The private school advantage

This article from the Chronicle gives an inside look at the admissions process at elite schools.  With an emphasis on style over substance, cooking the numbers game, and the advantages graduates of private programs receive, Jason England gives insight into the admissions game.  Compass Academics offers Letter of Recommendation assistance. 

This type of consulting can help the public school graduate compete with their private school counterparts. As England explains: “Private schools create applicants who are difficult to reject: The candidate is “prepared” (the assumption is the courses at private schools are more rigorous), has a relatively high SAT score (a reflection of parents’ incomes and education levels), and is touted by carefully crafted letters of recommendation from counselors who have many fewer students and far more resources than their public-school counterparts. After a while you could predict the hyperbole and buzzwords in each letter from a private-school counselor, some of which ran three pages; public-school applicants often got a paragraph that made it clear their recommender barely knew them. Neither recommendation told me much about what the student might contribute to the campus, but both provided a clear lesson in how expensive it is to not be wealthy.”  Read the full article here.