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Have a rule.

Our republic, and the California state government, is based on rule of law. One group makes the laws, another enforces it, and a third interprets the conflicts. This works. What we have here is a 'no rules' set of actions.

How about rules that say "we will take any student for $200K/year". This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student.

discuss

ipnon|5 years ago

The idea of privilege first entered the public sphere in the prelude to the French Revolution. "Privilege" in Old French literally means "private law".[1] It was the idea that a different set of rules for each of the Estates (Clergy, Nobles, and Commoners) was both fair and natural.

Are we are starting to see similarly different sets of rules for each class in the United States? Is such privilege in accordance with our ideals of liberty and justice for all?

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/privilege

chaostheory|5 years ago

Corruption never disappears completely, but it's pervasiveness seems to be cyclical. The 4th Turning is a good read on the subject

https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rend...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

youeseh|5 years ago

Social classes and economic classes, while they have a lot of overlap, are fundamentally different.

suprfsat|5 years ago

Can it be? Are the rich starting to follow a different set of rules?

nicoburns|5 years ago

Starting? When has this not been the case?

TheAdamAndChe|5 years ago

It's always been there, it's just that social media is making it extremely easy for everyone to see it now.

kenhwang|5 years ago

1 for 1 isn't worth it, and the UC system already plays that game with international students where one international pays for 3 in-states. Make the buy-in price pay for 10 and I'm in support.

gibolt|5 years ago

1 for 10 seems reasonable, assuming there is also a strict academic requirement for that privileged student. Even more points if it supports their housing and food plan.

baddox|5 years ago

You obviously have to balance the legitimate cost against the illegitimate costs people will incur to get kids admitted. I don't know if 3x or 10x is the right value, but it's definitely not "more is better." If you make it cost a billion dollars to legitimately buy your kid into the school, there will still be millionaires utilizing these sorts of bribes.

minhazm|5 years ago

Maybe they could take like 5-10% of the slots and just auction them off.

joshuamorton|5 years ago

This isn't tenable at this price. Double or triple it, and maybe.

The limiting factor for elite universities usually isn't dollars, but the quantity of qualified tenure-track faculty and physical space. Not at the university, but overall. The number of postdocs and graduating PhD students each year with the credentials that Cal wants to accept isn't huge. Similarly, the number of rooms that the university has is limited, and both of those numbers take time to change.

A certain ticket for 4x the price of Harvard is still a really, really good deal for lots of wealthy people.

rahimnathwani|5 years ago

"This is enough money to supply extra supervision and also give a full scholarship to another student."

Imagine there are 10 students for 5 spots, and there is an objective ranking from most-qualified (#1) to least-qualified (#10).

Now let's assume student #10 can pay that $200k. That funds their spot plus another spot. So instead of admitting:

{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

You can now admit:

{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10}

Doesn't this seem unfair to candidates #7 to #9, who are more qualified than #10, but will end up with a less valuable credential?

sobani|5 years ago

#7 to #9 would never get admitted anyway.

The question you should ask is whether being able to admit #6 is worth it.

If #10 is some trust fund baby who couldn't study himself out of a wet paper bag, then probably not.

But if #10 is merely 'good' it might be worth it to be able to admit just-0.1-GPA-short-of-great #6.

grumple|5 years ago

This is already the way education works. You’ve heard of “needs-blind” admissions? Anywhere they don’t say that, it means the ability of students to pay full price is part of the admission process.

gowld|5 years ago

Even "need-blind" admission uses proxies for (non-)need, like "legacy" and "celebrity".

hatmatrix|5 years ago

Like first class passengers footing a large share of the bill so economy passengers can pay less.

robocat|5 years ago

I think that is a misconception.

The economy travellers make it possible to travel first class. First class travel is for the moderately wealthy. The very wealthy have their own transport.

Economist article on decline of 1st class travellers: http://archive.vn/OQPt2 (2019).

TimTheTinker|5 years ago

Completely agreed.

The idea that we have to "tear it all down" and institute Marxism is backward and self-contradictory.

As you said, we need to identify where and how rule of law is lacking and fix it, making sure that representative government and separation of powers remains intact (or is put in place again).

TimTheTinker|5 years ago

I know this may be against the guidelines, but does anyone know why the above comment was downvoted?

Do people really favor Marxism, or is something else wrong?

sudosysgen|5 years ago

Do you actually believe that letting people pay for guaranteed enrollment is at all acceptable?