The Washington Post has a piece on USC, epicenter of the “pay for class” college admissions scandal. USC is often described/ridiculed as a playground for rich kids, and the Post says there’s plenty to back up the stereotype:
There is, to be sure, plenty of privilege. Campus restaurants serve acai bowls, poke and salmon salads. A nearby shopping center includes a store that peddles fancy gummy bears and skin-care products. The bookstore has a “cupcake ATM” that dispenses gourmet cupcakes instead of cash.
“Fancy gummy bears” and “gourmet cupcakes”? That’s all you came up with? Doesn’t sound like Moriah Balingit, Susan Svrluga, and Nick Anderson burned a lot of shoe leather on this one.
Afterwords
Seriously, this is pathetic. This is southern California, folks. There weren’t kids wearing Prada running shoes? Gucci shades? Platinum iPhones? I was in one of those artsy Pennsylvania towns near Princeton a couple of years ago and saw two Lamborghinis parked in the same block.1 Southern California has got to do better.
Afterwords II (more serious, this time)
What is, uh, “tacky” is that schools like USC have myriads of sports teams that kids coming from low-income backgrounds, whether urban or rural, have never even heard of, much less played. Water “polo”? That’s almost as bad as real polo. And, far worse, Stanford has a sailing team. I would hope (a lot) that these la-di-da schools that give a kid a leg up for being a water polo prospect would also give an “athlete’s discount” to any kid coming from a low-income school. But considering that they have to make room for the 1500+ SAT kids and the “no financial aid needed” kids, I wonder if they do.
At the American Conservative, Daniel McGraw explains how the sports hustle, for women's "crew" in particular, works.
1. How irritating would it be to be one of two Lamborghini owners in the same small town? If there were three you could form a club, but two would just be obnoxious.
