I was weeding the garden tonight and thinking about this -- what is going on right now with the very top colleges seems almost like doping in sports... baseball and cycling are in the news this week, maybe that is why it is on my mind. I think that is one reason we stayed away from the Ivies altogether in the application process -- it feels like there are too many students (and parents) who would do ANYTHING for their kids to get into those schools these days. We focused more on schools with an intellectual reputation -- Swarthmore, U of Chicago, Mudd... although U of Chicago seems to have joined the Ivy-like frenzy, their head of admissions is focused on knocking off Yale in the college rankings... D got in there, but did not much like most of the present or accepted students she met. Anyway, that is the analogy I was thinking about.