55 Quotes by Eliot Schrefer

On average, twelve hundred Congolese had been killed every day since 1998. Five point four million. And it wasn’t nearly over yet.

Intimacy is the only shield against insanity. Intimacy, not knowledge. Intimacy, not power.

This lifetime is yours to make what you will of it.

Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers.

Elite private-school educations leave students unprepared for a standardized test with which their public school counterparts are innately familiar.

Higher SAT scores mean better college matriculation rates. So it's no wonder that private schools in ultra-competitive environments would grease the qualifying process as much as possible.

What SAT tutoring does is it invisibly alters the admissions pool so a school could try to be as egalitarian as they can, but if a student is SAT-tutored, and their score goes up 200 points in a year, and the college admissions committee has no idea that the student got tutored, all of a sudden it's shifting the pool back toward old money.

I remember my guidance counselor, when I told her I wanted to apply to Harvard, she paused and said, 'That's in New York, right?' The funny thing is, I didn't really know. It was a few weeks before I was like, 'No, I think it's in Massachusetts.'

At Horace Mann High School in affluent Riverdale, New York, one of the top schools in the country, those who receive double time on tests are plentiful enough to qualify as their own segment of the student body. Known to their peers as 2Ts, they participate in the same activities, get the same grades, and attend the same range of colleges.