I attended an elite private high school ($30,000 a year). The school gamed everything for them. It wrote their essays, created leadership positions for everyone

I attended an elite private high school ($30,000 a year). The school gamed everything for them. It wrote their essays, created leadership positions for everyone, and made sure to spread the applications around so that every student in the references could be “once in a generation.” One guy who went to Princeton used a flagship story of “building a forest”. The school was redoing its grounds and hired a bunch of homeless people to do it as they worked for cheap cash. They let him “oversee” it as a social initiative. Another kid got into Columbia by creating a “nationwide startup innovation movement.” His parents paid the school to book all these convention centres and they flew him out to chill at these fictional events. They claimed all the funds from the events went to startups. They claimed to find over 50 startups and sent each a small check for $30. They sent random startups $30 and used it as a claim to funding innovation. With grades, they had an internal grade to allow for actually rigorous education, but then they would multiply the grade by 1.2 to get your “public school grade.” That’s the grade reported to universities. Oh and the teacher left the room for AP tests and we were taught how to efficiently “come to group conclusions.” The only thing that kept them from doing that kind of stuff for everyone was the SAT as plenty of AP National Scholars couldn’t crack 1800 on the damn thing. We won over a million dollars in our 60 person class in scholarship money off these absurdities as most of them don’t ask about the SAT.