professional college confidential.

Even worse than the temporary psychological distortion is, as Lemann argued in “The Big Test,” the permanent sense of entitlement the admissions game provides. Winners can plausibly claim they participated in a brutal competition (even if many potential competitors were never told about it). So we owe no one anything. Many of the people I went to school with became doctors, public advocates, television writers who bring laughter to the American people. But most of them became, like my friend who believed that getting into Harvard was the hardest thing in life, investment bankers. We meritocrats have not, generally speaking, used our fantastic test-taking abilities to build a more equitable world. In fact, buoyed by a sense of the fairness of the process, we may have done the reverse.

-NYTimes, Keith Gessen March 16 2008

Replace Harvard & SAT with [my profession] and [admissions test], and the T/F answer is T+

Ironically, the people who were already most entitled upon entering my college are the most likely to validate their accomplishments with a sense of "I did that" rather than any attribution to (a) having unlimited assets, both monetary and invaluable like social connections, (b) having parents who selectively groomed them by sending them to elite schools from a young age, (c) having a family able to bail them out of any youthful mistakes they did make.

For example, my ex was expelled from high school early on and his parents responded by getting him admitted to the most elite boarding school in his area, fronting thousands of dollars in tuition per year. Other kids I know were charged with youthful transgressions and their parents produced massive fees for a lawyer who got the charge thrown out.

I was in a class this week and someone said that their parents had always expected them to go to professional college, so they were happy they could "make good" on the investment put into them. The same guy has admitted that he was happy to see tuition go up because he knew a large segment of the population would not be able to afford it, therefore applications would decrease and he would compete against a smaller pool. You know, take the smart poor kids out.