Slashdot Mirror
Good SAT Scores Lead To Higher Egg Donor Prices
alphadogg writes "Analysis from Georgia Institute of Technology of college newspaper egg donor ads showed that higher payments offered to egg donors correlated with higher SAT scores. 'Holding all else equal, an increase of 100 SAT points in the score of a typical incoming student increased the compensation offered to oocyte donors at that college or university by $2,350,' writes researcher Aaron D. Levine in a paper published in the March-April issue of the Hastings Center Report. Concerned about eggs being treated as commodities, and worried that big financial rewards could entice women to ignore the risks of the rigorous procedures required for harvesting, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine discourages compensation based on donors' personal characteristics. The society also discourages any payments over $10,000."
duh
I thought this was the case with sperm donors for over 20 years. I'm surprised it took so long to apply it to the ova ... I mean other side of the transaction.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do they offer men bonuses for high SAT scores?
I don't think society has any legitimate interest at stake here that is not covered by allowing the free market to set prices for human eggs. It should be interesting to see what egg buyers will place real $ value on.
This is a surprise? Just take a look around any big name campus - there will usually be some kind of ads posted looking for egg donors. I'm a student at Columbia University and I've seen posters offering $18,000 for eggs from any Columbia student for years.
I called them and asked about what their going rate was for a high-SAT scorer like me, and they offered me $12,000!
Things went badly when I asked if the eggs had to be organic, and what size they should be, and was styrofoam OK or did they prefer paper cartons. Oh, and when they found out I was a guy.
Sexist bastards.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
The Harvard Crimson was one of three college newspapers that ran an identical classified ad seeking a woman who fit a narrow profile: younger than 29 with a GPA over 3.5 and an SAT score over 1,400.
Wouldn't one think that someone going to Harvard with a high GPA and SAT score be smart enough to weigh the risks? Furthermore, these aren't desperate people from a starving nation; they are kids going to some of the most prestigious schools in the country.
This should lead to geeks lessening jocks' reproductive advantages.
Egg donation: yet another way that a high SAT score help you get through college.
Each woman has two ovaries with 300,000 eggs each. At $35,000 per egg, that's $21-billion per woman. You'd think more women would cash in on this.
I think that the worries expressed betray a double standard. How does it make sense to worry about high-SAT women "ignoring the health dangers" of forced ovulation, when you don't worry about low-SAT women ignoring the same dangers and getting a tenth of the money for the ordeal? To be clear: these people don't want women to stop donating eggs. They don't want high-SAT women donating eggs for a lot of money. But the risk in each donation is the same!
In any case, an egg donor will suddenly get a quick and large pile of money. I think the real question should be: How will the money be spent? If the donor gets $50,000 and uses it to help pay for three semesters of her Princeton tuition, I don't see a problem. If another donor, who is not in college, spends $5,000 on shoes and handbags, I don't see a great deal of good having been done.
I know someone who has donated an egg, and she was actually pretty sick for a part of the procedure. Smart women in Princeton, who have other options, will not want to undergo something like this unless you offer them more money. That just seems like a fact. But if the people who want the eggs have the money, and their satisfaction is increased by the knowledge that their donor is academically talented, and the donor herself will use the money to develop her talents further, it's a clear case of "everyone wins."
So why does the American Society for Reproductive Medicine need to shit on this optimal outcome? I think they should be encouraging it!
Back in college our daily newspaper had standing offers in the $15-50k range for eggs of a woman above a certain height, below a certain weight, and above a certain SAT score.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
DO NOT donate sperm, it can bite you in the ass later. There have been court cases where the mother who was artificially inseminated with donated sperm was later able to track down the man who donated the sperm, and successfully sue him for child support.
This is just another example of where the family court system is biased against men. Women automatically get custody of children, or more custody than the man, unless they are on crack or something and this can be proven. Alimony is a total insult; it's the notion that a woman has a legal right to get used to a particular lifestyle that her husband provided, and therefore her former husband has to pay her money after the divorce to make sure she doesn't have to get used to what her income alone can provide. If that was really fair, the woman would have to continue having sex with the man after the divorce, since that was the lifestyle he was used to when married, but fairness is not the goal here. Imagine a couple suing the female egg donor for child support after using her egg to produce a baby. It would be laughed out of court. But women have successfully sued men for child support for donating sperm.
Warning to men - it might look like easy money for something you do anyway (masturbating) but seriously, it's a bad idea.
It seems ironic that women of higher learning who might, as some suggest, fund their education from their ovaries, would need to go to a fertility clinic after their successful education and careers that kept them way from the maternity ward until their 30s or 40s.
a wedgie and that's not a bonus.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Maybe you missed the part about holding everything else equal.
"all else equal, an increase of 100 SAT points in the score of a typical incoming student increased the compensation offered to oocyte donors at that college or university by $2,350"
So I would presume they would compare across the same schools and adjust accordingly.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Wait, this sounds like a movie. Two Brothers, betting on the heredity vs. environment thing, something about a dollar... Oh well, this sounds old and lame.
So SAT scores mean what in terms of offspring? That the person had better opportunities to learn? They were cared for and had an environment that fostered education? That they could handle word problems?
What if the consumers buying the egg are morons? Yeah, paying that much for a donor egg would render your intellect questionable. I think, like some of these other posts, that the genetic makeup would be at a premium. I want characteristic X, Y, Z not that it came from a person
with a high SAT. Then again, we can always start a Eugenics War and see if the smart folks prevail. Now for me, I'm looking for:
Cross between Rachquel Welch, Barbara Eden, Anna Nicole Smith and Tylene Buck. And to make it simpler, I'm just looking for manual modes of dealing with my offspring, nothing artificial is required.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Smart enough? Possibly, but remember that this guy went to both Yale (BA) and Harvard (MBA). Don't know about his GPA or SAT scores though... or whether that says more/less about him or the schools.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
SATs over 750 each
Certified Mensa IQ
Concert pianist
Well endowed
High metablosim - hint, hint
Blonde, blue eyes
Starting bid: $youcantaffordit
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
You pay for quality, and this is just an example of that. You wouldn't pay $15 for a McD's burger, at least most people wouldn't, but a Red Robin (or similar high end) one could command that sort of price.
I know some people might think that's horrible, but the cold-hard truth is that some people are higher quality than others. We might be equal before the law, and have equal rights, but when people are given a choice in potential breeding partners, they will opt for as high as they can afford. In the social realm, that means relying on their own value as judged by whatever criteria (looks, smarts, social success as measured by wealth, social success as measured by "charm", etc) to get as good a "product" as possible. The pricing in this article just reflects the ability to turn one set of attributes into cash, and people's willingness to pay for certain attributes.
So we know that certain people have higher risks of developing certain diseases based on genetic factors, such as gender (color-blindness in men) or 'race' (Tay-Sachs in Ashkenazi jews). People are even willing to pay more for eggs or sperm from people with high SAT scores or PhD's. Yet, when a Harvard University President suggests that maybe certain aspects of intelligence are based on genetics, it causes an uproar.
I'm not suggesting that a certain race or sex is inferior to another, but why is the mere suggestion that intelligence is based on genetics (and therefore gives inherent benefits to certain genetic groups) considered so taboo? Can't we at least consider, discuss, and perform rigorous research on the subject?
I might be trolled for this, but he wasn't always a bumbling idiot. Not that I've voted for him or condone his choices but as a younger man, he wasn't what you would call stupid.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
This is the funny thing. In the "How do I get an entry level programming job" the university you go to seems to make a difference. But when we look at individual cases, we can see clear exceptions where the school does nothing to help the individual. It is only in aggregate that the school's name is valuable. This is partly due to applicant self-selection, and partly do to the entrance process selecting people based on prior performance.
I had the option to go to a school with a minimum requirement of 12 on the ACT, increased to 14 "to stress the importance of academics" or something, coincidentally the same year that they added 2 points to ACT scores pretty much across the board, so my 34 was equivalent to my older brother's 32.
People who don't meet the minimum requirements for Ivy League don't get in... unless your life is exceptional, meaning made up of exceptions.
http://www.monkeydyne.com/bushresume/early.html
So did they bend the rules to let him in? Did the top-notch universities help him? Did he tarnish the name of those institutions? There is no obvious answer, but it is obvious that universities only hold prestige in aggregate, not in individual cases. And anyone who makes decisions based on the institution attended is a fool.
If you can get in, networking and cronyism are the benefits of Ivy League education, not the value of the education. Secondary is hanging out with people who are as smart as you are, which is easier when you attend a university which suits you.
You just need a signed document saying so.
Most of those cases have been closed now, in favour of the men not paying child support anymore.
Nothing signed by anyone today, can bind to a person created tomorrow. If the woman who gives birth to a child of donated sperm and her spouse die, the state can and will come after the sperm donor for child support.
What a lot of sperm banks use instead, is basically an insurance policy against successful litigation. As long as the insurance company (which may be the sperm bank itself), doesn't go under, you're safe.
I don't know about that. This link, The Resume of George W. Bush (the early years), from another follow-up post, would seem to indicate otherwise. I can't authenticate its accuracy, but have seen some of the items listed in other articles.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Smart enough? Possibly, but remember that this guy went to both Yale (BA) and Harvard (MBA). Don't know about his GPA or SAT scores though... or whether that says more/less about him or the schools.
It takes some brains to convince everyone that you're stupid, to make them underestimate you, so that behind the scenes you can do whatever you like with little or no scrutiny. It takes brains and a ruthless determination to get your way no matter what it takes, even at the expense of widespread ridicule. It also takes some brains to exploit a climate of fear and use time-tested tactics (such as calling your opponents "unpatriotic") to virtually guarantee that the Congress will pass whatever legistlation you recommend with little or no concern for the Constitution.
It takes brains to do all of this. It also takes a profound lack of wisdom to have the desire to do this. An amount of inhumanity helps, too, for disregarding all the damage (sorry, "collateral damage") such policies have caused. No, G.W. Bush was not stupid, in the same way that serial killers are not stupid. Pathological, lustful for power, indifferent to suffering, and indifferent to our nation's traditions, sure, but not stupid.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
My coworker suggests that the process involves a roughly six month process of pretty nasty drugs, which makes the money a lot less attractive.
Are these offers generally for a few eggs, for fifty, for one which implants properly, for one which comes to term, etc?
I am frustrated to note that my Linux box does not allow me to cat /dev/mem
# cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama /dev/mem: Operation not permitted
cat:
This means I cannot check for llamas myself, and yet your signature makes me suspicious that my RAM, too, may be full of llamas. This would explain the recent slowness of my box.
Obviously one can't scrub the llamas out of RAM without finding them, but are there any open source programs which encourage the llamas to leave?
So they're worried that the smart people are going to act stupid and risk their health when offered an extra $2300?
Regression estimates are orthogonal effects, i.e., they are independent of the other factors included in the model. Have you even had a basic statistics class?
Unless you have, why are you statistically critiquing a study that surely several real statisticians already have?
Based on the (unverified) resume for GWB posted in another follow-up (some of which I have read elsewhere), I'd probably believe otherwise. However, his rise to greatness, despite massive, repeated failures, was apparently due to the support of friends, family and those around him, like Cheney.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It does take brains, but not necessarily his. I always suspected that pre-2006 Bush was little more than a pawn of Dick Cheney. It was only after the Republican Congressional defeat that he started to defy him (ousting Cheney's old buddy Rumsfeld, taking more moderate stances on Cheney's favorite issues, etc.).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
For some weird reason, I'm irked by the standard disclaimer in the article that discourages egg donation for (implied) paying your way through college. Risky as any surgical procedure may be, it's a far cry from any Ayn-Rand-gone-amuk dystopian cliche.
(says one geek with laissez-faire ethics...)
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Or you could actually adopt. That would be the sensible solution.
Exactly - he got "born again". I think that's fundie code for "remove 2/3rds of your brain so you don't wonder why Jeebus worries so much about teh gheyz and just follow instructions".
Lots of Smarts != Lots of Common Sense
In fact, I have somewhat noticed the reverse in many situations. Granted, a smart person has the capacity to better think about a situation and reason out all the possible problems, but, most people don't do that to begin with.
Besides, high SAT scores != smart, either.
The whole egg donation market is skewed towards the woman receiving the eggs. There is simply no data collection to see how these donors are doing health wise in the long run after going through an egg donation cycle. An egg donation cycle means that a donor gets injected with an ungodly and unnatural amount of hormones in order to hyper stimulate her eggs into producing mass quantities of eggs. This large amount of hormones has been known to cause cancer to donors down the road and only now in the internet age, do we start to see women sharing their egg donor horror stories. Currently there are bills in Arizona and Tennessee that are attempting to create a national database of egg donors in order to track a donor's long term health and more accurately expose the dangers.
"Now, what's wrong with adopting a child who has direct need, one from a broken home or some other set of unfortunate circumstances."
It doesn't lead humanity down the path of designer children, and the ensuing orgy of science fiction awesomeness that will inevitably follow?
Not surprisingly, higher SAT scores correlate with a higher eventual annual income, something to the tune of $20k/yr per 40 points in the combined SAT score (critical reading + math + writing). Assuming wages increase at the inflation rate of 3%, income is earned from ages 23 through 65, and a discount rate of 10%, the average additional lifetime earning potential of +100 points equates to $162k in present dollars.
Obviously not all eggs result in a baby; only about 10% of eggs result in a live birth. Even so, the economic value of higher SAT scores makes the $2350 look pretty trivial.
As for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine discouraging "compensation based on donors' personal characteristics"...well, they're exactly not raising my kid are they?
You could help produce numerous bright and healthy people. Instead, people of inferior quality will be created.
Hopefully you will at least go the natural route. You can consider it to be a career option that contributes more to society than anything else you could possibly do. You can produce at least a dozen wonderful children.
If that's not your thing, please reconsider the egg donation. Never mind the money; this is something you can do to benefit the world.
Concerned about eggs being treated as commodities ... the American Society for Reproductive Medicine discourages compensation based on donors' personal characteristics.
Basing compensation on characteristics of the egg causes differentiation in the market, and prevents eggs from becoming a commodity. The ASRM is making no sense.
Damn. 1180's not so bad, so I didn't bother retaking it. I still got into the university of my choice.
Learned a big lesson, though. Purple Microdot can be pretty sketchy stuff, and its all SETTING.
Throw the horsie some sugar cubes! Oh LOOK! It's all PAISLEY!!!
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
We're talking about humans here, are we not? Human females don't lay fucking "eggs." Female humans produce an ova; an ovum.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
If you do allow people to sell their kidneys, would you also provide funds so that poor people could compete on equal footing with the rich when it comes to getting a life-saving transplant, so there's rough parity in opportunity to survive, much like there is with food?
I don't see why. It's not fair that somebody who has worked to earn money be unable to use it. That's like taking the money away.
There also aren't tiers of organs - it's pretty much one-size-fits-all - so in the case of a free market for vital organs you wind up with the rich getting to live and the poor getting nothing
Nope.
First there is the issue of imperfect matches. The worse the match, the more anti-rejection drugs need to be used and the more the organ will degrade.
Then there are other issues. The donar may be old, a smoker, infected, dead for quite a while, etc. Surgeons are transplanting kidneys with cancer (chop the cancer off and the kidney is good!) and lungs from smokers.
And here I thought teaching SAT classes was the best way to get money for my abilities. Guess I've been doing it wrong.
The parent is right about kidneys and every other donate-able organ. Receiving an organ costs $$$$$. Everyone else in the organ supply pipeline gets paid -- except the donor. It's no wonder that lack of donations is the bottleneck.
The danger of abuse and fraud can be kept to a reasonable level for $ (or at most $$) worth of enforcement. That's a bargain compared to the overall $$$$$ spent on each transplant, let alone compared to the value of the lives saved.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)