Chinese Families Paying to Get Their Kids into Elite, American Colleges

[Jonathan Whatley]

To me, the reason you go out and work hard in HS is to get into a decent school to get a degree so you can live a decent life with a decent job.

Maybe that hard work, decent school, decent life sequence works out for most people in the middle and the 'solid' working class in the U.S.

There are parts of the world where the same sequence is considerably less likely to lead to a decent life. I'm not saying a Chinese family with 6.5 mil for college admissions gaming is in immediate humanitarian crisis. Broader point, China may be one of the places the sequence may not work as reliably. Just 43 years ago, Mao was in power and there was little if any private business wealth. Maybe the ways parents try to leave something for the next generation should look different there, in some details.