... $12,000 college admissions counselors is a sign of severe problems in wealth inequality.
Some may say that spending $12K USD on college admissions is out of reach for most families. In addition to considering it a luxury good and an unnecessary expense, some may say that families with a DIY approach are learning much more and developing themselves more fully by virtue of their research.
Wealth inequality is rather fluid in the US, as evidenced by persons of modest financial means rising to the top of their fields... including
Chris Gardner, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ben Carson, Oprah Winfrey, and many authors, actors/actresses, musicians, and athletes.
I have read a biography of Bill Gates -- he came from a well-off family that sent him to a private school that provided an opportunity to learn about computers that was rare at the time. From
Wikipedia :
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr.[b] (b. 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, Irish, and Scots-Irish.[18][19] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates' maternal grandfather was J.W, Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and a younger sister, Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family, but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.[20] Early on in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career.[21] When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.[22][23][24] The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock ... there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".[25]
At 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school.[26] When Gates was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[27] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was just something neat about the machine."[28] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students – Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans – for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[29][30]
I think letting all Americans keep most of their earnings so that they can supplement the education of their children is better than taxing away their earnings and sending it to an inflexible and inefficient government school system.