I stand corrected–thank you! I work in the Loop and my impression of suburban voters may be unduly skewed by interaction with elderly finance bros.
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Chicago CEOs might live in Lake County, but not everyone in Lake County is a CEO. When your elderly financiers bought or inherited their house in Kenilworth or Winnetka, their town was still closed to ethnic minorities. (A girlfriend’s father, who was a professor at Northwestern in the 60s, was once picked up by the Kenilworth police and escorted out of town because he was house hunting while Jewish.) Kenilworth isn’t a whole lot better today, but places like Deerfield have really changed.
ETA: They’re still absurdly affluent, of course.
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This reminds me of caste quotas in India. In practice, the reserved positions are almost always handed out corruptly to the rich and connected, rather than to the people they’re ostensibly supposed to help.
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If only this was the worst story I’ve heard involving privileged people, custody of children, and cash. I’d hope there will be severe penalties, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/#article/part1
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When they crack down on this, it’s going to hurt a lot of vulnerable kids (like in the last scandal, which involved faking disabilities to get testtaking accommodations.) Kids who get guardians are usually in a bad situation.
We are seriously considering taking in a 16 year old relative. We’d need guardianship to enroll her in school, get medical care, etc. But there’s no way we’d be able to help pay her college— we’ll be withdrawing from retirement accounts just to set up a room and pay her ticket out here. She wouldn’t be here long enough to get in-state tuition when she gets to college either.
She’s living like Cinderella with her dad and stepmom. They have a nice multibedroom house, but for 4 years she’s slept on a couch in the basement rec room with her clothes in bags, while she cares for her infant and toddler half sisters and scrounges her own food. They are both physically and emotionally abusive. He could definitely contribute towards her college, but realistically she’d be lucky if he even agreed to fill out a FAFSA for her. But I can’t envision a policy that would screen out the strategic guardianships in the article that wouldn’t also hit kids like Cinderella.
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Then they built fancy new sky-rise luxury dorms, a new athletic center with olympic-sized pools, tons of other amenities not needed for education, and now the price is closer to $70k/year.
All true, but bear in mind none of the undergrads actually asked for it, and all of them would have made the same decision to enroll at BU if. the dorms were good and properly shabby.
The problem is that there is an auction going on for every spot at BU, and the kids are bidding for it with borrowed money. And then the admins get more money than they know what to do with.
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When I was an undergrad, MIT had a strict policy of never, ever acknowledging any kind of estrangement between students and their parents. Precisely to avoid that kind of cynical game. Which is why in my social circle, there was a consensus that closeted gay students should stay in the closet until graduation, and that under no circumstances should the be blabbed about.
I’m too enraged to add any more here.
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This.
These relatively wealthy families defrauded 82k students who this money was earmarked for out of this support. Yes, college tuition is ridiculous. No, taking Pell Grants out of the mouths of students who had to run away from home to escape abuse (while said fraudsters voted against education funding) is NOT OK.
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Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon Spengler: 40 years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
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I’m reasonably confident in my ability to hate both the game and the players who’ve cheated in this instance.
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And I just hear rich couples among their rich cohorts, sharing tips and bragging among themselves how clever they are. Because when they do this, they’re not going to keep it a secret. The cognitive dissonance will be strong enough that they’ll need social approval and validation of their actions.
Meanwhile, they made sure in 2005 that actual non-rich people can never discharge student debt in a bankruptcy because of “abuse.”
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In cases of clear and provable fraud, apply the law and jail the fraudsters. Without being an authoritarian wanker, we need to remember not everyone is a well-intentioned citizen.
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Thisssssss
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Not every spot. They need to give us smarty-pants free rides to keep their rank up. When I was there, they had a “special” school called College of General Studies (CGS) which is where all the rich kids could just buy their way in. I never used this term, but others in the ENG, COM, etc. schools called it “Crowns, Glue, and Scissors” (CGS) 
Basically, 13th grade.
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My mom: “I don’t see why we should pay for your college if you’re just going to go there and be gay.”
Me: “You guys don’t pay anything towards my college.”
Mom:…
Literally the only advantage of having parents who couldn’t afford to pay for college (though unfortunately too middle class for decent grant aid). ETA: And despite all the time I wasted being gay, I still graduated summa cum laude.
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