ABSTRACT
Top students are treated as pampered consumers whose preferences should be satisfied—the idea that they're really neophytes whose preferences are formed by a college education is generally dismissed as quaint. More controversial is the way that many schools use financial aid as leverage to recruit students from relatively wealthy backgrounds with their relatively high sat scores. Students from richer families gain from it and poorer applicants lose, because a college bent on the strategic use of its financial-aid dollars can almost always buy a student with the same or better sat scores for less money than a poor applicant would require. Nonetheless, even public schools, where tuitions are lower, are trying to raise or maintain their status by taking the same shortcut and going after high-scoring students. Students write out answers to a hundred potential questions and do a videotaped trial run for each of the six or eight schools to which they apply.
