It is a long-established and well-received tradition in the U.S. that those with means can buy their kids’ way into university: cash-and-carry college. The idea that William Singer, pictured, is a criminal for facilitating an ancient U.S. college admission tradition is nonsense.
What Singer did is no crime. Buying admission and having others take tests to get kids into top universities and keep them there is the American way. If Fred Trump could do it for a son who is both illiterate and innumerate, projecting him into the presidency of the country, anyone with the means should be able to do the same.
Moreover, questioning the cash-and-carry business model of top American universities means changing how Americans think about paying for education.
Top American universities are endowment funds with classrooms attached. Ivy League schools could never support Canada's highly-competitive, marks-only admission system. They would have nothing to sell. It would destroy their cash flows overnight. The same for schools that depend on sports.
U.S. taxpayers, who are not remotely interested in funding education, would never agree to the dollars needed to replace cash-and-carry. Tell Don Trump, who got into Penn and graduated without being able to read or write and had to have a Mark Riddell do his tests and exams, that you want to divert his Iron Curtain money to abolish cash-and-carry. He would go nuts. And three-quarters or more of Congress with him, regardless of party. Buying admission to top universities is as American as apple pie. There is nothing scandalous about it.
A marks-only Canadian system requires not just taxpayer dollars and lots of them, but also a uniform, national belief that, for a nation to be successful in global markets, the state must guarantee that its businesses can draw from a labor force educated to the highest level possible. That process starts in primary school and works right through college.
Americans, however, do not believe that the state should ensure that their labor force is competitive. That is the responsibility of individuals—cash-and-carry if you can afford it—and not the nation.
Cash-and-carry isn’t the end of it, or even close. There are almost as many classes of affirmative action, like cash-and-carry and legacy, as there are students. Few students enter U.S. universities the old-fashioned way, marks. Almost everyone seems to have pointless embellishments in their applications like head of this high school society or work for that charity. Nothing whatever to do with marks.
So, there is no scandal here. Just an enduring tradition.
But it is a tradition that comes at an enormous cost to business.
Having been in business for over 40 years, Publius knows that the number one problem in hiring recent college grads in the U.S. is filtering out everyone but the marks-only students. The risk of hiring the others is just too great.
He discovered early that a lot of students from top U.S. schools had trouble with basic English. How could this be?
Part of the reason seems to be that, to keep the cash-and-carry system alive, top U.S. colleges have low washout rates, meaning that the incompetent and competent both graduate with degrees of equal value.
The cash-and-carry students front-load top college cash flows to support life-breathing endowment funds and students with fewer resources. But, the marks-admitted students who work like crazy to get in and to stay in, are the ones who uphold the cash-and-carry college brand.
All the admission classifications between marks-only and cash-and-carry are there because the entire structure of U.S. education through primary and high school is unbalanced and not tuned to maximum results. You could argue that the only reason that affirmative action, for example, exists is that the college feedstock system of primary and secondary schools is shattered.
This shattering is ensured by primary and secondary school funding. Nowhere in the U.S. is there the simple principle that all primary and high schools must be funded equally so that grads can all meet equal testing requirements.
Schools in the U.S. are funded through inherently inequitable property taxes: rich areas get rich schools; poor ones get poor schools and the results to match. States all have different degrees of funding equalization. The fact that equal funding for all students is core to American competitiveness is unknown. This leaves us wide open to “education aggression” from The Center of Everything (China in Chinese). But we don’t care.
As Publius made clear in The Growth and Development Party (GDP), business needs brain power, not money power or some other adjustment for the failure of the U.S. primary and secondary school system to produce uniform results. Whence the fourth of the GDP’s Four Guarantees.
Lacking the GDP’s Fourth Guarantee, U.S. employers are getting lumped with the enormous and very expensive mess at the end of the pipe.
What happens if you get stuck with an illiterate and innumerate Don Trump, just because he has a mythical, untouchable degree from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania? And if you keep hiring flakes like him? Endless, expensive HR problems as you fire and replace them. Unstable morale. Deadly customer service. Underperforming profits.
And it’s not just business that gets slammed. A long-time friend, the head of the Chemistry Department at a U.S. university, bemoaned all the remedial classes uneducated first year students must attend to make up for feedstock deficiencies.
You will not hear the slightest murmur from any politician in any party or at any level of government urging the GDP’s Fourth Guarantee to ensure our global competitiveness.
Cash-and-carry colleges make Presidents.
So, open your check books like Fred Trump and pay!
Follow Up July 8. 2019
In a great story in the Washington Post today, Michael Kranish brought Dumb Don's cash-and-carry admission to the University of Pennsylvania closer to the light. And, just as Publius surmised, Fred Trump was involved. Amazing how simple it was to use cash-and-carry to get an illiterate kid suffering from massive intellectual incontinence into a top school. Looks like Penn didn't give him more than a 2.0. Just took the money and got him out of there.