As noted in previous essays, competition over opportunities is almost certainly unavoidable and can even be desirable. However, this competition can do more harm than good. One example of this is opportunity hoarding. Opportunity hoarding occurs when parents try to seek advantages for their children in ways that are harmful to others. As would be suspected, opportunity hoarding typically occurs when parents use morally problematic methods to secure advantages for their children at the expense of other children. An excellent example of this is the 2019 college admissions scandal and I will use this to set the stage for the discussion.
As many writing about the scandal pointed out, the rich have many legal means of tipping the admission scales in favor of their children. These include methods that have nothing to do with the merit of the applicant, such as the use of legacy admissions and making financial contributions to the institutions. Other methods aim at improving the quality of the applicant (or at least the application). These methods include paid test preparation courses, paid counselors, paid tutors, and paid essay coaches. Because the rich have so many advantages already, the admission scandal seemed especially egregious and somewhat perplexing. From a philosophical perspective, the scandal raises an interesting general moral question about what methods are acceptable in the competition over opportunities and which are not.
While some might consider a state of nature approach to this competition (a war against all with no limit on the means), this would be clear violation of our moral intuitions. After all, while we might disagree on specific limits, we almost certainly agree that there are limits. To illustrate, the murder of competing children would seem to be obviously unacceptable as would other horrible things like blinding or maiming to weaken the competition. But once the obviously horrific is out of the way, there remains a very large area of possible dispute.
One approach favored by manner is to use the law as the guide. On this view, parents may use any legal means to restrict opportunities in favor of their children. While this might have some appeal, it suffers from an obvious defect: the law is whatever those in power make it, so evil (or at least unfair) things can become a matter of law. The usual extreme, but legitimate, example is the legality of slavery. As such, while it is often right to obey the law, it does not follow that what is legal is ethical. So, if a parent justifies their actions by pointing to their legality, they merely prove they acted legally—they have not shown they have acted rightly. So, something is needed beyond mere legality to determine what the limits of the competition should be.
Since this is a question of ethics on a national scale, an appeal to utilitarianism seems sensible: the limits should be set in terms of what will be most likely to create the greatest benefit and least harm. This leads to the stock problem of sorting out what it means to create the greatest positive value and least negative value. It also requires sorting out the measure of worth. For example, a set of limits might result in the children of the wealthy becoming even wealthier while the less wealthy were worse off than their parents might create more total wealth than a more equitable system in which everyone was reasonably well off. If what matters, as it does to some, is the overall wealth then these would be the right limits. However, if maximizing value is more about the impact on each person, then the more equitable division would be the moral choice: it would create more positive value for more people but would fail to create the most total positive value.
Since a utilitarian approach recognizes only the utilitarian calculation of value, some might find this approach problematic. Instead, they might favor a rights-based approach, or one based on a principle of fair competition. To illustrate, Americans profess to value competition, merit and fairness: the best competitors are supposed to win in a fair competition. This, obviously enough, just returns to the problem of fairness: what means are fair to use in the competition for opportunity?
One possible approach is to use a principle of relevance: a fair competition is one in which victory depends on the skills and abilities that are relevant to the nature of the competition. For example, if the competition is based on academic ability, then that should be the deciding factor—donating money should not influence the outcome of competition. This will, of course, lead to a debate about what should be considered relevant. For example, if it is argued that donating money is not relevant to determining college admissions because it is not relevant to academic ability, one might then argue that race or sex are also not relevant and thus should not be used. So, if relevance is used, it must be properly and consistently defined and applied.
While relevance, in general, seems like a reasonable consideration, there are also concerns about the preparation for the competitions. To illustrate, the children of the wealthy get a competitive edge because their parents can get them into good K-12 schools, pay for tutoring, pay for test preparation, pay for counseling, pay for help on essays and so on. That is, they can buy advantages that are relevant to the competition for college admissions and careers. On the one hand, these do seem to be unfair advantages because they are not available to the children of the poor simply because they are poor. On the other hand, they are relevant to the competition because they do improve the skills and abilities of the children. One possible solution, for those who value fair competition, would be balancing things out by providing the same support to all children—thus making the competition fair. This leads into the question of how far the quest for fairness should go.
At this point, some might be wondering if I will advocate forcing parents to only parent as well as the worst parents, so as to even things out. After all, a parent who can spend time engaging in activities with their kids, such as reading to them and helping with homework, confers an advantage. Since making parents do a worse job would obviously make things worse, this would be wrong to do. As such, I do not oppose (rather I fully support) parents being good parents. However, in many cases parents face the challenges of lacking time, resources and education to be better parents and these could be addressed. As such, I would advocate lifting parents up and utterly reject any notion to bring them down (something only those deranged by ideology would suggest).
The above is only a faint sketch of the matter—much more needs to be said about what the rules of competition for opportunity should be in our society. This is, obviously enough, a matter of values: are we just mouthing words like “fairness” , “opportunity for all” and “merit-based competition” while embracing the practice of unfairly buying success? Or do we really believe these things?
I have avoided commenting on this topic because the title makes no sense to me. “Opportunity Hoarding” goes against the idea of opportunity in the first place.
I don’t believe that opportunity can be hoarded. A place in a university can be unfairly competed for, but that’s just a seat at the table. Once a student is in, if they just sit in class and turn in their homework and do what they’re told, they’ll walk out with a diploma but not much else. Being part of a “legacy” family is not opportunity, it’s just being part of an old-boy network, not something that can be shared.
On the other hand, opportunity is all around us, and it’s not limited to college, or affirmative action, or “fairness”. It’s there for the taking, but one must be attuned to it, ready for it, and prepared to take the risks. At this point, I’d say that not going to college is as much of an opportunity as going – one can start one’s career without being saddled with debt or being duped into thinking that “_____-Studies” can actually advance one in this world, or that a degree is based on grades and is enough to land some sweet career.
So many students graduate from all sorts of colleges, public and private, and say “Oh, man, I had this wonderful opportunity and I blew it”. The opportunity wasn’t really there – or they were in no position to recognize it.
“At this point, I’d say that not going to college is as much of an opportunity as going – one can start one’s career without being saddled with debt or being duped into thinking that “_____-Studies” can actually advance one in this world, or that a degree is based on grades and is enough to land some sweet career.”
Precisely. Hence the term “opportunity cost”, something that many people, ironically (or not) many people who teach at universities, do not understand. Education in these non-STEM subjects costs the student in multiple ways. Not only is money being wasted on classes in subjects that are unnecessary. But some (many, depending on the major) make the student weaker and even less employable than they were going into the universities in the first place. Then there is also the lost positive cash flow that could have been earned during those four (five, six, seven, eight) years. And on top of that you have the years of lost real-life and real-world work experience at a time when both of one’s physical and mental skills have their greatest potential for improvement. On top of that there’s the delay of four (or five, six, seven, eight) years of putting off getting involved in a serious a relationship and/or starting a family during a person’s most fertile time of life. Coming as it does at the age of highest sex-drive, this is a societal cost that IMNSHO drives a good bit of the social problems that we see today, not the least being drug and alcohol abuse. Then there’s the burden of having a significant amount of student debt hanging over one’s head when earning entry-level pay that is also soul crushing for many. It’s like starting out in life by immediately buying a house…having spent nearly the equivalent amount of money yet not even having the satisfaction of having a physical place to live in.
Education, real viable education, is a good thing. But scaring people into believing that they need a BS/BA and now MS/MA at the least before starting out in life is a terrible thing to do. Especially as information and technology are so readily available, inexpensive to access, and so incredibly dynamic. The old idea that you could learn most of what you needed to know early in life and then use that early knowledge throughout your remaining years always was a crock, but at least to some degree it made some sense for most purposes in the past, at least so far as getting some traction in life. But with the rate of change that technology brings us, people need to understand that learning, seriously deep learning, is a lifetime continuous process. I know that we older people were all told this growing up but it was not as broadly relevant back then. Yet that said, it was something that was more preached than seriously practiced. Mostly because of the single-minded, unthinking culture of making sure people went to college. Because that’s just what you were supposed to do.
DH, I don’t mind the label so much. People often have a point but choose a label I don’t immediately relate to,
The substance of the categorisation, however, is so misguided that it is difficult to take seriously. Which is why I haven’t commented on the core issue either.
There is also an implied fallacy: that a well-placed applicant passing on an advantage benefits the least-favoured competitors. That’s complete nonsense. If Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Andy Murray all withdrew from this year’s Wimbledon, I still wouldn’t get anywhere near qualifying. Their absence would just bump up the other people close to the top.
Mike has provided no definition or clear examples, but I found some here:
https://www.brookings.edu/interactives/are-you-a-dream-hoarder/
Your family lives in a single family home in an upscale neighborhood, New legislation could change the zoning to allow multi-family housing, which often leads to an increase of lower-income residents. Will you support this legislation? Yes / No
My answer: it depends on much more than the facts given, largely on the current area, and the results I would expect from the development. Bad question. Lean no.
Your child is applying to your alma mater, but he/she has a low SAT score. You know that your legacy status – and a sizeable donation – will help his.her changes of getting in. Do you make the donation? Yes / No
My answer: If my kid doesn’t have the scores for the intended career path, then I’d certainly be engaged in looking for another rather than trying to grease the way into a possibly bad move. Lean no, but it depends.
Your child is interested in law and looking for a summer internship, Do you help him.her secure one at a friend’s firm? Yes / No
My answer: Absolutely! The author suggests that by doing it, I would be taking an opportunity from a poor child. That’s complete nonsense; If anything, I’d be taking the opportunity away from another well-off child. But in the way these things really work, my friend would not be hiring anyone else instead; just doing me a favour by adding my kid to the roster fo a while.
“DH, I don’t mind the label so much. People often have a point but choose a label I don’t immediately relate to”
Noted. I just read the title and my eyes rolled so far up into my head that i had a hard time re-adjusting them so I could read them.
Sometimes the title, or label, just puts me off to the extent I just don’t want to participate.
I just read the title and my eyes rolled so far up into my head that i had a hard time re-adjusting them so I could read them.
Thank you for the genuine chuckle.
It occurs to me that Leftist rhetoric commonly makes a point of labelling people as opposed to behaviours. You will see a lot of “X is a racist/sexist” claims, even when wharever allegation is being levelled concerns only one alleged incident, perhaps far in the past. This is dishonest. The book, and the website refer to “Dream Hoarders” and “Opportunity Hoarders”. At least Mike spared us that.
Mike, is sending your child to private school an example of opportunity hoarding?
Can you give us an example other than the bribery scandal which, after all, was illegal?
The principle seems to be that if you give your child an advantage that you could instead leave for a poorer child to take, you are This New Label.
A poorer child could not afford the private school, so that would not make you This New Label.
The thinking seems very undefined, and as I mentioned does contain at least one glaring fallacy, but my general impression is that you are not required to pay for the poorer child to go to private school instead of your own to avoid This New Label.
It all stems from malthusian, zero sum game BS that has been recycled here time and time again over the last ten…gee, has it really been ten?…years. Such fallacious thinking is boilerplate marxist fear mongering, envy, etc. that serves no educational, philosophical, nor intellectual purpose. These polemics have been refuted, mocked, disassembled, deconstructed here time and time and time again. Arguing it from a position of logic and reason is as foolish as bringing your chess set to a greased pig wrestling match. And it happens over and over and over again here. Like Groundhog Day meets Twilight Zone.
This is what our “education” system has become. That such obvious BS passes for “philosophy” is an indictment (yes, I’ve now degenerated to the point of using radical leftist 1960s cliches) of our society and culture. And such a clown show is supported with our tax dollars. Imbeciles.
I noted the difference between relative mobility which is zero-sum and absolute mobility which is not. Relative mobility, like one’s place in a 5K, is necessarily zero sum. If I place first, others cannot. Absolute mobility is not zero sum. Going back to the running analogy, everyone can get faster. I did discuss, earlier, that a society would low or no relative mobility and high absolute mobility could be a great place to live: while the economic classes are fixed, everyone is doing better every year. So, Betty Billionaire could own 47 houses, 23 yachts, 100 cars and so on while Paula Poor has good housing, a living wage, health insurance and a good school for her kids.
Compare the absolute mobility in the US from the time of the Civil War to now. Compare the absolute wealth and living standards in the US from then to now. Compare what we think of as poverty now to poverty then.
I expect we are on course for your idea of even the poorest people (in the world, not just the US) having living standards equivalent to middle-class US in 80-100 years, plus whatever technological advances we can’t even imagine yet, barring a catastrophe, or those terms just not making sense any more.
If we go all the way back to the first humans, then we get an even more dramatic comparison. 🙂
Marx made a similar sort of argument-advances will result in everyone being well off. Of course, he envisioned a destruction of classes. On his view, there would be no relative mobility (no classes) but a massive increase in absolute mobility.
There is a concern that people use absolute mobility when trying to refute criticisms of the lack of relative mobility. While upward absolute mobility is good, we should not ignore a dearth of relative mobility just because of it.
As I noted, we might be morally fine with a rigid class system in which there is little or no mobility between the classes (which is what we have in the US) as long as we have a robust absolute mobility. So, while the lowest classes will be locked in at the bottom, as long as each generation has more and nicer stuff, then one could argue that this is morally okay and nothing should be done to address even unfair and unjust mechanisms that maintain the social order. This would require abandoning the myth of upward mobility–that exceptional people born into the lower classes have a fair shot at working their way up (and talentless people born into the upper classes have a fair and just chance of sinking due to their incompetence). But, as I argued, a society with amazing absolute mobility and no relative mobility would be better than one with terrible absolute mobility but exceptional relative mobility.
We should, of course, be honest about the system we choose. If we are fine with low or no relative mobility and warrant that with claims about absolute mobility, then we need to stop lying about relative mobility and embrace the reality of our rigid hereditary class system. “The nobility should stay nobles, the peasants peasants…as long as the peasants have HDTV, fridges and the internet.”
We could go back to the first humans for comparison, but that would miss the inflection point of the Industrial Revolution, which was winding up at the time of the US Civil War. With the harnessing of energy for engines, and standardised manufacturing, industries that used to be piecemeal, scattered and manual became much more efficient – and productivity and wealth began to rise at a rate never before seen.
Many have argued that the abolition of slavery world wide was largely caused by the increased efficiency. Societies have the morality they can afford.
As the world’s total wealth and welfare continues to increase, we can expect life to get better for everyone.
There are legitimate questions about the concentration of wealth, but I have concerns about people ignoring absolute wealth creation to focus on distribution. Every measure to level wealth distribution leads to a loss in wealth creation. This is unfortunate, but inevitable. We need to be very precise about exactly which measures, and in what degree, we apply to taxation to as to gain the best benefit for those who need it most while doing as little damage as possible to motivations for wealth creation.
Good point. As you note, slavery was reduced more by technological advancement than by moral outrage. Interestingly, there is the story that when Hiero invented the first steam “engine” the implications were understood and it was not used because “what about the slaves, Hiero?”
I also agree that the most important factor is not inequality of income/wealth, but how well people are doing. So, a society could be incredible unequal, yet even the lowest citizen could have a great life. We are, however, in a society that has great inequality but also many people living in poor conditions. While they do have fridges and internet, they still often cannot afford adequate food, medical care and so on. To use an analogy, we have a few people gorging themselves on a giant feast they cannot possible consume, while many (including those who provide the feast) go hungry around them. Should anyone dare suggest that the hungry get a bit more from the feast they labored to create, the guardians of the gorgers will scream that the few must feast so that the many will have at least some crumbs that fall from the table.
I don’t argue against parents sending their kids to private school on their own dime. But, if they use their influence to redirect social resources to help fund private schools for rich kids at the expense of public schools, then that would be opportunity hoarding.
Not in and of itself.
As I note, what is legal is distinct from what is moral. After all, slavery was once legal. And there are countries that have many laws that are clearly immoral. My concern is not primarily with what the law allows, but what it should allow.
I challenge y’all to watch the full 20 something minutes of this video by Janice Fiamengo and offer your perspectives, preferably without hoarding the opportunity to do so, on how the opportunities offered to the people on this NASA sponsored panel were utilized. Come on. I dare you.
https://youtu.be/5UACktweQ3s
Or peruse this link about these great thinkologists and how they are thinking the thoughts about the stuff that must be thunk…
https://www.decolonizemars.org/becoming-interplanetary
Who is paying for this crap and why?
And now one of my posts in lost in the spam filter. I dared to put two links in it. Silly me.
So I finally got past the title – but I didn’t make it too far …
“As many writing about the scandal pointed out, the rich have many legal means of tipping the admission scales in favor of their children. These include methods that have nothing to do with the merit of the applicant, such as the use of legacy admissions and making financial contributions to the institutions.”
Yes, those pesky rich, at it again. What about methods that have nothing to do with the merit of the applicant, like “race” or “ethnicity” or “national origin” ?
Maybe it’s not about “opportunity hoarding” at all. Maybe it’s just a high-stakes game. Consider this:
“The Guardian” headline, October, 2018:
“Harvard uses vague “personal rating” to reject Asian Americans, court hears”
Or NPR, November 2018:
“Harvard Discrimination Trial Ends, but Lawsuit if Far From Over”
The New York Times asks,
“Does Harvard Admissions Discriminate? The Lawsuit on Affirmative Action, Explained”
To me, the answer is “Yes, of course!” Who needs an explanation? Affirmative Action is the very definition of what you are accusing the rich of doing – finding legal means of tipping the admission scales in favor of [fill in the blank].
Except in some peoples’ world-view, this sort of activity is heinous if one group (the rich, the white, the Republican) does it, but acceptable and even preferable if another group (the Leftists in governement) does it.
But then you have the problem of Asian Americans. On the one hand, they are an ethnic group with a history of discrimination in this country. On the other hand, as a group they have been acing admission standards and threatening institutions like Harvard with being overrun – kind of like what happened in San Francisco with all those hard-working laborers threatening to change the American (read: “White”) culture. Only today it’s not about “White”, it’s about “Diverse”. And you can’t have “Diverse” if one group keeps acing the tests!
But on the other hand – we have this situation of shall we say, “Crazy Rich Asians”. So – what trumps what? Are they a downtrodden, underserved population with a history of discrimination? Or are they members of that hated class of “rich”?
And on and on … is it any surprise then, to read this headline from the WSJ today?
“In College Admissions Scandal, Families from China Paid the Most”
Some races and ethnicities are “in”, some are “out”. So the “outs”, realizing that merit often has very little to do with it anyway, figure out a way to make themselves “in”.
It seems as though these Chinese families are just being practical. They know the game is rigged against them ethnically, so they’re just playing by different rules to even out the odds economically. And merit never really did enter into the equation on either side. If it did, there’d have been no lawsuit, and no need for big payoffs. They’d just be “in” without the scandal.
Very liberal of them.
Last Licks:
This lawsuit exposed another seamy side of things – many of these Asian plaintiffs believe they are being used by the system to expose flaws in Affirmative Action policies as a step in eradicating the practice.
But I think everyone’s just looking ahead a few years, trying to make more ethnically-correct Harvard lawyers to fill up seats in the burgeoning “Identity Driven” US Government. Who shall we vote for in 2028? 2032? Who will be “in” at that time? The daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father? A Somali refugee? How about a 4th generation Irish American / Hispanic wannabe? Or an American Indian?
(Of course, it’s not without a little snicker that I note that the two front-runners in the scramble for the Democratic nomination these days are not the ethno-racio-gender-identity front runners. Nope. Just two old white guys, like always.
Time to start filling out that pool, I say.
And who will be “out”? Will White Males still be on the outs in a dozen years? What about the old go-to standbys, the Jews?
Our government really has nothing to do with merit or policy, so why should our ivied halls of higher education?
Or NASA Mars missions, for that matter. I’d like your opinion on a post I made last night if Mike could retrieve it from internet purgatory.
the Martians would think very poorly of us if we didn’t send a diverse group of astronauts to greet them.
Oooh, you gotta watch this video. It’s absurd. NASA has some tie in to it to some degree. Didn’t research it much deeper as I just don’t have the time right now. If my post doesn’t show up, I’ll post the link to another blog that I got it from.
Eh, what the hell. Don’t recall exactly what my segue was and David Thompson deserves the finder’s credit anyway…hopefully this single link will post…
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2019/04/the-inadequate-and-resentful-should-not-be-put-in-charge.html
I couldn’t watch it very far. The presenter is good; I’d watch her in some more worthy context. And the bit at the end I skipped to where no panellists knew what to do with the question was mildly smile-worthy. But it was the same old blah, and rather weak.
I check out RealPeerReview on Twitter every day; it takes some serious nonsense to get my attention!
I’m not sure I understand. Is there some objection to sending these people to Mars?
… and DH wins teh Internetz for today!
Well not in the Golgafrincham Ark Fleet Ship B sense, no. Do you think Mike would be interested in going? Seems like an excellent opportunity to start a Brave New World under the supervision of philosopher kings.
You should have struggled on; I address the very point you raise:
“This will, of course, lead to a debate about what should be considered relevant. For example, if it is argued that donating money is not relevant to determining college admissions because it is not relevant to academic ability, one might then argue that race or sex are also not relevant and thus should not be used. So, if relevance is used, it must be properly and consistently defined and applied.”
I agree that race and sex and donations and legacy status are not relevant to the question of how well a student can use the education, and should not be considered for purely public institutions.
However, donations and legacy status do give the institution a benefit, and so the people whose priority is the status of the institution will have a reason to apply them. This should not happen in purely State institutions, but insofar as the university is a private entity, it is their right to decide that.
True, private schools can use a broader range of standards. If they want to allow cash on the table to buy admission, so be it.
the problem here is that you are assuming that a “College Education” is some sort of constant, universally used in the formula that defines “opportunity”, which it is not.
How so? All I seem to need is that college education is a valuable opportunity, not that it must be in every calculation of opportunity.
I wasn’t trying to suggest that a college education need be included in every calculation of “advantage”, only that when it is it isn’t necessarily a positive thing. It isn’t for everyone, but based on the politics of envy and societal disdain for those who lack the diploma, it is perceived as a necessity and something that should be an entitlement.
For some it is an advantage, but for others, it only forestalls entry into the workforce and the development of a career while saddling them with debt – to pay for a “Liberal Arts” education that will have no practical use for them. It fills them with false hope – that the world will cater to their needs and that their ethnic or racial identity is important enough to get them where they need to go.
The playing field here evens out for rich and poor. Non-merit-based admissions standards include legacies, bribery, donations and other methods accessible by the rich, but they also include need-based scholarships, racial, ethnic, and gender-based quotas in order to meet diversity standards. There are also some lesser-known admissions tricks employed by some department heads or deans or other decision-makers, such as accepting and retaining poorly qualified students in order to make themselves look good to the accountants … (“Look – this department I’m in charge of has had increasing enrollment and retention numbers for the last five years in a row! We clearly need more classes and more faculty and a bigger budget!”)
From a moral standpoint, basing admissions on diversity or fairness or internal bean-counting is nothing short of exploitation – but the pedagogical point is equally disturbing. When merit-based standards give way to identity-based, need-based, or even wealth-based, the schools themselves have a touch choice. Do we continue to accommodate and help those who are struggling in their classes? Or do we maintain our standards and weed out those students that the government and administration went to such lengths to get there in the first place?
A tremendous amount of money is spent on colleges offering counseling (both academic and psychological) for struggling students. Where do these dollars come from, and where else might they be spent? Very often, as a result of these “alternative admissions” practices, classes either become incrementally remedial or rigorous standards begin to erode. This is patently unfair to the students who did get in on merit alone, who have expectations of a high-quality education. And over time, of course, the reputation of a school can change – shifting from a respected source of talented, skilled individuals that’s at the top of the list for recruiters to a respected “place of safety”, admired for its commitment to inclusion and diversity, where ivy becomes endometrium. But eventually these students will have to face the harsh realities of life outside the womb, and when they do, they will see how unprepared they are. Unprepared and debt-laden.
And for the students who attend a particular school for its industry reputation may just find that the reputation is based on old information, and when graduation time comes around they wonder where all the recruiters are.
Not all, of course, and this isn’t a universal issue (though it’s getting there fast). But a college education cannot be universally regarded as an advantage for everyone. Even without side-door admissions practices and “fairness” based evaluation, going to college is a distinct disadvantage for some. The more it is regarded as an entitlement and a necessity for everyone, the more prevalent the disadvantages become.
I would agree that college degrees can be a form of empty credentials and that the US has a weird dual mental illness: anti-intellectualism and degree fetish.