Not Everyone Cheats to Get into Ivy League Schools

When I went to college, my parental support amounted to a Hudson Bay blanket. I had to get a full-ride academic scholarship or I couldn't go to Cornell University, especially since I was going to the private College of Arts & Sciences, not the State University of New York at Cornell, which is cheaper. NYU at Cornell U. is also how a lot of Italians and Jews attended, since the College of Arts and Sciences clearly had a quota on Italians and Jews in 1966. I was 17 when I left home because I'd skipped a grade.

My first year was spent in a suite at Mary Dickson Hall. I would call it a social experiment suite, since I was a poor white girl and my two roommates were a black girl from Mississippi and a Jewish girl from the Bronx, Bronx Science High School to be exact. My guess is that we were all on scholarship since we were all poor. We became friends. I was from rural upstate New York and was experiencing a certain amount of sociological shock -- not from diversity but from an excess of wealthy students in my classes.

I won the French prize at Geneva High School. At Cornell I was in a French class with a boy who'd summered in Paris. Not fair. I knew I couldn't compete, but I did the best I could.

My sister Kris went to Yale when she was 16 because she'd skipped two grades. She graduated magna cum laude. She probably would have graduated summa cum laude if our little brother hadn't committed suicide when he was 18.

Hugh was first in his class in physics and first in his class in mathematics in Lund, Sweden at an advanced Swedish high school. Swedish was not his first language and all his classes were in Swedish, which he learned while my father did his post-doc in Swedish politics and education there. Hugh wrote music and played the guitar and harmonica. He was a handsome, funny, wonderful boy who I will always miss.

As for cheating in college admissions, I never saw evidence of that, but I did wonder about how a boy I dated managed to get back into Cornell after he supposedly flunked out. I know he flunked out because he sold all of his belongings to his fraternity brothers before he left.

When I saw him again, I asked one of his fraternity brothers how he managed to get back to Cornell.

"His father probably bought Cornell a building or something," he said, laughing.

I knew Rick's father owned a big jam company down south, but was he that wealthy? He drove a very nice car, which he said he paid for by driving truck for his father. Could money make a difference in whether a student who flunked out stayed flunked out? I never found out.