Thread by @asymmetricinfo

It's a little late in the day to be starting a tweet storm on my college admissions column, but what the hey, it's spring outside, and I'm inside waiting for an edit, and I'm feeling a bit frisky.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-c…

But since it's spring, and many of you are feeling a bit frisky yourselves, no doubt, I'll limit myself to a couple of points.

First, I have never had so many commenters read a column completely backwards.

Apparently, many people took the column as an extended argument that the real people who were victimized by this were good, hardworking affluent parents who didn't cheat, and poor, poor them.

And yes, given the demographics of highly selective colleges, the slots they stole like would otherwise have gone to the children of other affluent individuals who poured all their extensive financial and social capital into grooming the brood for a good school.

But no, I was not trying to rally sympathy for this beleaguered group; I was pointing out the irony of getting angry at cheaters who rigged a game that was already heavily rigged in favor of the social caste that administers the system.

And I use "caste" rather than "class" for a reason: the allegedly meritocratic system is reproducing an increasingly hereditary social class more effectively than elite schools did in the days when a certain class of fathers put their newborn sons' names down for Groton & Harvard

There's much more about this in the column, which I urge you to read, but if you came away thinking that I approved of this development, you have gotten me exactly backwards.

Now, as to the folks who chided me from the other direction, for denigrating the achievements of youngsters who work hard for years to get into an elite school: well, in fairness, I'm one of those kids. Mama & Papa McArdle definitely weren't donating no buildings to Penn.

And both my parents were first-generation college students who attended less selective schools; I could not claim any legacy connection either.

But let's look at all the advantages I did start out with.

I had parents who valued education very highly, and raised me with the assumption that I would be going to a selective college. Our house was filled with books, so I could teach myself to read before I was allowed to cross the street by myself.

We lived in a big city, so there was more than one potential school I could attend. My parents had the social capital to know how to find good schools within the public school system & work the system to get me in.

Later, when that school broke down, they had the social and financial capital to a) recognize what had happened and b) get me out and into a private school where I spent a few years catching up to my classmates. They had the ability to tutor me in that catching up.

They understood what constituted a good school, what the admissions process looked like, what a good college essay should sound like. They had a lot of assist from all the staff at my school.

They taught me all that stuff, so when the time came to sit the tests and write the essays, I did well enough to make up for a spotty GPA. (Having been born in 1973 helped a lot; I couldn't get into any of the schools I attended given current application numbers.)

Did I in some sense earn that admission, & graduation, & admission to the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business? Sure, in the sense that I wrote those essays, I took those tests, I got the recommendations from teachers.

But if my folks hadn't raised me with the expectation of a certain kind of academic career, & put me in an environment that enabled my getting it (including, very importantly, choosing a peer group that believed Ivy League admission was the epitome of cool), would I have done it?

No. I might have been like my Mom, who got into Radcliffe, & didn't go, because she was from a small town in the middle of Western New York and didn't understand what opportunities Radcliffe could open up. Or I might have dropped out of high school, like some of my cousins.

I submit that at this point, most of the kids in the Ivy League are in this position. Yes, they did a bunch of work that got them where they are--but while the work was necessary, it was not sufficient.

For them, it was equally necessary to have parents who knew how the game was played, and taught them to play it, and bought them all the equipment and practice time they needed to win it.

And while I don't fault any parent for doing that, it's a problem for society.

And while I gestured at this in my column, I didn't have space to expand on something really important: this is mostly a problem not because institutions exist that allow an elite class to train its offspring; such institutions always have existed, and always will.

It is mostly a problem because those institutions have more and more of a chokehold on more and more parts of the economy--the most lucrative parts. As a 4 year college degree has become a requirement for more and more jobs, and a 4 year *selective* degree for many ...

We are setting ourselves up for a caste system.

My grandfather, who barely finished high school, and was not in any way academically inclined, was more financially successful than his college-educated relatives & children. How likely is such a scenario today?

*That* is the really big problem, and *that* is the problem no one wants to stare in the face. They want to slightly tinker with admissions criteria and alter the payment formulas rather than asking "How come there's no way to work your way up without a BA?"

Anyway, /endrant. The column is here. Please read it, and have a nice weekend.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-c…