Samantha remembers her high-school days more as a trial version of college. She seems part amused, part ashamed as she recalls the hours she dedicated to reworking her résumé—or the hours on top of that spent plowing through SAT exercises in the home of her one-on-one college-application coach, even though she had already achieved near-perfect scores on practice tests. On any given weeknight in high school, she says, she was likely up until 3 or 4 a.m., studying in her twin bed, then waking up at 7 to go to school. College prep consumed her already-limited free time, even cutting into hours she needed to work on homework ranging from AP-physics problem sets to her senior thesis.

Samantha, 20, who asked to be identified by her first name only so she could speak freely about a sensitive topic, is now a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, some 500 miles east of her suburban Cincinnati home. A Korean American who graduated from a predominantly white, affluent private high school, she’s double majoring in international relations and East Asian studies. The century-old Baltimore campus is gradually becoming home. But the way she got there still makes her uncomfortable. “I got a very high SAT score,” Samantha says, “literally because my parents hired somebody.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/10/elite-college-admissions-broken/572962/