Yes!! Exactly this, there are only so many spots at Those Kinds of Schools and there are a LOT of kids who are competing for those spots. Significantly more than there were when I went through school, in fact, because kids apply to more schools in general and there are WAY more applications to the super elite schools in particular.
And this:
Of course that's just the exclusive ones. One of the schools I applied to, as far as I'm aware, took in everyone in the city (probably also the county) who wanted to go there and had graduated high school and could pay tuition; that one had an application form that was about two pages long.
Yeah, and that's a lot of what this book is about, how some schools have this incredible scarcity going on (and have jiggled things to make it like that) and how a lot of schools don't.
And then we get into financial aid and it all gets so much worse. (I got into every university I applied to. They all offered financial aid. The one I wanted to go to the most in the world didn't offer me as much financial aid as I needed. So I didn't go there, and I actually do regret it to this day that I didn't take out loans or try to transfer late, which is not usually how the story goes.)
Oh oof, I'm sorry. And yeah, I hadn't appreciated before reading this book how wildly unfair it really is that there's such an inequity of information between schools and students as to how much all of this actually costs! (I mean, I knew this was a thing and that it sucked, it just somehow hadn't occurred to me that the benefit is all on one side of the scale here, so to speak.)
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Date: 2024-11-05 01:21 am (UTC)And this:
Of course that's just the exclusive ones. One of the schools I applied to, as far as I'm aware, took in everyone in the city (probably also the county) who wanted to go there and had graduated high school and could pay tuition; that one had an application form that was about two pages long.
Yeah, and that's a lot of what this book is about, how some schools have this incredible scarcity going on (and have jiggled things to make it like that) and how a lot of schools don't.
And then we get into financial aid and it all gets so much worse. (I got into every university I applied to. They all offered financial aid. The one I wanted to go to the most in the world didn't offer me as much financial aid as I needed. So I didn't go there, and I actually do regret it to this day that I didn't take out loans or try to transfer late, which is not usually how the story goes.)
Oh oof, I'm sorry. And yeah, I hadn't appreciated before reading this book how wildly unfair it really is that there's such an inequity of information between schools and students as to how much all of this actually costs! (I mean, I knew this was a thing and that it sucked, it just somehow hadn't occurred to me that the benefit is all on one side of the scale here, so to speak.)