A new name and another guilty plea.

https://www.latimes.com/local/...-20190628-story.html

And Lori Laughlin reportedly regrets not pleading guilty.

https://www.sfgate.com/educati...scandal-14059715.php

This is a brutal Vanity Fair article. Includes some profiles.

quote:

Any parent obsessed with curating an image of affluence, good taste, and beneficence was exactly the sort to fixate unreasonably on a degree from Georgetown or USC. In a world dictated by status symbols, having “a kid at Yale” was the Holy Grail, the ultimate proof of a life worth envying—even if their kid was only interested in plugging products on Instagram. L.A. was teeming with such showboats.

https://www.vanityfair.com/sty...r_axiosam&stream=top

You know, I've never thought of USC as a particularly good school. It's a rich school, to be sure, and they have great business and entertainment programs. But even in California, there are other schools that are equally good if not better. Wanting desperately to get your kid into USC seems to be an acknowledgement of style over substance.

When this story first broke, I remember sort of snickering that people were doing all this stuff to get their kid into USC. It would be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard, Yale, etc. I always felt like "one of these things is not like the other...."

Disclaimer: I have a family member who is a USC grad (MBA).

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
You know, I've never thought of USC as a particularly good school. It's a rich school, to be sure, and they have great business and entertainment programs. But even in California, there are other schools that are equally good if not better. Wanting desperately to get your kid into USC seems to be an acknowledgement of style over substance.

When this story first broke, I remember sort of snickering that people were doing all this stuff to get their kid into USC. It would be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard, Yale, etc. I always felt like "one of these things is not like the other...."

Disclaimer: I have a family member who is a USC grad (MBA).

I felt exactly the same way. When I was younger, USC was thought of as a party school.

As near as I can tell, my perceptions have lagged the reality. It's supposed to be a pretty good school now. US News ranks it as the #22 private university ... tied with Georgetown, just behind Washington University in St. Louis and Emory and UCLA, and just ahead of Carnegie Mellon (!) and UVA (!).

Seriously? Ahead of Carnegie Mellon and UVA? Color me shocked.

(And I won't even get into Notre Dame, ranked #18, ahead of all of those. Back in the day, I thought that was just a football school.)

There are lots of schools that have moved up the greasy pole of college rankings. And they're also becoming really good schools too...

USC is one. Wake Forest and Tufts have ascended. University of Miami and George Washington University in DC have both moved up sharply.

Public universities, by and large, have fallen. This is because they have lost funding so their resource base has declined relative to what private universities offer, which is an important component of the US News measure.

quote:

And they're also becoming really good schools too...

Don't get me started on the US News ratings....

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:

quote:

And they're also becoming really good schools too...

Don't get me started on the US News ratings....

I never thought of them as more than an indication.

However, a school ranked in the top 20 by US News is likely one of the 50 best in the country, certainly one of the 100 best.

Their rankings may be wildly off in some respects, but not THAT wildly off.

Ask any school president if they're OK with being ranked 55th instead of 25th and you'll get a funny look that suggests you haven't much of a brain.

Yes, I know you didn't assert that. The US News rankings are probably highly correlated with true quality, however one might choose to think about that ineffable thing. But the randomness in how they produce their index, and the probable bias many of their measures introduce, make university administrators tear their proverbial hair out over these things.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
Ask any school president if they're OK with being ranked 55th instead of 25th and you'll get a funny look that suggests you haven't much of a brain.

Yes, I know you didn't assert that. The US News rankings are probably highly correlated with true quality, however one might choose to think about that ineffable thing. But the randomness in how they produce their index, and the probable bias many of their measures introduce, make university administrators tear their proverbial hair out over these things.

If a lot of people are paying attention, you can't afford to disregard it, even if you don't agree with their methodology and personally wouldn't rely on it.

Maybe like a Google algorithm ...

Mr. Morse, who produces the US News rankings, is always on the lookout for sexy new tweaks. The current rage is social mobility. When you add a new number into the rankings and give a tiny bit of weight, you jiggle the rankings ever so slightly, and you have one or two schools that make seemingly large jumps up or down. It's fantastic for your revenue base when everyone hangs with proverbial baited breath to see who has been jiggled up or down a few spots in THIS year's tally. Morse is a smart guy ...

And of course if the universities tried to boycott the rankings, the DOJ would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

Hmmm... George Washington University is number 63 in the USNews ranking, below University of Washington, Washington University (St. Louis), and Georgetown.

Lloyd Elliot and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg wanted GWU to be known as "Harvard on the Potomac". What happened there?

If GWU has been climbing in the ratings and in actual quality, where was it before now?

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:

Public universities, by and large, have fallen. This is because they have lost funding so their resource base has declined relative to what private universities offer, which is an important component of the US News measure.

I have a question about this. What about the U Cals? Not Berkeley, which is an amazing school. And not UCLA. But what about the others? Specifically, Santa Barbara (ranked 30), Irvine (ranked 33), Davis (ranked 38), San Diego (ranked 41). Those places were thought of as much lower tier or even just party schools (I'm talking about you, UC Santa Barbara) when we were college age. The idea that any of those places would be ranked higher than private universities like Boston University or Case Western (both ranked 42), just as examples, would have been eye-popping. And it's my understanding that a lot of the UC system is in a funding squeeze. Am I wrong about that? What's the explanation there?

FYI, UC Berkeley was rated #1 in this year's rankings. They've been dropped to "unranked" for faking their data....

Same with UVA and a handful of others.

Oopsie.

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:
FYI, UC Berkeley was rated #1 in this year's rankings. They've been dropped to "unranked" for faking their data....

Same with UVA and a handful of others.

Oopsie.

Yes, I know.

And Oklahoma.

quote:

Originally posted by pianojuggler:
Hmmm... George Washington University is number 63 in the USNews ranking, below University of Washington, Washington University (St. Louis), and Georgetown.

Lloyd Elliot and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg wanted GWU to be known as "Harvard on the Potomac". What happened there?

If GWU has been climbing in the ratings and in actual quality, where was it before now?

GW debuted in the rankings in 1996 (at number 46). Before that they weren't even considered for a ranking. That's what Trachtenberg's efforts accomplished. All of the schools in, say, the top 100 are really good. GW was just a low-quality commuter school in 1980. That changed. Their recent drop to 63 is sudden (Morse likes those moves, remember). They tracked (pun intended) in the low 50s for many years. That is a very high ranking for a place that was pretty much a dump a generation earlier.