Peregrine wrote:
And this is the key to it all: the problem is not that rich people are buying their way into college, it's that the kind-of-rich are trying to take advantage of a privilege that the really-rich don't want to share.
And the schools didn't get their cut
No I am thoroughly enjoying this brief moment of justice, even if worse offenders float above it all, at least some were scooped up.
The only thing that irks me are the commentators trying to ask if an ivy league (or similar) degree is really worth all this, and the answer is yes, really, truly yes.
Time is always limited and 'what school did you go to' tells people a lot in one word. I've seen it in cut throat, supposedly meritocratic private industries where unless your answer was on a very, very short list, nothing else mattered.
I'm a public school kid (barring a brief and regretaible dalliance with NYU) and know damn well that if I had more ambition I would get myself into a graduate or executive program at one of the right schools (or at least try). And if I ever say otherwise I'm deluding myself.
Besides that, even if you can show that education at a state school is just as good, there's the connections issue. Mark Zuckerberg started his little website company in a dorm room in Harvard, yay. Well that's a lot easier when your dorm mates come from the sort of families that can drop seven figures in start up money for you, or connect you with mentors and contacts who can raise things to the next level. I'm sure there's someone somewhere who started the CUNY-Queens-Connection.com but without those contacts it would never be a world wide corporation with a billion users.
Kyoto Secunda and her clone sister still have a few years before this is an issue, but yeah, that is the score. You can do fine without the top schools in your resume, you can always go for grad school, but getting to the top... it's a big leg up if not invaluable.
