Skip to content
Personal Growth

The Arms Race for Top Colleges

We are all caught up in a crazy arms race to send our kids to prestigious colleges, where the order of the day (to borrow a useful term from the Cold War) is "escalation dominance."

Is going to a so-called “better” college worth it? Is the system fair? The first question is the subject of seemingly endless study, which almost always concludes: It depends. The second question is easier to answer: Of course it isn’t fair. Despite diversity goals, scholarships, loans, all kinds of waivers of application fees, and various other leg-up programs, the entire application system is so unjust that it makes the House of Lords look like a New England town meeting. This is especially true now, when the tanking economy puts college more and more out of reach for just about everyone other than the financially secure.


Related

Up Next