthermore, when you're at university, you often have to take a range of different modules which can incorporate quite different elements testing different skills - heck, I did everything from business French to statistics to anthropology to climate change. I can tell you that I was good at some modules and struggled with others, you can't possibly be good at everything (if you are, then you're superman) - most of us normal students will have one module that we totally hate and would struggle to pass. So often, we're happy to give our friends the benefit of the doubt - like I had to help one friend with statistics, I don't think she was that stupid, her just sucked at maths and she wasn't taught maths well when she was younger. So she sucked at statistics - did I suspect she bribed her way into my university? No, I just accepted that she wasn't good at everything and statistics is her weak spot.
As for the teachers, I refer you to what I said above - even the teachers will accept that some bright students will struggle with one or two modules that take them out of their comfort zone.
Anyway, that's why some of these rich but dumb kids aim for mid-tier colleges (like USC) rather than Harvard or Yale, so no one is expecting them to be geniuses - just somewhat above average. If your child is really dumb, then you'll be an idiot to bribe your way into Harvard knowing full well that your child will never pass the exams there.
And as for the rich parents of dumb kids who somehow still want to bribe their kids into a university like Stanford or Harvard, well - I refer you back to the lady I mentioned in my article who was telling me how beautiful her daughter was and I wanted to laugh out loud, I had to control myself. Because we were having dinner, the lady and her daughter were at the same table - I could just say, "you have gotta be kidding, right? You're talking about your daughter - that girl sitting next to you? Do you need glasses or contact lenses? When was the last time you went to the optician?" No, I just bit my tongue and said nothing. Of course the lady is not being objective, she loves her daughter and so she thinks her daughter is beautiful - but by conventional standards, let's just say her daughter is short, fat and wears thick glasses. Yeah, not conventionally beautiful - not by a long shot. If I was cruel, I would go as far as to use the word U-G-L-Y. But again, I didn't want to get into an argument or hurt anyone's feelings, so I said nothing. But that just goes to show how loving parents can have an altered sense of reality when they let their love affect their judgement when it comes to their children.
DeleteI have degrees from Hong Kong U, Peking U and Cambridge U, and so have some rich experience in different universities. One factor you seem to have neglected is that some top universities are difficult to get in but easy to get out. Some local Americans told me that Harvard is one such university. If I were rich, I would try to get (or bribe) my kid into Harvard despite the fact that s/he just has mediocre intelligence. As long as s/he is not too lazy or mentally retarded, s/he will be able to graduate and has a Harvard degree. Having lived in the US for almost two decades, I realize that the so-called holistic admission system administered by the top universities is seriously rigged. For example, about one-third of the incoming students of Harvard this year are legacy admissions. In the past when someone told me he had an undergrad degree from Harvard, I would think this guy should be academically capable. Now, I would think probably he came from a rich family.
DeleteHi Wkthl, hello - please allow me to respond to your comment.
DeleteIf you're describing the American universities, then I have had limited experience with the American system. I did my undergrad in the British and French system and my pots-grad involved some collaborations with American institutions, but I did that from London.
Let me share with you what I went through in the UK as an undergrad and this is quite a common theme with a lot of students who did get into top UK universities. I went from being the top student in my school in Singapore to the bottom of my class in my first year at university - oh yeah, talk about a shock to the system. This was because I was so lazy in Singapore, I never studied, I somehow managed to get As in the exams despite not studying and I wanted to do sports, I wanted to have a social life etc. So when I rolled into my university in the UK, the sheer excitement of living here got to me - I partied a lot, I went clubbing all the time, I did a lot of sports, I made a lot of friends and I didn't study. I naively thought that I could still get good grades despite not working hard but good grief, I got a major shock at the end of my first year at university when I had bad results. I had to seriously change my lifestyle to work a lot harder in my second year to pull my degree back on track as I realized I couldn't just dick around and still expect to graduate.
The bottom line was that I got my place at university because I was smart, but they weren't going to allow me to graduate without a lot of hard work and meeting their rigorous standards. This happened to another friend of mine as well - he came from a small town in Scotland and he was the top boy in his school in his town, but when he got to Oxford he went to the bottom of the class pretty quickly and he had to work so much harder just to keep his head afloat because he was now studying with the very best students from around the world.
As to why Harvard would lower standards for their internal exams - I don't know, you know better than me; it seems bizarre to do that. However, at least this is not something that happened in my experience here in the UK (nor in France).
I know a Taiwanese student from TED talk - Alex Chang. He always get As before getting into Harvard,achieved in the top 99th percentile in his SAT score and yet he struggled there despite working very hard. So no, I do not think someone very average can graduated from Harvard.
DeleteWell the SATs follow a certain format so it is possible to train for them and do loads of exercises to anticipate certain kinds of questions until you consistently achieve great results on your SATs. However, in a university course, you are challenged to do a lot more critical thinking, you are tested in a range of ways far beyond the SATs so simply acing your SATs doesn't mean you are so intelligent you can graduate from Harvard with ease - it only tells us so much about the student. That's why so many students struggle in their first year at university because they really have to shift gears and respond to a totally different kind of learning method.
DeleteHi Lift, I hope you can still allow me to post despite my inappropriate remarks in your other post. I just have some questions about correlation of uni ranking to academic standards. From my limited understanding, the criteria for university rankings are based on academic reputation by peer universities, employer reputation, international staff and student numbers, and academic citations. That say a university does not have high educational standards on courses but focus on a few other criteria, like getting more publications, hiring more foreign staff, recruiting more foreign students, they may have a good ranking but poor academic standard. I am assuming peer reviews of academic reputation and employer reputation may be subjective. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the point of the ranking, I ask you? Well, it is to allow the public to decide which university to go to - needless to say, smart kids want to go to the best possible university their grades can get into. It is a guide though there are there different ranking systems which use different criteria and as a result, the positions of these universities on different league tables will vary (but usually not by a lot). So a university could appear 15th on one table (hey quite respectable) but 33rd on another (oooh not that good), depending on the criteria you choose to judge them by and you have talked about a wide list of criteria in your comment - different experts will have different opinions about which of those factors are more important and which are less.
DeleteLikewise, there are also gatekeepers - the people who decide whether or not you get granted an interview when you apply for a job who also judge you by the university you go to. Now they're far less concerned about all of those other factors you mentioned, like who cares if your university gets more publications into academic journals - that doesn't really tell me anything about you as a candidate when you apply for a job at my company because you have absolutely nothing to do with those publications (which are done by a select few people at the university, it is not a group effort!). So for us, the most important factor is the entry requirements: if you came from an elite university, then yeah we know they take only the very best of the best and you would have needed straight As to gain a place there - so we know you're capable of producing quality results. But if you came from a chapalang university, then we know you messed up your A levels and you don't even have the discipline to get through a series of exams and can't be trusted with anything important.