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If elite college admission is a ritual of class selection, with a cottage industry of private escorts administering the rites, then here is its deeper psychological function: instilling a sense of desert into the future ruling class. For the investment banker’s son from Phillips Exeter who gets int…

If you had to construct a higher education system de novo, and you were given only two prerogatives—to transmit generational privilege while projecting an air of meritocracy—it would be hard to improve on the current setup. If the emotional well-being of young people were a priority, however, you m…

For the old rich, an Ivy berth means status preservation. “You’ve got people trying to make sure their kids don’t fall down a class, basically,” said Kara, a consultant who asked to go by a pseudonym so as not to offend her clientele, which includes Middle Eastern royalty and scions of multinationa…

[...] I read about housing inequality in Matthew Desmond’s Evicted and find that this story is so often a story of mothers and children. These are the people our society claims to love and support above all others, and yet their suffering is endless and untenable, and the reason is simple, really: …