Admission Scandal Snares Celebs Among Others

George Turner in reply to Marchmaine says:

I’ll suggest two possible solutions, or serious changes to the education system, the first a theoretical possibility that’s staring us all in the face, and the second a tried-and-true system we’ve long used when results really matter. But this will be long.

For the first, what about a university system that accepted everyone who applied, and eliminated travel and housing problems by having all the classes on the Internet so anyone with a connection could take classes?

What if it made all courses available to all students, and everyone was free to learn as much as they could absorb. Suppose it makes its courses hard and thorough, but virtually free, and the university kept track of each student’s progress, accomplishments, and test results.

What if it had levels of difficulty, so you could take the Harvard/Oxford/Cambridge version of a class or the party school version, and your detailed transcripts listed what level you’d passed?

The students then used that list in the real world to gain employment, and they could take even more classes whenever they felt bored, continuing their education. If collecting degrees is your thing, why should someone else try to make a living from it?

There would be no intense competition to get into a school because basically there’s only the one school, and what each student got from it was tailored to them.

Could it be scammed? Yes, but only by producing fraudulent proof of results, and those could be easily double-checked by computer, or having a job applicant take some of the college’s online tests that they should, based on their transcript, be able to pass with ease.

Could it be somehow abused, or cause worthless degrees to proliferate? Probably, but if worthless degrees were filled with worthless classes, and if you didn’t have to limit yourself to taking just X hours of classes before they handed you a diploma and kicked you out, every student could sail through those easy classes while snacking on a taco, and every job applicant would have those same easy classes checked off. So those classes wouldn’t point to any particular skill level, and employers would in theory look at the difficulty of what you took, not the mere fact that you managed to become a graduate.

So if we did all this, then college wouldn’t be a place you go, it would be a process of learning that you undertake, perhaps while you are also doing other things in the real world. Sure, it sounds too much like Star Trek, and perhaps it is.

Of course this wouldn’t work for all classes, as some require lots of hands on training and expensive facilities (nobody is going to a surgeon whose only training came from watching Youtube videos). And some students really need the brick and mortar experience or they won’t focus. But do they need a $70 million dollar student center annex? Do they need a Division I team that’s really just a minor league for the NBA or NFL?

I should point out that this would be a very difficult shift to make because employers’ HR people, who are the ones conducting job interviews, already have a brick and mortar degree on their wall and are fully invested in maintaining the existing system because they have large sunk costs.

What we’ve built isn’t a meritocracy, it’s a pyramid, and when you build a pyramid people devote themselves to climbing higher than other people, regardless of whether that’s a worthwhile endeavor for society.

So this brings me to the tried-and-true results focused education system, whatever its manifest real-world flaws, as implemented by the US military.

Every guy wants to be a SEAL in part because the SEAL school (BUDS) flunks almost everyone out, so graduating is a very selective achievement. It’s like graduating from the Harvard of kick a**. But flunking out isn’t like flunking out of the Ivy Leagues, as applicants came from the Navy and return to the Navy.

But special forces schools are subject to some of the same things that happened to the Ivy League.

The Green Beret school is currently in turmoil and chaos (seriously Oscar worthy movie stuff, check it out) because the Army needed a whole lot more Green Berets to fill slots, so the school stopped flunking soldiers out (instead allowing unlimited retesting, some hand holding, etc), and started allowing some under-performers to graduate.

Complaints from the field about the quality of some of the graduates quickly followed, and along with the drop in absolute standards that affects units in the field, it also threatens the coveted beret as a future positional good for career advancement.

What’s happened so far is the equivalent of grade inflation, where everyone who gets into school gets an A from there on out. From our current experience with university admissions, we can bet that this will create an incentive to game the admissions process, since anyone who can talk their way into Green Beret school will graduate from Green Beret school, just as almost everyone who gets admitted to the Ivy League leaves with a diploma.

Before the grade inflation, a person who conned their way into Harvard or the Green Beret school would flunk out, and in the Army case be returned to regular army postings, because getting through the physical training or land navigation course wasn’t something you could fake, and the program was looking to weed out a whole lot of the students. The Ivy Leagues used to work like that, and when they stopped, the admissions scams probably started.

For the Army, the options are to open a second Green Beret school so they can let more people try to get through the course (I imagine slots are limited by facilities), or just admit that our pool of recruits doesn’t have as much Green Beret material as we’d like. Warfare is like that, as as much as any nation might want to field millions of elite soldiers, they can’t because the average recruit is average. So go back to being highly selective and accept the reduced number of special forces operators.

The academic equivalent would be a system where the kids don’t go directly to a top school, but instead go to a quite good state university for their first year, or community college, then full four-year, and from there apply to a top-tier school that only offers upper class coursework (junior and senior level). If they fail at the harder classes, the failure just returns them to their original university with no blot on their record.

The goal is to output the maximum possible excellence from the pool of recruits, but it also makes sure all those recruits who might achieve excellence first demonstrate excellence at a lower level, or at least a high level of competence, before moving up to the big leagues. It also retains everyone in the system, shuffling them to their best level of achievement. Ivy League drop outs would no longer be college drop outs, they’d just automatically drop back a level and graduate somewhere else.

I think the different approaches reflects that the military is a unified system, whereas each college stood alone, as its own all-encompassing world, and one often dismissive of other competing schools.

A military service branch shuffled people where ever it needs them, within what was one organization. Colleges operated as little private militias that tried to make new transfers start over at the bottom, so it really, really mattered which private militia you signed up with, a band of drunken canon fodder or an elite strike force. So the over importance of the freshman application and the acceptance were baked in, very unlike wandering down to the local recruiting office.

As for the issues in college athletics, aside from basketball’s one-and-dones, the real competitors are generally juniors and seniors.

In a newly modified system where top-tier universities are primarily upper-class only schools, their athletes would be recruiting based on college athletic competitions among freshmen and sophomores, so people’s high-school records would be irrelevant.

There wouldn’t be much reason to fake a child’s way in to a lower-tier school because those would take almost anybody anyway.

The big remaining issue is that the top-tier schools tend to be private and very expensive, which runs counter to a purely meritocratic system. But perhaps the lower-tier schools would pay the tuition difference, getting bragging rights for how many juniors they got into Harvard, positioning themselves as also an Ivy prep school.

A third avenue might be to figure out how to get the influence of money out of a higher education system that is obsessed with money, yet also obsessed with decrying its influence. Our student loan system made an almost infinite pot of cash available to universities, and sure enough, they found a way to claim almost all of it, making sure their profits were offset by massive capital construction costs (they’re essentially putting all that money into real estate). If their budgets weren’t so big maybe the obvious bribes would be more obvious. But the first approach, doing almost all education over the Internet, would basically defund much of our university system, so if pursued, the non-egalitarian financial issues should go away for fields that aren’t technology or resource intensive.Report