Why Bother Playing Clean?

Just cheat the system instead!

Besides being a fast-track to Twitter clout and job interviews at high-paying companies, attending prestigious schools for high school also allows you a glimpse at rich kids and the ways they can cheat the system. Warning: potential blood-boiling ahead.

During high school, there was a well-liked kid who got caught selling alcohol. He was a financial aid kid, and he ended up getting expelled. A few years later, two guys in my grade were caught doing acid. Their parents had donated lots of money to the school, so rather than being expelled, they were simply asked to leave for the rest of junior year but could come back as seniors.

I think about these anecdotes a lot these days, as I’ve been interrogating my relationship to money. Of course, selling alcohol is a different offense than getting caught doing drugs, so you might argue that maybe a poorer kid who got caught doing acid wouldn’t have gotten kicked out. But there were other incidents in high school that gave me a certain sort of cynicism about money. One girl labeled herself as “Hispanic” during her college admissions, as her mom had studied abroad in Spain during college. And don’t get me started on the cheating: if you had enough money, you could buy anything. Essays, research papers, entire novels that could be submitted for research awards. One student recently slept through a national math competition yet somehow submitted a perfect score.

During senior year, there was a girl in my grade, Tina, who had also gotten into Harvard. I found out later her parents had donated $1 million to the school in recent years.