#ill have institutional access to most of those academic ones soon at least but how fucked up is it that its like

[lenin-it-to-win-it]

its officially autism awareness day and given that im up past midnight having fits of rage over how limited and/or terrible most of the "analysis" im able to find about the luzhin defense is, its safe to say i am very aware of my autism right now

[mariebenz]

Seton Hall Law Expert Comments on Global and US impact of COVID-19

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:

Prof. Coleman Professor Carl Coleman, JD Academic Director of Division of Online Learning Seton Hall Law School MedicalResearch.com: Do health care workers have an ethical and/or legal obligation to provide treatment during an infectious disease outbreak? Are there exceptions such as pregnancy, if the health care worker is her/himself immunocompromised or have young children at home?   Response: As a legal matter, health care workers can generally be required to fulfill pre-existing employment or contractual obligations during an infectious disease outbreak.  For example, an emergency room nurse who refuses to come to work during a pandemic can be disciplined or fired; a physician who breaches a contractual obligation to provide on-call services during an outbreak can be held liable for damages.  In addition to loss of employment and contractual damages, other potential consequences for failing to honor pre-existing commitments during a pandemic could include professional discipline for patient abandonment and, for physicians with on-call responsibilities in hospital emergency departments, civil fines under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. This does not mean that health care workers are obligated to show up for work during a pandemic regardless of the circumstances.  For example, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, health care workers who are immunocompromised can ask for a "reasonable accommodation," such as the right to work remotely (if possible) or to take leave.  Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, employers with more than 50 employees must give workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off to care for a seriously ill immediate family member.  In addition, federal law laws allow employees to refuse to work under "abnormally dangerous conditions," which might apply in situations where an employer fails to provide necessary protective equipment.  However, assuming protective equipment is available, it is not clear that an outbreak itself would be considered "abnormally dangerous," particularly in fields like emergency medicine, where exposure to contagious disease is always a foreseeable risk. In most states, health care workers without pre-existing employment or contractual obligations cannot be compelled to treat patients during a pandemic.  However, a few states have laws that authorize public health authorities to require health care professionals to work during public health emergencies.  I am not aware of any state that has invoked this authority so far. As for ethical obligations, in 2004, the American Medical Association (AMA) declared that "individual physicians have an obligation to provide urgent medical care during disasters," and that "this ethical obligation holds even in the face of greater than usual risks to their own safety, health or life."  Some academic ethicists have expressed similar views.  Common justifications for this position are that physicians "assumed the risk" of exposure to infectious diseases when they voluntarily committed themselves to the healing professions; that a "social contract" requires physicians to assume risks in exchange for their social status and privileges; and that individuals who are uniquely capable of providing life-saving care have an obligation to do so. However, I am not persuaded that all physicians -- let alone health care workers more generally -- have an ethical obligation to provide treatment when doing so involves significant risk.  A willingness to accept risk is not a condition of obtaining a medical license, nor is it part of the oaths that students commonly take at medical school graduation.  While I agree that physicians have ethical obligations to contribute to society, there are many ways they can fulfill these obligations without assuming personal health risks.  And even assuming that individuals who are in a unique position to provide life-saving care should normally do so, we generally do not expect people to rescue others from danger at significant risk to themselves.   MedicalResearch.com: What duties are owed to health care workers who assume personal risk by caring for infected patients? How should limited PPE be distributed? Response: Rather than debating whether health care workers are subject to special ethical obligation, it would be more productive to focus our energies on making sure that health care workers who choose to provide service during a pandemic -- and there are many -- are adequately protected.  At a minimum, this includes ensuring an adequate supply of personal protective equipment.  If supplies are limited, priority should be given to those who face the greatest risk of becoming infected.  In addition, health care workers who become sick should be guaranteed financial support for themselves and their families. Health care workers also should have some priority in obtaining access to limited medical resources, including ventilators and, when they become available, vaccines and antiviral medications.  MedicalResearch.com: What ethical issues arise when testing unproven medical interventions during an infectious disease outbreak? Should pharmaceutical or medical device companies receive some form of liability relief for rapid innovation? Response: We have already seen a rush to embrace unproven treatments for COVID-19 before obtaining sufficient evidence of their safety and efficacy.  Some people think that there is nothing to lose by trying new treatments for a potentially fatal disease.  However, it is important to remember that medical interventions can cause significant harms.  Even medications that are generally safe when used for other conditions cannot be assumed to be safe when applied to a novel disease.  Moreover, unless unproven interventions are rigorously tested in clinical trials, there is no way to know whether any improvements seen in patients are actually being caused by the intervention.  Clinical trials are also needed to determine the appropriate dosing and duration of treatment, as well as to compare the safety and efficacy of different treatments in different patient populations. For these reasons, unproven interventions should be subject to rigorous testing before they are disseminated broadly.  While there are mechanisms for patients to obtain access to investigational drugs outside of clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies should ensure that the use of these mechanisms does not interfere with the ability to enroll sufficient numbers of patients in clinical trials to generate reliable evidence of safety and efficacy.  Similarly, before prescribing existing (approved) drugs to COVID-19 patients on an "off label" basis, physicians should take the time to educate patients about why they might want to consider participating in a clinical trial instead. As in all medical research, individuals who enroll in studies of unproven COVID-19 treatments should be given complete and understandable information about the potential benefits and risks.  Studies should be designed so that they will produce scientifically reliable information; in most cases, this means that patients who receive the experimental intervention should be compared to a control group that receives standard care or another experimental treatment.  Studies should be stopped as soon as there is sufficient evidence to confirm or disprove the intervention's safety and efficacy, and, following the study's completion, research data should be rapidly shared with the scientific community so that others can benefit. On March 17, 2020, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services issued a declaration pursuant to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, providing legal immunity to manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, and administrators of qualified products and processes used to fight COVID-19.  One of the purposes of this declaration was to provide liability protection to pharmaceutical companies that develop vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. MedicalResearch.com: Under what circumstances can governments legitimately restrict individuals’ freedom of movement in order to control an infectious disease outbreak? Response: The rights to freedom of movement and assembly are both fundamental, but governments can limit these rights when doing so is necessary to achieve an important public health goal.  Any limitations on fundamental rights must satisfy several conditions, including the following: There must be a justifiable basis for imposing the restrictions; that is, the threat must be significant, and there must be a reasonable basis for believing that restrictions on freedom of movement or assembly will be effective in countering it. Any limitations on freedom of movement or assembly must be the least restrictive means available for achieving the public health goal.  For example, individuals should not be isolated in institutional settings if they can be safely isolated at home. Individuals should not be required to isolate themselves in unsafe conditions.  For example, mechanisms should be provided for persons who cannot leave their homes to obtain access to basic necessities.  No one who is asked to isolate themselves at home should have to worry about their heat being turned off. Restrictions on freedom of movement and assembly should be applied in a non-discriminatory manner.  Individuals who believe that their freedom has been restricted should have the ability to challenge those restrictions without unreasonable delay. Governments should be transparent about the reasons they are imposing restrictions on freedom of movement and assembly and the expected duration of those restrictions.  Individuals should have easy access to avenues for obtaining answers to questions and for communicating any concerns to authorities. I have no conflicts to disclose. The information on MedicalResearch.com is provided for educational purposes only, and is in no way intended to diagnose, cure, or treat any medical or other condition. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health and ask your doctor any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. In addition to all other limitations and disclaimers in this agreement, service provider and its third party providers disclaim any liability or loss in connection with the content provided on this website.   Read the full article

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Soon after the tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas, the White House batted down the idea of enacting more gun control with the argument that many cities with strict gun laws have high murder rates. The White House specifically pointed to Chicago and Baltimore as “some of America’s cities with the strictest gun laws” coupled with “the highest rates of gun violence.” While the statement has some merit — Chicago and Baltimore had the first and third most murders nationally in 20161 — evidence suggests a city or state’s gun laws may only be as effective as those of the state next door.

The relationship between state gun laws and the flow of firearms between states can be measured using data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which traces guns’ origins and where law enforcement recovers them. An analysis of data from 107 pairs of bordering states2 throughout the country shows a relationship between the strictness of a state’s gun laws relative to its neighbor and the number of firearms recovered3 from that neighbor.4

Jens Ludwig, a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the University of Chicago crime lab, notes that ATF data “that has been analyzed by academics across the country regularly shows that in cities that try to control gun violence by supplementing federal regulations with additional local gun laws, those laws are regularly undermined by crime guns coming in from other states.”

For instance, an NPR fact check of the White House talking point noted that Chicago is close to the borders of two states — Wisconsin and Indiana — that have weak gun laws. A 2014 report from the city of Chicago noted that 60 percent of guns used to commit crimes in Chicago from 2009 to 2013 originated outside of Illinois, and Indiana and Wisconsin were two of the biggest sources of recovered guns.5 And Illinois is not alone.

To track the movement of guns between neighboring states, we started with the ATF’s handy matrix of the number of firearms recovered in each state in 2016 for which the state of origin is also known. Next we identified what might be called “neighbor pairs,” or pairs of states that share a border, and compared how many guns originating in one state were recovered in the other.

We then measured the difference in gun laws between states to identify which ones have looser gun laws than their neighbors. To do this, we created a gun law ranking for each state by averaging the ranking of the Cato Institute (a gun rights supporter) and Everytown (a gun control supporter).6 Each state was given an average ranking of between 1 (least strict) and 50 (most strict) and compared to its neighbor to establish a net ranking between the two.

Each pair of neighbors contains a source state where the firearms were originally purchased and a recovery state where the firearms were finally located. This produces 214 pairs of neighbors made up of a source state and a recovery state. Half of those pairs were removed to avoid double counting — tracking guns that started in Alabama and wound up in Mississippi is just the inverse of tracking guns that were recovered in Mississippi and originated in Alabama — so we took out the pair where the source state had looser gun laws (ties were broken by which state comes first in alphabetical order).7 Then we measured what I’m calling the firearm trade differential between the states in a neighbor pair, accounting for the combined populations of both states. The final product is 107 pairs of states in which the relationship between gun laws and firearm recoveries can be explored.

How state gun laws stack up

Each state’s average ranking from least strict (1) to most strict (50), based on the Cato Institute’s freedom ranking and the number of “key” gun laws passed, according to Everytown

RANK RANK STATE CATO EVERY-TOWN AVG. STATE CATO EVERY-TOWN AVG. Wyo. 2 1 1.5 Fla. 38 16 26.0 Alaska 4 5 4.0 Utah 21 33 26.5 Vt. 1 8 4.0 Ark. 32 22 27.0 N.H. 5 3 5.0 Wash. 19 36 28.0 Ariz. 3 13 7.0 N.C. 33 24 28.5 S.D. 6 9 7.0 Ohio 30 27 28.5 Ga. 7 10 8.0 Pa. 20 36 28.5 Idaho 18 3 10.5 Texas 31 27 29.0 Ky. 8 15 10.5 La. 37 22 29.5 Ala. 9 16 11.5 Iowa 40 20 30.0 Kan. 15 12 12.5 Ore. 26 36 31.0 Miss. 24 1 12.5 Nev. 22 43 32.0 N.D. 12 10 13.0 Mich. 36 29 32.5 Mont. 23 7 14.5 Wis. 35 34 34.5 Maine 16 18 16.5 Del. 41 39 39.0 Ind. 17 21 18.5 Minn. 39 44 41.5 N.M. 28 13 19.5 R.I. 48 35 41.5 Colo. 13 29 21.0 Md. 44 41 43.0 Va. 11 32 21.5 N.J. 46 41 43.0 W.V. 14 29 21.5 Conn. 43 45 44.0 Mo. 29 6 23.0 N.Y. 42 47 44.5 S.C. 25 24 24.5 Ill. 45 49 47.0 Neb. 34 18 25.5 Calif. 49 46 47.5 Okla. 27 24 25.5 Mass. 47 48 47.5 Tenn. 10 39 25.5 Hawaii 50 50 50.0

The Cato Institute’s ranking is based on which of 25 selected gun-control laws each state has passed. Everytown tracks 67 such laws in every state, and the ranking shown here is derived from their data.

Sources: CATO Institute, EVERYTOWN

By analyzing these pairs, we found that the relationship between gun laws and firearm recoveries generally appears to be more pronounced in states with larger differences in the strictness of their gun laws. Illinois and Indiana are 28.5 points apart in our combined gun rankings, and in 2016, for every 100,000 residents of the two states combined, Illinois recovered nearly 6.5 more firearms originating in Indiana than Indiana recovered guns originating in Illinois. California recovered firearms at higher rates from neighbors Nevada and Arizona (15.5 and 40.5 points apart from California in our rankings), where gun laws are looser, while Maryland has a similar relationship with West Virginia and Virginia (each 21.5 points away from Maryland).

Alex Yablon, a reporter who covers guns for The Trace, points out a variety of ways in which a neighboring state’s looser gun laws could directly and indirectly affect the number of guns recovered in a state with stricter laws. According to Yablon, “It’s not just that states with looser gun laws are going to make it easier to buy at a retailer and are going to be easier for a straw purchaser or unscrupulous private seller. It’s also that there are going to be a lot more guns around in civilian hands to sell on Armslist,” which is like Craigslist for guns, “or be stolen from cars. Theft is a big source of these guns, and it doesn’t take a high percentage of stolen guns to result in a high absolute number accessible to criminals.”

The ways that gun laws affect weapon recoveries is clearly complex.

Overall, the relationship between the two factors is decent but not extremely strong,8 and plenty of neighbor pairs have large differences in the strictness of their gun laws but only a small differential in the relative size of their gun trade. Vermont, for example, has far looser gun laws than Massachusetts and New York, but the gun trade between Vermont and each of those two neighbors is fairly even. Given the noisiness of this relationship, it seems likely that other factors, such as the effectiveness of local police departments, the way existing gun laws are enforced, and the distance between major cities in each state, could also be contributing to these discrepancies. Part of the challenge is also that the ATF is unable to trace all firearms, and the traces they do run do not reveal what happens to the firearm during the decade, on average, between when it is purchased and when it is recovered.9 Simply put, there’s a lot we do not know about this subject.

The available evidence does, however, show that gun laws in one state seem to affect their neighbors, which makes this an important area of study in efforts to better understand the flow of firearms used in crimes.

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

Credentialism and Corruption: A Second Look at the College Admissions Scandals

Digital Elixir Credentialism and Corruption: A Second Look at the College Admissions Scandals

By Lambert Strether of Corrente

We’ve had yet another college admissions scandal enter the headlines, briefly, and so I thought I’d aggregate the other recent college admissions scandals; it’s surprising — or not! — how prevalent they are. Then I’ll do a simple piece of arithmetic that I haven’t been able to find in the coverage.

The Scandals

This aggregation is by no means exhaustive[1]; what is most striking is the routine seaminess of it. Interestingly, only the “Varsity Blues” (2019) and “Clout goes to college” (2009) have catchy, “Watergate”-like monikers; the others are simply isolated news stories. Where no moniker exists, I invented one (“Fencing Coach Gets House”). In particular order, but starting with this month’s scandal, which made me think, “What, again? So soon?” Sometimes the institution is corrupt (e.g., Harvard), and sometimes the ingenious providers of professional services are corrupt. In all cases, the parents who participate in these schemes are corrupt.

Gaming Guardianship (professional services). From Inside Higher Ed:

[T]hat parents in suburban Chicago had taken part in a scam to increase their children’s eligibility for need-based financial aid for college. The scam, apparently devised by independent college consultant Lora Georgieva, owner of Destination College in Lincolnshire, Ill., involved parents giving up legal guardianship of their children during the junior or senior year of high school to a friend or family member. That allowed the student to claim independent status, meaning that eligibility for financial aid was based only on the student’s earnings rather than the parents’ income and assets.

Yes, you read that correctly. Parents gave up legal guardianship of their children for the purpose of qualifying for financial aid for college. In Lake County, Ill., alone, there were 38 cases in 2018 where a probate court judge granted transfer of guardianship for a teenager in the junior or senior year of high school. Most of those cases involved families living in homes valued at more that $500,000.

The story raises a number of questions. Did no one in the legal system in Lake County find an epidemic of wealthy parents giving up guardianship of their high school children in the least bit suspicious? Nearly all of the 38 cases above were filed with similar language: “The guardian can provide educational and financial support and opportunities to the minor that her parents could not otherwise provide.” I have read enough Scott Turow novels and watched enough episodes of The Good Wife to know that the judicial system in Illinois may be less than pure, but really?

“Operation Varsity Blues” (multiple Ivies and wannabe Ivies). The Guardian:

There are 50 people charged in the case, including actors Felicity Huffman, known for her role on the TV show Desperate Housewives and the feature film Transamerica, and Lori Loughlin, a cast member on the TV series Full House. Defendants in the case include parents and college athletics coaches.

The wealthy parents were part of the biggest college admissions scam ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, prosecutors say, accused of conspiring to get their kids into elite colleges through bribery and cheating. The FBI investigation was dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues”.

Administrators of the SAT and ACT college exams were bribed to allow someone else to pretend to be the student and take the exam in their place, according to a criminal complaint. In other cases, the proctors gave the students answers or fixed their wrong answers after they had taken the test.

The children sometimes faked learning disabilities so that they would be able to take the tests at facilities where staff had been paid off, the complaint says; parents paid between $15,000 and $75,000 a test to participate in the cheating scheme, which was allegedly masterminded by William Singer, who ran a college prep company called The Key.

In another part of the scheme, college coaches allegedly received bribes to designate applicants as recruited athletes – which gives them a leg-up in admissions – regardless of their athletic ability, and sometimes when they didn’t even play the sport they were supposedly recruited for. Clients paid Singer a total of $25m to bribe coaches and university administrators, prosecutors say.

The schools include Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Texas.

Fencing Coach Gets House (Harvard). Deadspin:

The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that an independent investigation initiated by Harvard determined that Brand violated the university’s conflict-of-interest policy when he sold his home to wealthy Maryland businessman Jie “Jack” Zhao for $989,500 in 2016, or about $440,000 more than its assessed value. Zhao’s eldest son, Eric, was then attending Harvard and competing with the Crimson fencing team; Zhao’s younger son, Edward, was still in high school and “interested in fencing for Harvard.” Zhao purchased Brand’s home at the obscene markup in May 2016; 15 months later Edward began attending Harvard as a fencing recruit; two months after that, in October 2017, Zhao sold the home at a loss of more than $320,000. In the view of Harvard’s investigators, this sequence reeked of conflict.

“Clout Goes to College (University of Illinois). Chicago Tribune:

At a time when it’s more competitive than ever to get into the University of Illinois, some students with subpar academic records are being admitted after interference from state lawmakers and university trustees, a Tribune investigation has revealed.

Hundreds of applicants received special consideration in the last five years, according to documents obtained by the Tribune under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. The records chronicle a shadow admissions system in which some students won spots at the state’s most prestigious public university over the protests of admissions officers, while others had their rejections reversed during an unadvertised appeal process. In one case, a relative of Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the now-convicted influence peddler for former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, got admitted after U. of I. President B. Joseph White wrote an e-mail stating that the governor “has expressed his support, and would like to see admitted” Rezko’s relative and another applicant.

Since 2005, about 800 undergraduate students have landed on the clout list for the Urbana-Champaign campus. It’s unknown how many would qualify for entry on their own, but their acceptance rate is higher than average. For the 2008-09 school year, for example, about 77 percent were accepted, compared with 69 percent of all applicants.

That’s in spite of the fact that patronage candidates, as a group, had lower average ACT scores and class ranks than all admitted students, records show….

[T]he Tribune review of about 1,800 pages of documents shows politically appointed trustees and lawmakers routinely behave as armchair admissions officers advocating on behalf of relatives and neighbors — even housekeepers’ kids and families with whom they share Hawaiian vacations.

Juice at the Board of Regents (University of Texas at Austin). Texas Tribune, one of many examples:

During the tenure of UT-Austin President Larry Faulkner, which ended in 2005, one official saw a note from a a UT System regent that said every graduate of a specific high school should be admitted to UT.

Gaming Special Needs (professional services). WGBH:

Gordon Caplan, a prominent attorney from Greenwich, Conn., pleaded guilty in May to paying $75,000 to get his daughter fraudulently diagnosed with special needs, which enabled her to get extra time on the ACT exam. Speaking outside the federal courthouse in Boston, he apologized to his daughter.

“We’ve seen a remarkable and disturbing pattern lately of highly-advantaged people taking illegal advantage of the college admissions system, but this is just the tip of the iceberg,” [Paul Reville, a former Massachusetts education secretary who now teaches at Harvard University] said. “Whether or not you can get a designation for a special need that will then enable you to get extended time so you can improve your scores on the SAT is just one of many legal pathways to the advantaged further advantaging their children.”

Gaming the Transcripts (professional services). New York Times:

T.M. Landry’s founders, Mike and Tracey Landry, put the very real obstacles that exist for some minorities — a higher proportion of first-generation college applicants, limited access to wealthier school districts, and a scarcity of affordable college application coaches and tutors, to name a few — at the very heart of their pitch.

The Landrys explicitly vowed to get black students into top universities; to level a vastly uneven playing field; to put into reach a college education that many teenagers and their parents worried was outside their grasp.

Their magnetic pitch had students staying at T.M. Landry despite enduring what they described as severe emotional and physical abuse. “He seemed to see in us what we didn’t see in ourselves,” Raymond Smith, a T.M. Landry alumnus, said of Mr. Landry.

In addition, dozens of parents have continued to stand by the Landrys. “The reason I’m here is return on investment,” one woman said in an audio recording of a parents’ meeting convened after our initial investigation was published in November. The Landrys “give us hope that I never would have imagined going after,” she said.

But the Landrys could not have attracted students without also delivering results. Transcripts were littered with inflated grades, nonexistent extracurricular activities and fictitious classes. In recommendation letters, they fabricated and exaggerated stories of hardship that played on negative racial stereotypes. And they encouraged students to do the same.

The Arithmetic

And now the promised arithmetic. Since “Operation Varsity Blues” focused on the Ives, let’s do the same. For the Class of 2021:

Total Applicants: 32,724 + 37,389 + 47,038 + 20,034 + 39,506 + 40,413 + 31,056 + 32,900 = 281,060

Total Acceptances: 2,722 + 2,185 + 5,889 + 2,092 + 2,056 + 3,699 + 1,890 + 2,272 = 22,805

Now, some percentage, as we have seen from the aggregation above, of the Total Applicants will be corrupt (corrupt in the sense of taking place through fraud or bribery, and not “donating” for a building or being a legacy). What percentage shall we use? Since the United States, obviously, is not a Third World country, where literally everything is done with personal networking and tea money, and everything is for sale, we should set the percentage of corrupt applicants quite low. Let’s set the percentate of corrupt applications at 1%: 281,060 * 1% = 2,816.

Of the corrupt applications, how many will turn out to be accepted? I would argue 100%. That’s what the (wealthy) parents thought they were buying. China Daily:

The parents involved in the scandal, however, obviously wanted more than a mere 10-fold advantage, they wanted certainty, could afford to pay for it and didn’t care either about what methods were used or who would be harmed.

So, if 100% get in, you can assume that 2,816 — forgive the spurious precision — of admissions to the Ivies are fraudulent. Assume further that they all graduate, either because the Ivies are lax, or because they (and their parents) apply the same methods to collect the diploma that they applied to secure their admission. That means that of the (roughly) 22,805 graduates from the Ivies in 2021, 2,816, or more than 10%, were fraudulent applications. On the bright side, if the letterhead from your collection agency has a Harvard man (or woman) listed on it, there’s a one-in-ten chance they’re a crook. So there’s that.

Conclusion

Lifetime will make a movie about it all. People:

The Lifetime network announced on Tuesday that it was greenlighting a new movie based on the high-profile scandal. The working title is College Admissions Scandal, but the network acknowledges that the title may change.

The movie will follow two wealthy mothers who share an obsession with getting their teenagers into the best possible college. When charismatic college admissions consultant Rick Singer offers a side door into the prestigious institutions of their dreams, they willingly partake with visions of coveted acceptance letters in their heads.

But when Singer cooperates with the FBI and pleads guilty, the mothers must face the consequences of their actions and the loss of trust and respect from their families.

Those (“wealthy,” “highly-advantaged people”) people aren’t crooks. They were seduced. “The woman said, ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.‘” Maybe so. But Singer wasn’t the serpent.

NOTES

[1] Perhaps I was not diligent enough, but I couldn’t find a comprehensive study of corruption in the college admissions process, at least in the United States (as opposed to China). A quick scan at NBER yields no titles of interest. I’d welcome such a study for follow-up.

Credentialism and Corruption: A Second Look at the College Admissions Scandals

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[bigyack-com]

How to Ask a College for More Financial Aid

It is rarely easy to summon the will to ask for help, especially if you’re seeking more financial aid from what you believe to be your first-choice college.But this spring, the traditional time of award letters and admission deposits, is unlike any other.Normally there is an orderly process: Current and prospective students scrutinize their awards, and college administrators field their requests, knowing they have a certain amount of budgetary wiggle room.The economic cataclysm caused by the coronavirus outbreak has changed all that: Large numbers of families have lost some or all of their income, or fear they soon will. And high school seniors are trying to pick a school even as there are few indications yet about whether they are signing up for what will be a virtual freshman year, at perhaps $80,000 or more.And the colleges? They’re dealing with unprecedented uncertainty, too. Many use algorithms created by consulting firms to calculate aid offers and predict how teenagers and their families will respond. But those finely tuned models don’t have any answers for a pressing question: Just how many more families than usual will change their minds this summer amid changing public health projections and switch schools — or keep students home for the year?Brian Zucker, who runs one of those firms, Human Capital Research Corporation, said it was futile to use last year’s behavior to predict what will happen now. “It’s a meaningless exercise at this point,” he said.Amid this chaos, there are a handful of new services to figure out what to pay for college and how to ask to pay less, whether a student will be a senior or a freshman in the fall.And the founders of some of these services are just the sort of renegades who can sometimes provide clarity, or at least some pointed advice, in strange days like these. They urge you to take the time you need — many colleges have pushed the decision deadline for incoming freshmen from May 1 to June 1 and may offer extensions beyond that to those who ask — and not be bashful about asking for more help.The most transgressive new offering is TuitionFit, which allows you to upload your own financial aid award letters to see whether people like you got a better deal from your school or similar schools that you might not have even applied to. It is attempting, through blunt force, to create long-needed transparency and comparability of actual net prices.Anayeli Martinez of Elgin, Ill., recently signed up for TuitionFit’s free service. At the moment, her son is planning on attending Iowa State University to study kinesiology at an all-in cost of around $16,000 per year — a price that already reflects a successful financial aid appeal that cited medical expenses and new educational costs for a younger sibling.The family turned to TuitionFit for two reasons. First, the family is looking for uploads on the company’s website of new award letters from similar families that suggest that Iowa State is giving better deals to others. If they see that, Ms. Martinez will go to the school and ask it to match.Second, TuitionFit has a feature that allows schools to shop for willing students. Colleges that have space might want to make, say, a $14,000 offer to the Martinezes for a similar academic program. (TuitionFit blacks out personal information on award letters and doesn’t reveal families’ identities to inquiring schools until a family signals that it wants to respond to a particular, personalized offer from a school.)The possibility for eventual disruption here is enormous — even if the odds are long of gathering hundreds of thousands of award letters. So far, TuitionFit’s founder, Mark Salisbury, a former Augustana College administrator and the author of many cutting bits of commentary on higher education and its dysfunctions, has assembled over 6,000 award offers.But even if TuitionFit doesn’t completely upend the school-picking process, it is offering perfectly practical advice that Ms. Martinez’s family is following: Be flexible. There is no telling how much maneuvering any given school might want or need to do in the coming days. Families should ask for more help, and then ask again. They should also be open to considering whether the school they’ve picked is really so perfect, if another comes with a better offer.But let’s say you’re locked in. You’re already enrolled, or adamant about your chosen school. It is certainly still possible to appeal for more money.Abigail Seldin, along with a company called FormSwift, has created a free offering called SwiftStudent that helps users draft a formal financial aid appeal letter and coaches them through writing one efficiently and effectively.Several years ago, she created a tool that helped families more easily compare estimated prices using colleges’ individual net price calculators. Many selective institutions blocked her tool entirely, as if making this all easier was some kind of sin. The comparison tool is no longer available.Presumably financial aid directors, whom Ms. Seldin consulted before starting SwiftStudent, won’t disparage her efforts this time, given that the tool is designed to make their lives easier.Your chosen school might have advice, too. During any appeal, Job 1 is heading to the school’s financial aid website and seeing if it has useful guidance, such as a particular form for reconsideration requests. The University of Denver, for instance, has an excellent page explaining what sort of changes in financial circumstance are grounds for appeal when asking for more need-based aid.Your school may also offer money in another form: merit-based financial aid. It’s generally based on academic performance, leadership or other skills. And Todd Rinehart, the University of Denver’s vice chancellor for enrollment, said in an interview that there was nothing greedy about asking for more of that, too, even if you aren’t in the middle of an unfolding crisis.How can that be? Let’s say you want to lower your annual cost from $50,000 to $45,000 by asking for $5,000 more merit aid. If the school figures that its cost to educate each student is, say, $38,000, your $45,000 can still help the students who can afford to pay only $25,000. If that’s the case, the college may still want you to come and stay until graduation.Schools like Denver also understand that there may be similar colleges offering you more merit aid. If that’s the case, it certainly can’t hurt to send a polite, measured request pointing out your other, better offers. Also include any proof that your academic performance or standardized test scores have improved; a school may have a formula to help administrators determine merit awards, and you may have vaulted to the next level in the months since you applied for admission.If this sounds like too much, more hands-on assistance is available.A start-up called Edmit — founded by Nick Ducoff and Sabrina Manville, two former college administrators — has a free college-shopping and pricing tool. For a $99 annual fee (though some families pay nothing through partnerships with schools) plus $30 for every 30 minutes, you can get access to its network of advisers, who will hop on the phone and coach you through any appeals you want to make.Ms. Manville offered a couple of words of advice in an interview this week, in the form of a do and a don’t.First, don’t wait to ask for more money if you truly need it. There is no telling what may happen to aid budgets in the coming months, given a likely deluge of families seeking relief from financial pain.Once you do that, however, take a deep breath. “Wait as long as possible to put down a deposit,” Ms. Manville said, and don’t be afraid to ask for an extension, either. The longer you’re able to wait, the more likely it is that you’ll know how your top contenders will handle the fall semester.And then there’s the possibility you end up the subject of a bidding war.Some schools may get desperate if they’re falling short of their enrollment goals. That may make them more willing to offer new or additional discounts. In fact, Ms. Manville said, Edmit has already heard from users who are getting unsolicited boosts in merit aid offers from schools where they have not yet committed.May all of that and more come to you, too, in the coming weeks and months. Read the full article

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‘Prohibition Will Get You Nowhere’: Writer and Activist Cory Doctorow’s Message to Schools and Educators

It’s not unheard of for an instructor to tee up a YouTube video for a lesson, only to have the content blocked by the school or district’s censorware. And while administrators might have good intentions when they decide to use censorware, censorship is often only effective for those who play by the rules.

It’s one reason why writer and activist Cory Doctorow thinks schools and educators should rethink their approach to surveillance and censorship. In science fiction novels like “Little Brother,” he has explored the implications of mass surveillance, and on the popular blog Boing Boing, he has written on topics such as net neutrality, open access and user privacy.

EdSurge recently sat down with Doctorow in San Jose, Calif. at Worldcon, a science fiction convention, to get his take on everything from surveillance in K-12 schools to open access publishing in higher education.

To listen, you can subscribe to the EdSurge On Air podcast on your favorite podcast app (like iTunes or Stitcher). Or, you can read highlights from the conversation below, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

EdSurge: Schools today expose students to technology in a variety of ways, be it through Minecraft or an iPad. Do you think that the way schools are exposing kids to tech is helping them be creative, or are those ways too stifling?

Doctorow: The promise of technology is its ability to provide individualized interactions for the people who use it, and education is clearly not a one-size-fits-all activity. One of the crises of education, especially tech education, is that we try to walk this line between the things that we are afraid of kids doing, and the things that we hope they’ll do. And it requires, or it results, at least, in a high degree of control.

So, I don't know that I have any great answers about creativity. When I think about electronic media and pedagogy, though, the thing that I worry about is how our systems of protecting kids from the real dangers of the internet revolve around surveillance. And [schools] normalize surveillance, so [students] are necessarily incompatible with any kind of self-help measures to understand surveillance and to eliminate or moderate the amount of surveillance [they’re] under.

So, if you are a student whose school is completely reliant on surveillance tools to stop you from seeing genitals or whatever it is they're worried about, then anything you do to learn about how that system works and how to stop it ends running against the school's own core defense mechanism.

We really do need kids to understand and be literate about surveillance. We're in this great global conversation about social media and what Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism," and kids are perfectly capable of understanding that stuff. If there's anyone who understands what it means to be manipulated by people who think they have your best interest at heart, it's kids. And I think we need to re-think the whole program because it can't be grounded in surveillance if we are also going to produce good citizens who understand and resist surveillance.

There's an argument being made these days that there's a need for more surveillance in schools. Where do you stand on that issue? How much surveillance do you think is appropriate?

The reason the debate is hard is because we are talking about short-term instrumental goals and long-term strategic goals. So, obviously, a school's purpose is to produce well-rounded, self-actualizing, self-starting, full-fledged citizens who are capable of participating in a democracy, and being in the workplace, and having good interpersonal relations.

If you took another domain like interpersonal relations, you could say, "Well, bullying is a problem." Bullying is a problem. The problem of bullying could be prevented by just not letting kids talk to each other. That would be a short-term instrumental goal that would absolutely take a real bite out of bullying, but we can understand immediately why it's not a good one.

And so, normalizing surveillance for kids on the one hand ill-equips them to be literate about surveillance in the world. But on the other hand, it means that a lot of the things that we hope that they'll learn to moderate on their own instead gets moderated by extrinsic motivations. Instead of having good interrelations with other people because good interrelations are fulfilling and produce good outcomes, your good interrelations exist as a formal exercise that you engage in for fear of reprisals.

Whenever we talk about education, we struggle with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. We want intrinsically motivated students, but extrinsic motivation is powerful. It's quick, and it achieves instrumental goals.

So, at a certain point, we say, "Well, we don't care if the reason you're not bullying the kid next to you is because you've realized that bullying is wrong, or you're afraid of being punished for bullying; what we care about is that the kid next to you isn't bullied.” And that is a totally legitimate argument, but it also produces someone who, as soon as the fear of reprisal goes away, may return to bullying.

If we are going to use surveillance of kids to achieve some instrumental goal, it has to be as a wedge to open a space in which we can teach kids to achieve the same goal without that extrinsic threat of retaliation.

You’ve written a lot on the issue of net neutrality, which was recently reversed. How do you think that reversal is going to affect higher education institutions?

It affects higher education institutions as a subset of the way it affects all of our lives because, of course, the internet is like the nervous system that binds together everything we do in the 21st century. Everything we do now involves it and everything we'll do shortly from now will require it.

Allowing cable operators and phone companies to act as gatekeepers means that all the things that we rely on pluralism or competition to promote, are endangered. It's not like they'll be killed, but they'll be harmed, and there's a kind of spiral where the rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer. The people with a lot of eyeballs will get more eyeballs, and the people with fewer eyeballs will have a harder time getting a foothold on an eyeball. I guess that's kind of a weird metaphor.

I think [reversing net neutrality] is catastrophic for all human endeavor. But I also think it's a mistake to think of net neutrality as being won or lost.

Do you think that higher-ed institutions will be at the forefront of that struggle?

Well, they have been. You have things like WiscNet in Wisconsin, where there are statewide fiber networks—really, really good next generation networking—being done through a combination of an academic project and a kind of self-help measure because Wisconsin is very rural. You have these state institutions that are really spread out. I think that there are lots of educational institutions that are de facto [internet service providers].

I wanted to ask you about OERs. It seems like open educational resources are something that people always think are about to take off, but they never really do take off. Why do you think that is? Why do you think they haven't had their lasting moment?

Well, I think that they have [taken off] in the sense that the fight is over about Wikipedia. Any educator who says, "Don't use Wikipedia," instead of teaching their students how to use Wikipedia is an idiot. You're just doing it wrong at that point because even if you hate Wikipedia, your attitude should be harm reduction—because prohibition will get you nowhere.

In terms of open access [journals] like [Public Library of Science]… they're leading edge. Nobody anymore says, "Oh, a PLOS isn't a real journal." They may say, "Well, in my discipline, I am much more likely to get tenure if I'm publishing in a, you know, Springer Journal." But nobody is like, "I'm going to look down at you because you're in PLOS ONE." Being in PLOS ONE is a big deal.

I think the short-run of open access has been less successful than its most enthusiastic boosters would have hoped. But its long-term trajectory is really obvious because we have such a broadly-indexed set of [articles at the pre-publication stages].

What else should our audience know about the work you’re doing?

I always meet students. When I go and do young adult tours, and I go to secondary schools, I meet students who've read Little Brother, and they're like, "How do I hack my school's censorware?"

I always say, ‘Don't do that,’ because if you do that, you could get expelled. Or you could even be charged criminally under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It's really risky…. What you need to do is do ethnography. Go and ask your fellow students and teachers about over-blocking and under-blocking. And then, ask them about their circumvention methods because the other thing we know is that these tools don't work. They only block people who are playing by the rules, but it's not hard to defect from playing by the rules. So, document the ways in which these are inadequate to the purpose that they're set for.

Then, learn how to use the Freedom of Information Act to find out how much your school board has paid for this censorware. Then, learn how to use stock market filings to figure out who is behind your censorware because they're the dirtiest companies in the world—their primary customers are not corporate America, and they're not schools; their primary customers are repressive regimes in the Middle East, and Asia and sometimes in autocratic African states. And they repackage stuff that's used by dictators to spy on their population to help corporate America and educational institutions spy on their stakeholders, their users. So, find out who the war criminals are who get to see all of your data, who get to offshore every click you make.

And then present it. Present it at the PTA. Present it at the board meeting. Call up local journalists and say, 'Do you know how much my school district paid out of your tax dollars to buy inadequate software from war criminals that everyone knows how to get around, and interferes actively with our education, while letting us see eye-watering pornography that none of us want to see?’

And that, I think, is an exercise that teaches real media literacy and also has a chance of affecting change. Even if it never affects any change, those kids will leave the school understanding how to think in the round, holistically about the economic, technical, social and market forces that surround the technologies they use.

‘Prohibition Will Get You Nowhere’: Writer and Activist Cory Doctorow’s Message to Schools and Educators published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness