What Are The Cornell Seven Teaching Us About College?

This remarkably silly piece says parents aere rethnking sending their kids to Cornell:

[I]n recent days, college counselors and admissions consultants have fielded frantic messages from shaken parents, questioning whether the university should remain on their campus tour lists. Would my daughter be safe? Is Greek life less entrenched at other colleges?

But sometimes they're asking: Will it actually be easier to get into Cornell this year?

. . . Cornell is a platinum brand institution with international standing, which -- like many of its highly selective peers -- can be shielded from its troubles by an elite school halo. It received more than 67,000 applications last year and admitted roughly 9%. >/p> Among the Ivies, Cornell is't all that selective. Brown's acceptance rate is more like 5%, Columbia 4%, Harvard 4% as well. Even Dartmouth, apparently the current title holder for Joke of the Ivy League, is 6%. Maybe they'll revisit this at some point. But let's check in on other higher ed news I've covered here.

Back in July, I noted that Brown had a cheating scandal:

This spring, after three decades of teaching at Brown, [Prof Robero] Serrano let his students take their midterm exam at home, upping the difficulty to compensate for the unlimited time. The average score, which had historically run between 65% and 80%, jumped to 96%.

Was that a particularly studious class? Maybe. But Serrano suspected a simpler explanation: AI.

He announced that the final would be given in person, causing 18 students to drop the class. Nine more didn't bother showing up for the exam.

The average score on the final was 48.6%.

Serrano shared the anonymized results of the 59 students who took both tests with Inside Higher Ed. A handful can be safely called honest. One scored 95.5% on the midterm and 95% on the final. Another went from 55% to 59%, the only student whose score actually improved.

Many more students fell from highs in the top percentile to failing grades. Two who submitted perfect midterm exams scored exactly 0% on the final.

I suspect a similar invetigation at Cornell would bring equivalent results. An Ivy degree is going to be hit-or-miss if you ask how many Ivy students routinely cheat. Then there's the problem of Greek life, which we see nervous parents bringing up about Cornell. In August, I looked at the 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students at an off-campus residence.

[T]his residence was widely known as a "party house" and something of an eztension of the on-campus Greek scene. The door locks were combination-style; the combination was widely known and never changed. Outsiders were routinely in and out of the place, it simply wasn't secure.

The levels of blood aocohol in all four victims ranged from the precariously high, 0.282 g/100 mL, to 0.107 g/100 mL, which would be just a plain ol' DUI or maybe drunk and disorderly. Two of them also had amphetamines in their blood.The BACs of the eight students involved in the Cornell Seven affair were not recorded, but "Jane Doe" reported some passing out, with additional use of ketamine over a period of several hours. Just another day in paradise.

While some colleges and universities have striven to eliminate Greek organizations, this had little effect on student life. Georgetown, with a reputation roughly comparable to Cornell, eliminated fraternities in the 1950s, but Hunter Biden, who graduated in 1992, first developed his cocaine habit tbere and continued the alcohol abuse he'd started earlier. Unfortunately, religious affiliation generally doesn't make a uniiversity more safe. In fact, it occurred to me that all eight of the students involved in the Cornell Seven episode were, and still likely are, in Hunter Biden territory.

This reminds me of a remark my uncle, a corporate CEO, made. In a chat with my father, his brother, he mentioned one of his subordinates, who'd met my father. "What did you think of him?" my uncle asked.

"He seemed like sort of an ass-kisser," my father answered.

"Well," my uncle replied, "I run an ass-kisser factory."

In this case, the US higher education system is actually running a Hunter Biden factory, irrespective of Greek life or religious affiliation. Whether or not they have Greek houses, and whether or not students are members of Greek houses, underage alcohol and narcotics are freely available, in part because many students develop drinking and narcotics habits by their early teens, and what they find in college isn't new. Add to that an institutionally enabled culture of promiscuity:

Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year.

At best -- and this has probably always been then case in higher ed; look at Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited for what life was like at Oxford in the 1920s -- kids of good character are dumped into a sea of kids of less-good character and have to struggle their way through as best they can. Why would we see anything good in such a situation? Why would we pressure a younger generation to sacrifice their childhood and adolescence to compete to get into such environments?

Just as one possible strategy, if trying to work out a solution for a child approaching college age, I might consider a commuter school, with the kid living at home, just as one possibility.