Ok so this story has gone viral and it’s frankly bothering me a lot:
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2015/06/10/kenwood-academy-grad-awarded-more-than-3-million-in-scholarship-money/#comments
http://abc7chicago.com/education/kenwood-academy-student-accepted-to-26-universities/778961/
First off, getting into 6 ivies is a significant accomplishment. Congrats on that.
From my social media feed and comments elsewhere, it seems that the average American doesn’t really understand how ridiculous this whole thing is.
- The media portrays it as if she got $3,000,000 outright. She won’t be able to claim a LARGE majority of that, since most of that probably came as financial aid from individual schools.
- The $3m is also portrayed as an academic accomplishment by media and social media comments. Anyone receiving such a large FA (avg 115k per school) is more indicative of financial situation than academic talent.
- Who applies to 26 schools? W.T.F. Even the person who applied to all 8 ivies a while back seemed a little over-the-top.
- She probably has some other significant academic accomplishments (other than her GPA, which given no context as to how the weighting works, should mean very little to the informed reader and of course the fact that she got into 26 colleges - which isn’t really an academic accomplishment imho). Why not highlight those?
Oh right, that doesn’t make a good news story. “$3 million in scholarships” does.
Thoughts?