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Everyone is talking about the college admissions scandal, with most people observing that the real issue is all the legal ways affluent parents give their kids a leg up 1/ nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/…
One take I haven't seen emphasized, however, is how deeply this whole thing is tied to the fundamental hypocrisy of US society: we're a class-ridden country that likes to imagine that it's a meritocracy 2/
Alesina et al have a nice chart comparing perceived odds of going from the bottom to the top quintile with reality (yes, I know there are some methodological critiques, but the point seems right) 3/ scholar.harvard.edu/alesina/public… 
We have the least social mobility in the advanced world -- largely because we have so much inequality to start with –, but pretend that we have the most. That's an environment in which rich parents will make extraordinary efforts to pass on their status 4/
If you're really, really rich you can do this legally (although how you got rich may be another story) 5/ propublica.org/article/the-st…
And if your child is in fact talented, various privileges denied to equally talented children from less affluent families may do the trick. But outright corruption was bound to be part of the story 6/
