Internationalisation and Higher Ed

More people are moving across the world to attend college

Internationalisation should be ethical and for all - University World News

 

I fail to see the wisdom in trying to make fair an inherently unfair system.

Do rich kids buy their way into colleges? I'm absolutely sure of it. Do rich kids get preferential treatment in terms of grading and choice appointments within a university? Go ahead, universities, try to tell me with a straight face that you treat the kids of a billion dollar donor exactly the same as the kids there on scholarship.

I'm OK with it because it seems to be a waste of energy to fight it. If you have enough money to drop megabucks on getting your precious snowflake into college then you have enough megabucks to ensure that your precious snowflake is better positioned elsewhere in the world than my own kids every time and in almost every other way.

Education is important. And it can set people on a trajectory for success. But it isn't the great equalizer that people make it out to be. The rich kid graduating from Harvard still has a leg up over the poor kid graduating from Harvard. The rich kid can decide s/he is going to work with underprivileged youth and live a fairly modest lifestyle subsidized by their hedge fund parents. The poor graduate has no such option.

The rich play by different rules. Rather than expending all of this effort to try to change that perhaps we should be focusing our efforts on improving the non-elite schools where everyone else goes and opening up new opportunities for the non-elite kids.