I read yesterday in The Globe that Wesleyan University will no longer offer "need blind" admissions. Now this article. Regular, hard working people will stand less and less of a chance to do anything in this society since we can't buy out way in. The Gilded Age is, indeed, back, and there seems no sign of it abating. 

A fool and his money are quickly parted. 

A bit surprised at the vitriol spilled about the parents.  There's nothing in the article to suggest that they were 'helicopter parents', hovering over their sons in New England prep schools while they lived in Hong Kong.  They seem to be more like rich and clueless about the US admission process.  A little research and media literacy would've gone a long way, though mostly they have my pity. That website is an embarrassment; it still says it was last updated in 2007.  It looks as though it was created specifically to target the Chows and their money.  

For the commenter rueing another Gilded Age, having wealthy patrons grease the academic wheels through donations is an age-old tactic. Ironically, it seems that the Chows' donations never made it to the targeted institutions, and yet their sons ended up in good schools.  

All sides in this dispute deserve each other's throats. First, you have the helicopter parents, more accurately the ""Blackhawk Down" parents, the Asian version of which can be especially hovering and obnoxious. They normally produce 2.0 children whom they regard as ornaments of their own success. At least one of these usually develops nicely into what has become a much lampooned figure on the American prep school and collegiate scene: the bright, driven, personality-challenged, highly micro-managed Asian Loser who took the SATs a dozen times. Then you have the academic charlatans like Zimny. Is it any wonder that people like him would stride into the void which nature abhors and exploit frantic gullibles like the Chows? Or that they would pay him for the privilege? Of course the Chows thought that they could buy their way into Harvard and other schools like Harvard, because .... The so-called elite colleges and universities like Fair Harvard, pioneer of such concepts as the "stretch gift" and the "development" candidate, provide the environment for this sort of absurd drama. Anyone familiar with Ivy League admissions knows two things. First, that the ranks of Ivy League graduates are filled with examples of undeserving sons and daughters of the plutocracy. (Where do you think all this money comes from that pays people like Elizabeth Warren and others $350,000 per year to teach one course?) This is not necessarily a bad thing. These "C" students provide much color. Besides, they frequently go on to provide jobs for the "A" and "B" students. But the sustained preference for money over Veritas over the long haul erodes the spirit of an institution, prompting the following correct observation, certainly accurate in Harvard's case: reputation lags performance; it lags it on the way up, and it lags it on the way down. But the sustained academic bubble of the past 40 year is, happily, about to burst, as more and more parents come to realize about schools like Harvard something of what the Chows came to realize about Zimny: the payment of $55,000 per year in tuition for 4 years is a hoax, that buys only a label and a smug sense of security, not an education.

Makes you sick doesn't it?