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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

People also underestimate how easy it is to cheat. One of the richest people I met in College was also on full financial aid and received in-state tuition despite being from out-of-state. All he had to do was lie on a couple forms. He was also on foodstamps so that he could spend more of his monthly stipend on drugs and alchohol.

There will always be bad actors in any system, and its still worth having aid programs even though a few people take advantage of them, but there needs to be serious checks and balances first.

TLDR; college organizations can't be trusted to audit themselves so we need a combination of government regulation with teeth, consumer advocacy, and full transparency, in order to achieve the best outcome of an initiative such as an adversity score.

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I recall that in my home state, the school system there reported that of the myriad of special concessions requests made and given for testing in the final year of school, the majority (I believe over 60%?) came from Private Schools and to the wealthiest areas. (Despite being the minority of schools).

The reason likely being twofold - Access/Knowledge of the system, as well as a pressure to improve their marks.

I.e. These private schools make their name and are in many ways partially paid for by parents because it promises better marks than sending them to public schools.

So they use every trick they have to get special dispensations and raise student's marks, leading to the bulk of these extra marks and time going to the wealthier, privileged areas.

As well as that, note that I'm not saying that all of these students are necessarily cheating by doing this, many of these students have their own problems (though many didn't too!) but the access and knowledge of how to use the system is also a part of being privileged.

Be careful with that private school generalization. I send my kids to private school (on my dime). For all my kids, I would say on average about 40% of each class has kids there on scholarship - some classes more, some less, with scholarship being needs-based, performance-based, or both. So the implied "private school kids come from wealth" generalization isn't always true.

Private school kids being always rich was not implied. A skew towards wealth in private schools however, is.

Which is clearly true.

I mean, I'm married to a lady who went to a private school. I wish she was rich.

The point was, adding concessions to a system often exacerbates the gap between poor and everyone else, which is not what people would necessarily expect.

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