How could she stay on the uni?

[Papsmear]

I tend to agree with Terran that CEOs most likely have a ton of responsibility and if the do a bad job they will be replaced by a board of directors.
Share holders want to make money and would certainly vote out a CEO if their stock is tanking. It happens quite a bitactually.

I also agree with Metz's statement: Don't be an employee.
Bet on yourself, start your own business and be more in control of your future.
That's what I did and I'm doing better now than I was as an employee.

[zombywoof]

QUOTE (Terran @ Mar 24 2019, 11:14 AM) no, not a single one of those sales associates would survive a day in the job.

So the skills that a CEO employs are, in your opinion, more rarefied than being in one of every thousand people?

It is your opinion that it's not possible to attach training wheels to a CEO position for a period of time while a newhire gets used to it?

That must be why when the CEOs are dismissed (which, as Paps stated, happens) the companies immediately collapse and can't function at all until a new CEO comes in.

My position, for clarity, is that CEOs do not do the work of a thousand people and should not be paid as if they do the work of a thousand people. At no point have I suggested that CEOs shouldn't make more than Joe Grunt. I said they should not make as much more as they do, because they are overvalued by the market.

Perhaps there are some major corporations out there that understand this market inefficiency and have moved to correct it. Probably apocryphal, but it's worth noting that there are corporations doing this and start their employees at above minimum wage (technically $12 is minimum in CA, but they were at $12 for years before the min wage caught up).

Your counter to that position appears to be that not one of a thousand random people would likely be able to be trained to do the job of a CEO, and that the CEO's job is more valuable to the company than the thousand workers.

I mean I get it because I like to think the market makes rational choices, too. But people... aren't rational, and the market is made up of people. And sometimes the actual interests of a cohort of people isn't actually aligned with the interests of people at large. If you shift the paradigm to where High Paying Executive Positions aren't the payoff for a long career, but rather an insular community that self-selects for membership, it does a lot better job of explaining the lack of women in leadership positions. Further, it also helps explain the relative lack of all minorities in leadership positions.

[zombywoof]

By the way, another example of what I'm talking about in this thread, about how it's all just a big $#@!ing joke and the butt of the joke is anyone who doesn't make over a couple hundred thousand dollars a year:

There are 9 Supreme Court justices in the United States. The lawschools they attended are Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Harvard, Yale, Yale, Harvard, Harvard, Yale.

Is it really the case that Harvard and Yale's lawschools are so much better than all of the other law schools in the country that 8/9ths of the sitting SCOTUS justices are from those two law schools? Former justice Anthony Kennedy (another Harvard alum) used to teach at McGeorge Law School. My dad almost had him as his con law professor. What makes Harvard a "better" school then?

She gets to stay because she's rich and white and that's really, fundamentally, all the school really wanted in the first place.

[Terran]

i don't think you're applying the right formula here p1. CEOs make as much as they make not because they are the equivalent of 1,000 Joe Grunts - it's because if you pay them any less, they will go and lead your competitor who is willing to pay more. if there comes a day when there are so many people that can do the work of a CEO that they become easy to hire, then their wage will decrease. that's where the market comes in, and i think it's bad to $#@! with it. i think some euro countries have applied a cap to the wages their banking CEOs are making and it saw an exodus of capable CEOs to banks elsewhere (too lazy to find reference but it's probably on The Economist). you should also look at the performance of the average european bank versus the average american bank, and it's not pretty, but yeah there are lots of other factors that would contribute to that so it's probably just one of several factors.

no, if you apply "training wheels" to one of the 1,000 employees they will still most certainly not be able to perform the job of a CEO after some time. i think it really comes down to you not understanding what it is CEOs do or how $#@!ing difficult it would be to lead a multinational firm worth billions.

your example with Supreme Court Justices is similarly strange. you're saying just because all justices come from Harvard means Harvard must be 5x better than the next best one? no, it just means it has to be a teeny weeny bit better than the next one on the list. also that's where all the other cool lawyers happen to have gone, so if you go there you will get to know all the other lawyers that matter and would thus be more likely to be selected to whatever it is they got selected for.

[cashto]

I suspect CEOs might be a Veblen good (a good where demand increases with price due its perception of being a luxury item). Like, it might be possible to find someone capable of competently running a Fortune 500 company for, say, $300k a year. But no sane Board would ever take a chance on a hiring a bargain-basement CEO. And who would invest in a billion-dollar company that obviously didn't care to hire the best of the best of the best? The value of a CEO is perhaps 1% making good decisions and 99% status signalling that we the company is so successful it can afford to pay top dollar for (presumably) top talent.

It's also worth pointing out that just because a company can run on autopilot while it finds / hires / trains its next executive -- that isn't to say that a good CEO can't be worth more than a dozen or so employees. If a oil tanker captain has a heart attack while at sea, the ship certainly will continue sailing straight for a while. But eventually the ship will drift off course or miss a turn, and the result will be disastrous when it happens.

[zombywoof]

QUOTE (cashto @ Mar 25 2019, 05:04 PM) It's also worth pointing out that just because a company can run on autopilot while it finds / hires / trains its next executive -- that isn't to say that a good CEO can't be worth more than a dozen or so employees. If a oil tanker captain has a heart attack while at sea, the ship certainly will continue sailing straight for a while. But eventually the ship will drift off course or miss a turn, and the result will be disastrous when it happens.

Ok but in fairness an oil tanker captain is something like 50% of the actual manpower on these vessels

[zombywoof]

QUOTE (Terran @ Mar 25 2019, 04:35 PM) i don't think you're applying the right formula here p1. CEOs make as much as they make not because they are the equivalent of 1,000 Joe Grunts - it's because if you pay them any less, they will go and lead your competitor who is willing to pay more. if there comes a day when there are so many people that can do the work of a CEO that they become easy to hire, then their wage will decrease. that's where the market comes in, and i think it's bad to $#@! with it. i think some euro countries have applied a cap to the wages their banking CEOs are making and it saw an exodus of capable CEOs to banks elsewhere (too lazy to find reference but it's probably on The Economist). you should also look at the performance of the average european bank versus the average american bank, and it's not pretty, but yeah there are lots of other factors that would contribute to that so it's probably just one of several factors.

Well US banks are basically free to tank our economy every twenty years or so and face a mild slap on the wrist and some campers in their front yard.

But I'm not here saying that there should be wage caps on CEOs. I'm saying that the CEO market has a massive inefficiency where you're paying a premium for something that isn't really going to make your company better.

More profitable? Sure. But those profits don't come from CEOs making brilliant decisions that drastically revolutionize the industry, those profits come from CEOs finding ways to exploit workers more by driving down their wages, preferably using arcane shifts and outsourcing to developing nations that don't have robust labor protections. Indeed, in the 1980s, the big "skill" of CEOs was shutting down labor organization. They literally got paid @#(! tons so they would find ways to prevent laborers from unionizing to get a larger piece of the pie.

QUOTE your example with Supreme Court Justices is similarly strange. you're saying just because all justices come from Harvard means Harvard must be 5x better than the next best one? no, it just means it has to be a teeny weeny bit better than the next one on the list. also that's where all the other cool lawyers happen to have gone, so if you go there you will get to know all the other lawyers that matter and would thus be more likely to be selected to whatever it is they got selected for.[/quote]
My example with the SCOTUS justices is to point out that the perception of their value is more important than their actual value. Cashto explains it better using proper terms.

(FYI Cashto: thanks for showing me that term! And I don't think it's just "possible" to find someone capable at $300k a year, I think that a de-centralization of decision making processes and correct corporate structure could virtually eliminate the position. )

[cashto]

QUOTE (phoenix1 @ Mar 26 2019, 10:21 AM) (FYI Cashto: thanks for showing me that term! And I don't think it's just "possible" to find someone capable at $300k a year, I think that a de-centralization of decision making processes and correct corporate structure could virtually eliminate the position. )

Well, it's not like such a thing hasn't been thought of or tried before. But co-ops have not been terribly popular or successful.

There is not much evidence so far to say that they have a clear evolutionary advantage over centrally-managed companies. Now, it's possible to say that the conditions or incentives necessary to make them successful hasn't arisen yet -- living in medieval Europe, it would have been just as easy to say that republics haven't been as successful as monarchies. But then, what would those conditions or incentives be?

[zombywoof]

I dunno if I'm thinking "workers' cooperative," just more a process where the supreme "executive" power of a corporation is wielded by committee rather than an individual, and the execution of the committee decisions is left to departmental heads. But that is going down a side-path of "what could we replace the CEO system with" that isn't actually related to my point, which is my fault I know (I get nerd sniped easily).

I'm just suggesting the CEO position is not nearly as vital to the operation of a corporation as its relative compensation would suggest, and that the requisite authority and powers to maintain the operation of a corporation in the absence of a CEO could be delegated to other roles. I could be wrong, but the counterarguments I have received so far appear to be that a) generals are important and b) not one in a thousand people can be a CEO. The first I don't have a good "counterargument" to but would strongly suggest that militaries and corporations are run very differently for very good reasons so extrapolating corporate culture from military culture might not be safe, and the second I don't have evidence for or against, but it does appear to fall apart in the face of, well, *gestures at the current US President.*


To bring it back to the OP:

This student gets to stay at $University because the people at $University aren't smarter, more talented, or harder working than the people at $University2. The reputation of $University is a thing which is utterly unrelated to anything you might associate with academic success, because for the most part universities (especially big, famous, and private ones) don't give a flying $#@! about the hoards of undergrads who go there, they just want the small handful who are going to go on to be famous and/or rich.

TBH I don't understand how this college thing is a "scandal." Surprise! Some mediocre people cheated to get ahead! I've talked to a lot of perfect SAT scores and... yeah. I can't tell the difference between them and the ones who cheated. It's the difference between not knowing why the Spanish colonized the Americas and saying "oh they definitely wanted to Save Souls with Catholicism that was the Primary Reason."

[cashto]

I too didn't really understand the scandal either, probably because I wasn't under much illusion that the system was meritocratic to begin with, or that there was a duty of private college admissions boards to have objectively "fair" admission criteria.

Calculus is calculus everywhere. If what you care about is learning calculus, save yourself some money and take it at a community college, it's the exact same material. What people are paying for when they attend elite institutions isn't an education, it's access to social circles.