Chow Time

In a break from all Elizabeth Warren, all the time, the Boston Globe of October 9 featured a front page story (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/10/09/chinese-family-lawsuit-former-harvard-professor-promised-admissions-help-took-million/7tfbug9YlmW5LR4EqumIFN/story.html) about a Hong Kong family named Chow who paid $2,000,000 to a college consultant and former member of the Harvard faculty named Zimny who was supposed to get their two sons into Harvard. He didn't. The Chows are now suing Zimny in U. S. District Court for fraud. 

All sides in this morality play 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 to 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, pioneers 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.

Second, 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 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.