This Explains Elizabeth Holmes, Alissa Heinerscheid, And Stockton Rush

I found this piece via Instapundit, Why Match School And Student Rank? which echoes my own views on Ivy admissions, which were formed by my own experience as an undergraduate and the views of Ferdinand Lundberg in books like The Rich and the Super-Rich, which in my view is up there with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and Milton's prose in both style and intent.

His thesis is this:

Elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege.

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

. . . People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

The South African true crime writer Nick van der Leek has recently followed the Titan submersible story on his True Crime Rocket Science YouTube channel, which carries the implication that OceanGate is a true crime story, and Stockton Rush was a crook. How could this be? This story, published after the Titan went missing but before its fate was reported, refers to him in the present tense:

Richard Stockton Rush III, 61, better known as Stockton Rush, is the CEO and founder of submersible company OceanGate Inc. as well as a descendant of both the Rush and Davies families, SFGATE reported. Among his ancestors are Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence, according to The New York Times.

He is related to millionaire Ralph K. Davies, who started as a 15-year-old office boy at Standard Oil of California in the 1910s before becoming the company’s youngest-ever director and eventually launching his own oil business, SFGATE and the Times reported.

. . . Stockton Rush's father, also named Stockton Rush, was from Philadelphia and also attended Princeton University.

The prestige of his own aerospace engineering degree from Princeton drove his ultimate success as OceanGate's promoter despite an uneven start to his career, and he was able to use that to counter the questions about the Titan's design and construction that were raised from the start.

But this goes to my own experience as an Ivy undergraduate. Once I arrived, I was surprised at how un-challenging the course work was and how mediocre my classmates generally were. It became almost immediately clear that to flunk out (or as they put it, to be "separated from the College") took real application. I coasted, as did most of my friends. Now and then I've mentioned that within weeks of my arrival as a freshman, I went to the dean of freshmen and told him my admission had been a terrible mistake, although my reasons were inchoate.

He was sympathetic, but he convinced me to see it through, and he and I maintained a friendly ongoing relationship throughout my four years. Unfortunately, a heavy smoker, he died of a heart attack not long after I graduated, or I might have corresponded with him after that as well.

The dean, Albert I Dickerson, had been admissions director there earlier in his career, and in fact, in that role, he claimed that he and his immediate predecessor at Dartmouth had been the ones to invent the Ivy selective admissions formula that the link above outlines. He did this in an article, "Enter Ye in by the Narrow Gate. . .", that appeared in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine for October 1947, reprinted in Albert Inskip Dickerson: Selected Writings (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974).

Having invented the Ivy system, or at least co-invented it, he explained it in nutshell: it was based on Scholarship, Personality, and Groups to Which Preference Is Given, i.e., the usual suspects, and there you had the deal that's existed since the 1940s: some are admitted on merit, some are admitted because they have preference, and nobody is supposed to know the difference -- except that as a somewhat confused 17-year-old, I seem to have realized from the start that something was hinky. I think this is why the dean and I got along so well, he thought I was a bright kid indeed.

What strikes me is that there's been a change, which I began to outline in this post, whereby famous crooks, con artists, and corporate frauds are starting to come from wealthy backgrounds with Ivy degrees, when they'd previously been middle class at best. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, an illegal immigrant from Germany, may have pioneered this trend in the 1980s and 1990s, when as a career con artist who incidentally murdered a California couple in 1985, he adopted a succession of upscale aliases until, as "Clark Rockefeller", he married a high-earning McKinsey senior executive and maintained the fiction that he was wealthy and upper-class.

Somehow this presaged the new trend whereby wealthy Ivy legacies can hitchhike on the prestige of their schoolmates who were admitted on merit and build careers in crime, or in the case of Alissa Heinerscheid, disastrous incompetence. The impostor syndrome may play a part in this, where people who are deeply conscious of their own lack of real qualifications nevertheless seem to function effortlessly among the elite. But why are they only now turning to serious white-collar crime?

This is new. I still wish I could have kept up a correspondence with Dean Dickerson about it. He probably understood more than anyone thought.