Chinese Family Reportedly Paid $6.5M for Spot at Stanford | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Family Reportedly Paid $6.5M for Spot at Stanford

nytimes.com

36 pointspseudolus21 comments

I truly do not understand the shock and outrage.

Jokes about the wealthy/elite getting their offspring admitted to schools in exchange for "buying buildings" or making considerable donations to school endowments have been around far longer than me, and I'm 50.

At what rate do the offspring of apex elite attend top tier schools?

Does that all work on merit?

Did Chelsea Clinton truly deserve her acceptance to Stanford when her father was President? I assume so....

Or was it a much better executed version of Libyan dictator Qaddafi's son and the London School of Economics scandal?

To me it seems these things have always happened.

The only surprise, I think, is when people think they are amongst the elite to whom most rules don't apply, but they're really just part of the super affluent and risk being made examples of.

The whole scandal only happened because these families paid the wrong person. Instead of paying the doorman, they paid for a disguise to sneak into the backdoor.

I think you understand the outrage perfectly. I think you may be overestimating the shock.

Good point!

Maybe there's a conflation of the "shock?" There's the level of shock implied by the media and then there's the level of shock experienced by viewers of said media.

One path is official and in the open. The other is corrupt and helps no one but those in on the bribery.

Think of it like this. The school has X places reserved for people to pay their way in. In exchange for those places, the university and student body get a bunch of benefits for letting in someone who is not otherwise qualified.

Think of this as a theft from the university and student body by the person accepting the money. The quality of the student body goes down but the university doesn’t get the benefit they’re supposed to.

I worked at Stanford in both academic and business departments.

Given the prevailing attitudes and pedigrees of the non-scholarship students, I'm surprised it took this long for the public to realize how elite institutions operate.

Furthermore, I don't think people appreciate that going to an elite institution isn't concerned much about academic rigor, rather it's about networking and getting a pedigree "certificate of authenticity." I'd be willing to bet around half of students cheat as there can be no proctors per the honor code and guess around 10-15% of students buy their way through school.

Universities are a business; elite universities are also status reaffirmation factories.

I get that going to a well regarded school is good for your career prospects.

But if you're that rich, what's the benefit? It's not like your child will have trouble finding a job, you could even pay someone to employ them.

Also does anyone know what kind of degrees the kids of rich people who paid to get them in get? I doubt they're graduating with a Master's in Physics.

Even more frustrating for me is that for someone that rich it is easy to provide early opportunities for the kid, so that they grow into a person that Stanford actually would want on their own merits. Paying for good schools, tutors, experiences, mentors is a useful helpful thing. You can not buy friends and consciousness, but you can buy the opportunities to grow that on your own. The fact that these people had so many opportunities and still failed to be good parents is beyond sad.

Theres an (arab?) parable about this. Something along the lines of “the grandfather is born in a tent and dies in the palace. The son is born and dies in the palace. The grandson is born in the palace, and dies in a tent.”

The people who strive and exceed can accomplish great things. Those who are born to greatness may maintain it. But if they dont remember why their lineage strived it can all be lost.

"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel." - Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai

In this case, I think the context was different. I think he was talking about competition to petroleum

They already bought the politicians off so its quite easy to buy Stanford spots.

After donating a $20m building, is an elite institution ever going to pass on a donor's kid?

The main source of outrage between the current scandal and school donation quid-pro-quo is the brazenness of individualized graft. Before, the rigging of the admissions game had a level of indirection and spatial-temporal separation that seemed amenable and subtle.

I wonder if there was a correlation between how much someone had to pay, and how bad the student was.

Lowering the tuition for other students by $6.5M sounds like a win to me

Yeah, because that is how these things are priced. Oh no, wait a minute, they aren't. They will actually be priced using perceived-value-added, so someone paying 6.5 million might push that up a bit.

I do not know about Stanford in particular, but elite schools have some of the best financial aid programs in the US. If against odds a kid from a blue collar family gets into an Ivy, they might very well pay zero tuition (which was the case for a number of acquaintances of mine).

However, this money was not paid to the school to buy a spot. It was paid to a white collar criminal who falsified data in order to make it look like the kid "deserved" to get in Stanford.

The money didn't go to Stanford. It went to the guy running the scam.

The whole problem is that the money didn’t go to Stanford. That’s where the “theft” occurred.

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