A spicy translation of WSJ's feature on the lucrative "elite" college admissions consulting game and its top hustler - Crimson Education CEO Jamie Beaton
“Full circle moment when their kid gets subjected to Maoist struggle sessions on campus, only one generation removed from them escaping Communism”
True story. My parents escaped Hungarian communism, were so proud to see their son go to Harvard, my history 101 class freshman year was taught by a Stalinist who said the holodomor never happened. F all those people. Ps Vivek was my classmate. You’d be surprised by how counterproductively radicalizing the constant leftist groupthink can be…
Prof Peter E Gordon, an avowed Marxist (you don’t have to hide that sort of thing to be employed in polite society, alas - in fact, he is a renowned Marxist and Critical Theory intellectual), you can get a recent taste of him here:
If you don’t care to wade through pages about Adorno (and I don’t blame you), some highlights:
“The evangelical Right in the U.S. is an apologist for corporate greed, with the result being that they betray the message of the charismatic religious leader they claim as their founder (a religious revolutionary, who embraced the weak, the ill, and the outcast)”
“Democracy has never been fully realized, surely not in the U.S., and it is being challenged from the Right by a rising movement of authoritarian populism around the globe. Unless one cleaves to the ludicrous old myth of American exceptionalism, it seems that the only responsible stance for those of us on the Left is to remain aware of the horrors that could replace liberal democracy.”
“Another area of concern is voting rights. Today the stated ideals of American democracy are being betrayed by one of the two major political parties that control the U.S. They’re doing so systematically, state by state, to disenfranchise the poor, the non-white, and the disabled. Many of the most powerless depend on the system of voting by mail, and many of the states where the Right is strongest are now dismantling that system.”
Etc etc.
This is who Harvard feeds its empty-headed impressionable freshmen to
As a follow-up, you could do a whole post just on that extremely sinister Platypus 1917 organization. I mean, the bastards name themselves after the year of the Bolshevik revolution, their about me page openly embraces Marx Lenin and Trotsky, openly says they don’t care about communism’s death toll (“let the dead bury the dead” and “Our actions might redeem their suffering yet”!!!).
If it were a neo-Nazi organization, it would have been hounded out of society. Instead it apparently does friendly interviews with famous Ivy League professors. Creepy!
I am also an escaped Eastern European... We are the West's Early Warning Radar for this bullshit. Just like we were for the Russian thing - they didn't listen to us on that one either.
Luckily my education was in the 90s and I have no kids to cultify.
So basically he culturally appropriated the Tiger Moms' approach, and slapped a ridiculous price on it (because everyone knows whatever costs more is better, Marketing 101). Here, status-conscious parents, I'll save you 200K:
-Be black
-Be a victim
-Publish a memoir of being a tween communist at your high-performing private school for black communists of means
-Be Angry, Very Angry about everything, all the time, and make videos to document your Anger (Greta Thunberg is getting old, after all)
Talk about demoralized! These children’s lives sound sad and bereft of childhood fun. And what happens after admittance? More tutors, more striving, more competing to end up with an unfulfilling job on Wall Street to restart the same dreary process with their own children—if they deign to have any based on their own meaningless experience.
Although I have many complaints about my native Canada, no one much cares where you obtained your undergraduate degree as all the universities are basically the same. For most, you complete a basic application and submit your grades and, more often than not, there’s at least one school willing to accept you. Additionally, at fees ranging from $5-$7K per annum, student debt is manageable. So glad my own children were not subjected to this insanity.
My husband went to an Ivy and now serves as treasurer for his local alum club. He said most of the people active in the alum club were doing it to give their own kids a leg up on getting into the same Ivy. They’re all very wealthy and connected—and hell bent to get their kids admitted. (We’re not—and we didn’t send our kids to Ivies.)
I am now mostly embarrassed to say I went to an Ivy, they have all gone the tubes with woke DEI garbage. Back in the day we busted ass to make it, but at least without being hassled by DEI screwballs.
Back in my father's day (the Fifties), MIT would advise some students to take a year of prep school before starting at MIT - apparently they would identify traits in a prospective student that made them think he (most often males back then) would be a successful engineer. So, they were picking the person and not the accomplishments.
My undergrad school had a similar plan (in the Eighties) for students that may have needed a little more prep work for the freshman curriculum, but otherwise had the spark to be good professionals.
Unfortunately, it is probably easier to look at accomplishment data rather than to put in the effort to consider the whole student.
Insightful and accurate comment, and yes, set up for success: a person with spark that will innovate and get things done.
There were many who were more book smart than me, but I was fortunate to have 2 professors who recognized my potential. Now it's all DEI and identity politics first. Highly inefficient to say the least.
I'm there with you... only difference is that I'm not mostly embarrassed - I'm embarrassed. I went to one, and graduated from one but never ever bring it up.
Well thank goodness our elites are grooming their children to improve the lot of humanity. I suppose they could instead raise their children to become a mensch like Norman Borlaug, the Man Who Saved a Billion Lives.
I can't imagine a more miserable existence on the inside. The outside will be great, but they will spend their entire lives in competition, anxiety, and emptiness. I was pretty hard on my son and he's done great, but this is just a line too far. I may have actually overdone it a bit myself.
Everything about this is repulsive and depressing, but I just have to nitpick one thing. Elite universities don't put students in debt. Undergrads get a full ride at Harvard if their families make less than 85k and pay less than 10% of family income of their parents make between 85 and 150k. If you come from an upper/upper middle class family and you can't leverage a Harvard degree into a high-paying job, then there's something wrong with you. It's the consolation schools for kids who couldn't get into Ivies that bleed you dry, like NYU.
So much competition for so few spaces, but really, as is noted here, smart and competitive students would already be doing what these consultants suggest. But! A few hundred thousand to assure oneself that all the desirable measures have been taken seems to be money well spent for some. More power to them and to the niche market Beaton is tapping. One born every minute, as the old saying goes.
Is it really so different when someone like Rob Henderson enlists aid in gaining admission to (who would have guessed) Yale? Not so much of a spend, but as Henderson tells it, there was no spend to spend.
Much the same would be true of Vance. Although anyone with a Maw-Maw like his deserves an Ivy degree.
It is such a shame that we seem to have run out of social satirists. These goings on are as fertile ground as Wall Street and Silicon Valley, skewered so richly by Wolfe and Judge, respectively.
You're being unfair to RH. He had a truly hard upbringing and went to uni on the GI bill. He is exactly the kind of dude these leg-ups were for before they were bastardised. At least he has made a genuine intellectual contribution, Vance seems an opportunist who went after the money and grovelled to Don to get the veep gig.
40 mins ago·edited 40 mins agoLiked by Yuri Bezmenov
Surely it is a shot at the contacts list, to move one's child into the ranks of the ruling caste, who are eaten vs. the ones who eat.
The families vulnerable to lawfare, debanking, and bank-rupting, third-world heathcare vs, those who are not locked in, have access to Ivermectin, and get the saline jab, and the TARP money.
All it takes is one child to make it, and the whole family is safe.
A good friend just got a plum appointment as the chief of staff for the head of a very prestigious medical school. I've sent him this article with orders to get his boss to read it! I'm now worried because I sent it off before the article got to the DEI snark - it may get him fired...
“Full circle moment when their kid gets subjected to Maoist struggle sessions on campus, only one generation removed from them escaping Communism”
True story. My parents escaped Hungarian communism, were so proud to see their son go to Harvard, my history 101 class freshman year was taught by a Stalinist who said the holodomor never happened. F all those people. Ps Vivek was my classmate. You’d be surprised by how counterproductively radicalizing the constant leftist groupthink can be…
How was Vivek in college? Who was the holodomor denialist?
He was a decent tennis player!
Prof Peter E Gordon, an avowed Marxist (you don’t have to hide that sort of thing to be employed in polite society, alas - in fact, he is a renowned Marxist and Critical Theory intellectual), you can get a recent taste of him here:
https://platypus1917.org/2022/11/01/traces-of-different-colors-an-interview-with-peter-e-gordon/
If you don’t care to wade through pages about Adorno (and I don’t blame you), some highlights:
“The evangelical Right in the U.S. is an apologist for corporate greed, with the result being that they betray the message of the charismatic religious leader they claim as their founder (a religious revolutionary, who embraced the weak, the ill, and the outcast)”
“Democracy has never been fully realized, surely not in the U.S., and it is being challenged from the Right by a rising movement of authoritarian populism around the globe. Unless one cleaves to the ludicrous old myth of American exceptionalism, it seems that the only responsible stance for those of us on the Left is to remain aware of the horrors that could replace liberal democracy.”
“Another area of concern is voting rights. Today the stated ideals of American democracy are being betrayed by one of the two major political parties that control the U.S. They’re doing so systematically, state by state, to disenfranchise the poor, the non-white, and the disabled. Many of the most powerless depend on the system of voting by mail, and many of the states where the Right is strongest are now dismantling that system.”
Etc etc.
This is who Harvard feeds its empty-headed impressionable freshmen to
As a follow-up, you could do a whole post just on that extremely sinister Platypus 1917 organization. I mean, the bastards name themselves after the year of the Bolshevik revolution, their about me page openly embraces Marx Lenin and Trotsky, openly says they don’t care about communism’s death toll (“let the dead bury the dead” and “Our actions might redeem their suffering yet”!!!).
If it were a neo-Nazi organization, it would have been hounded out of society. Instead it apparently does friendly interviews with famous Ivy League professors. Creepy!
I am also an escaped Eastern European... We are the West's Early Warning Radar for this bullshit. Just like we were for the Russian thing - they didn't listen to us on that one either.
Luckily my education was in the 90s and I have no kids to cultify.
So basically he culturally appropriated the Tiger Moms' approach, and slapped a ridiculous price on it (because everyone knows whatever costs more is better, Marketing 101). Here, status-conscious parents, I'll save you 200K:
-Be black
-Be a victim
-Publish a memoir of being a tween communist at your high-performing private school for black communists of means
-Be Angry, Very Angry about everything, all the time, and make videos to document your Anger (Greta Thunberg is getting old, after all)
Boom! Pick your Ivy.
You're welcome!
Yuri the First was right. The takeover of the educational system is a principal stop on the demoralization highway.
Two doctorates and two masters from 2020-2023? Has anyone vetted the CV?
I thought the same thing. Complete BS. 🙄
Exactly. Isnt’t online commerce wonderful? You can just buy what you want from anywhere in the world.
Talk about demoralized! These children’s lives sound sad and bereft of childhood fun. And what happens after admittance? More tutors, more striving, more competing to end up with an unfulfilling job on Wall Street to restart the same dreary process with their own children—if they deign to have any based on their own meaningless experience.
Although I have many complaints about my native Canada, no one much cares where you obtained your undergraduate degree as all the universities are basically the same. For most, you complete a basic application and submit your grades and, more often than not, there’s at least one school willing to accept you. Additionally, at fees ranging from $5-$7K per annum, student debt is manageable. So glad my own children were not subjected to this insanity.
My husband went to an Ivy and now serves as treasurer for his local alum club. He said most of the people active in the alum club were doing it to give their own kids a leg up on getting into the same Ivy. They’re all very wealthy and connected—and hell bent to get their kids admitted. (We’re not—and we didn’t send our kids to Ivies.)
I am now mostly embarrassed to say I went to an Ivy, they have all gone the tubes with woke DEI garbage. Back in the day we busted ass to make it, but at least without being hassled by DEI screwballs.
Back in my father's day (the Fifties), MIT would advise some students to take a year of prep school before starting at MIT - apparently they would identify traits in a prospective student that made them think he (most often males back then) would be a successful engineer. So, they were picking the person and not the accomplishments.
My undergrad school had a similar plan (in the Eighties) for students that may have needed a little more prep work for the freshman curriculum, but otherwise had the spark to be good professionals.
Unfortunately, it is probably easier to look at accomplishment data rather than to put in the effort to consider the whole student.
Insightful and accurate comment, and yes, set up for success: a person with spark that will innovate and get things done.
There were many who were more book smart than me, but I was fortunate to have 2 professors who recognized my potential. Now it's all DEI and identity politics first. Highly inefficient to say the least.
I'm there with you... only difference is that I'm not mostly embarrassed - I'm embarrassed. I went to one, and graduated from one but never ever bring it up.
Prepping future douchebags.
Well thank goodness our elites are grooming their children to improve the lot of humanity. I suppose they could instead raise their children to become a mensch like Norman Borlaug, the Man Who Saved a Billion Lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug.
But it doesn’t pay nearly as well as a having one’s life legacy being a miserable McKinsey drone.
I can't imagine a more miserable existence on the inside. The outside will be great, but they will spend their entire lives in competition, anxiety, and emptiness. I was pretty hard on my son and he's done great, but this is just a line too far. I may have actually overdone it a bit myself.
Everything about this is repulsive and depressing, but I just have to nitpick one thing. Elite universities don't put students in debt. Undergrads get a full ride at Harvard if their families make less than 85k and pay less than 10% of family income of their parents make between 85 and 150k. If you come from an upper/upper middle class family and you can't leverage a Harvard degree into a high-paying job, then there's something wrong with you. It's the consolation schools for kids who couldn't get into Ivies that bleed you dry, like NYU.
So much competition for so few spaces, but really, as is noted here, smart and competitive students would already be doing what these consultants suggest. But! A few hundred thousand to assure oneself that all the desirable measures have been taken seems to be money well spent for some. More power to them and to the niche market Beaton is tapping. One born every minute, as the old saying goes.
Is it really so different when someone like Rob Henderson enlists aid in gaining admission to (who would have guessed) Yale? Not so much of a spend, but as Henderson tells it, there was no spend to spend.
Much the same would be true of Vance. Although anyone with a Maw-Maw like his deserves an Ivy degree.
It is such a shame that we seem to have run out of social satirists. These goings on are as fertile ground as Wall Street and Silicon Valley, skewered so richly by Wolfe and Judge, respectively.
You're being unfair to RH. He had a truly hard upbringing and went to uni on the GI bill. He is exactly the kind of dude these leg-ups were for before they were bastardised. At least he has made a genuine intellectual contribution, Vance seems an opportunist who went after the money and grovelled to Don to get the veep gig.
I think you misunderstood my reference to Rob Henderson.
I have seen this firsthand living in a DC suburb. It is really sad. No one should do this to their children.
Surely it is a shot at the contacts list, to move one's child into the ranks of the ruling caste, who are eaten vs. the ones who eat.
The families vulnerable to lawfare, debanking, and bank-rupting, third-world heathcare vs, those who are not locked in, have access to Ivermectin, and get the saline jab, and the TARP money.
All it takes is one child to make it, and the whole family is safe.
A good friend just got a plum appointment as the chief of staff for the head of a very prestigious medical school. I've sent him this article with orders to get his boss to read it! I'm now worried because I sent it off before the article got to the DEI snark - it may get him fired...
Nicely written, comrade!
All that prestige, and he's an infomercial wannabe. ICON!