Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth my U.S. state tried to stem the brain drain to out-of-state universities. They offered big money scholarships to anybody wh

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth my U.S. state tried to stem the brain drain to out-of-state universities. They offered big money scholarships to anybody who graduated in their school's top ten. The higher the rank, the more money. This was pre-internet, but people still tracked rankings across the state. One kid would transfer schools to bump their rank two spots. That would cascade to a flurry of transfers. All the top students knew where their GPA would place them in every other high school in the state and everybody was watching for movement. Eventually, they capped the program to be based on your rank midway through senior year to prevent 100s of transfers in the last month of the school year before graduation. Which of course, just moved the activity to the last month in the semester before the last semester before graduation. But then you had to maintain your GPA in the new school for a whole semester, so it involved more risk. Now that I've told this whole story, let me say that none of it is true. Or, at least, I don't really know how much of it is true. I do know that it was the buzz among students when I was in school. I never entered that world very deeply. I'm pretty sure that it did happen a bit. Probably not as much as it was talked about.