Right. The current situation simply seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people-- greed, self-promotion, callous indifference, and out-and-out selfishness.
I think this is difficult to truly understand on an emotional level until you are actually living it with your own child/their cohort.
It's very much like an amplification of the phenomenon that so many of us are already familiar with by the time our children are preschoolers-- the one where you don't talk about ______ with other parents, or they give you THAT look. Or the obnoxious parents that want everyone to treat Little Lord/Lady Fauntleroy as the budding genius that s/he obviously is when s/he meets developmental milestones days ahead of schedule due to endless parental "oversight" and "assistance."
An awful lot of the kids in the top 10% of their high school classes are in that latter group. It's one long arc through childhood. THOSE are TigerKids. Some of them are bright, and some of them are MG, but very very few of them are more than that. It's just that mom and dad careful engineer things so that they LOOK as though they could well be HG. It's pretty evident that they aren't, when you meet them in person, but man they can sure look like HG/EG on paper. This is the cohort that is featured in films like "Race to Nowhere." They REALLY don't like EG/PG kids, believe me. Because they know that those kids can do things that the MG ones can't possibly actually do. Of course, some of them aren't above doing it for their kids and lying about it. I wish that I were kidding. Truly.
My impression is that the rate of increase in scholarship funds has grown at about the rate of overall inflation, and that college costs have grown at about the rate of healthcare in the US (several times the rate of inflation). So the gap between the two things has been widening since the 1980's, making the current competitive atmosphere all the more fierce-- and toxic.
Reducing college costs is the only larger solution, I fear. The problem is a fairly significant one, though, when you dig into what is driving those cost increases. There are a lot of structural problems to solve there.
