At certain moments in my month-long stay in Seoul, say when I was navigating about its immaculately clean subway system or gorging myself on endless supplies of Korean short ribs, it occurred to me that it wouldn't have been half bad if I had been born and raised there. But then I'd watch my seven-year-old cousin race off to his test-prep center after class every day, see uniformed high-schoolers trudge back to their apartments past midnight, and I'd silently thank my parents for immigrating to America.

Given the madness I observed in Korea firsthand, I was hardly surprised to see Newsweek write an article on two of Korea's top high schools, focusing particularly on their success at sending students to elite colleges in America. At Minjok Leadership Academy, for example, 25 of its 77 graduates who applied to American colleges were accepted to Ivy League schools. Daewon Foreign Language High School, which is similarly competitive, had 36 students get into the Ivy League last year.

All of this has its price - assuming, of course, that one manages to do well enough in middle school to get in:

Typically, students study well past midnight, sleeping four to five hours a night. The coed Korean schools also have tough rules on dating and other behaviors deemed distracting. Hand-holding is banned.

More insanity after the jump:

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Speaking of exorbitant “independent college admissions counseling," Sarah Jessica Parker's next venture is The Ivy Chronicles, based on a book by Karen Quinn. Parker will play Ivy, a woman who loses her job, gets divorced, moves from the Upper East Side to the Lower East Side (which is apparently still affordably bohemian in Movieland) and "starts a business to help upper-middle-class women get their children into elite kindergartens," or "Baby Ivies." To summarize another way: "Marking a huge departure from [Parker's] previous acting gig, Ivy is about a single gal in New York City who lives in a series of wildly unrealistic apartments."

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You know how the world is sort of going to pieces, what with expensive gas and rice, and related famines and genocides? As it so happens, even Manhattanites living the kind of charmed existence familiar to fans of Gossip Girl are not immune to tragedy. There's a terrible affliction plaguing prep schools far and wide (from the Upper East Side to, um, the Upper West Side): “Harvard drought." This year -- for the first time ever -- not a single student from the elite Dalton School was admitted to Harvard.

It's no Darfur, but you wouldn't know it by the way some of these parents are acting. They are unhappy indeed.

At Dalton’s graduation earlier this month, one mom was heard muttering, "I won’t send my grandchildren here, that’s for sure."

Oh, snap.

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Yes, Princeton is being investigated on charges of discriminating against Jian Li in its admissions process.  The Daily Princetonian reported a couple weeks ago that the investigation has broadened, but the best part about the article is the unmoderated melee going on in the comments!

Since the article went up on the website one commenter "Yale College Dad" or, as the cool kids have begun to call him, "YCD," has posted the overwhelming majority of the 200 comments, responding to everyone else with a rapid fire of enraged fury oh so common to the internet.

One of his better posts:

To the pimple popping Princeton brats...Jian Li has more than a strong argument. At the Ivies, especially at HYP, the evidence is overwhelming and compelling, and it is clear and convincing that for decades, there has been a racial basis, conscience or non-conscience, directed against Asian American applicants. Regardless of the outcome of the decision on Jian Li's complaint from the OCR, since it also consists of biased politically correct appointees, who will undoubtedly rule against Jian anyway, Princeton's admissions files will be OPENED, and this could bolster Jian's claims when viewd by an impartial party. This case has put Princeton and the Ivies on notice for more future complaints and federal law suits based racial discrimination by Asian Americans. They won't be ignored, mocked and ridiculed and be treated as frivolous anymore, especially by the Daily Princetonian....090909 has yet to post a credible reponse. Laugh it up, Princetonians, because the joke will be on YOU!!! BTW, some of my relatives and best friends are graduates of Princeton. Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!

But what isn't so common is his encyclopedic knowledge of the case! From my super-scientific estimation, YCD has quoted extensively from at least a handful of articles and legal texts regarding this case, all in his valiant efforts to defend an innocent student from the Princeton's discrimination and its students' ridicule.

After the jump, the plot thickens!
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Anyone else find it ironic that April 1 is America's unofficial "find out if you got into college day"? Now there is a prank we'd like to see.

Record applicants, ergo record rejections, this year. The Daily Princetonian predicted of a 6% rate for its alma mater, but then realized they accidentally flipped the digit upside down, as it was actually closer to 9%. Bloated with low standards! Harvard came pretty close to the Prince's fantasized elitism, with an acceptance rate of 7.1% from its 27,462-applicant base. On Harvard Time's take on the rate:

Yale accepted 8.3% of applicants, Columbia 8.7%. Penn had the highest Ivy acceptance rate, a wide-open door to the huddled masses, at 16.3%!

Complete Ivy acceptance breakdown (except Cornell because they haven't released their numbers yet and admissions offices don't take press requests or phone calls until after the murderous rage of rebuffed high schoolers passes, on April 3), links to articles, even a spreadsheet! After the jump. 

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Last seen seeking his cyber-fortune by objectifying college girls with Hot-or-Not clone Miss Facebok, Harvard's Daniel Wallace '08 is back... and revealing the inner machinery of the beast itself, Harvard admissions! With the prose of Viagra-peddling spam and the typograpical design of a ten-year-old's AIM profile,Wallace's GetIntoHarvard.net sells a 56-page, $27 pamphlet that will "triple your chances of getting into Harvard." The guide comes with endorsements from "Bryan Kang, Harvard senior," and "Ganesh Raj Kumaraguru, England," because Brits have those smart-sounding accents, so just being from England is a credential in and of itself.

But where, you ask, does Wallace's expertise come from? Well, first he got into Harvard.

Since then, I have read over tons of books, over 1,000 blog posts, too many forum entries to count, and continued learning from my own hands-on admissions experience, all to keep Get Into Harvard cutting-edge with the latest information. [boldface and italicization from original]

"To think!" writes Legion, "That's over ten paragraphs a day... for four whole months!" We got a hold of Get Into Harvard (which is actually just a PDF file you pay to download), are providing a brief review and choice excerpts after the jump.

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Infected by the unbridled ambition rampant at Penn's Wharton School of Business, senior admissions officer Judith Hodara found a clever way to parlay her dayjob into a sidejob: Admissions counseling! The conflict of interest is so blatant as to boggle the mind. So, one more time: Hodara was simultaneously advising people on how to get into Penn, and choosing who would get into Penn. We assume her counseling consisted of instructing 17-year-olds to mark their applications "Hi Judy! The secret password is MAD MONEY," and then admitting them all.

To be fair, Hodara worked in business school admissions, and her company, IvyStone Admissions Consultants, advised high schoolers. But wait, it gets better! Inside Higher Ed reports that the only reason Judith got caught is because her relationship with another admissions consulting company -- advising Japanese B-school hopefules -- fell under ethical scrutiny.

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Lee Stetson, Penn's Dean of Admissions and a 29-year veteran at the University, announced in July his plans to resign at the end of the current school year. He was going out on a high note as Penn had just admitted its most selective class ever.

This is where things come undone.

On August 29, Stetson abruptly made his resignation effective immediately. The Office of Admissions, behind University spokeswoman Lori Doyle, offered little explanation beyond Stetson's personal statement in which he said "that it is in the University's, and my own best interest, to step down immediately, before the commencement of the fall semester." Stetson was unavailable for further comment at the time, Admissions said, because he was traveling. According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, "As recently as Tuesday morning [Stetson] had given no indication in a DP interview that he would resign sooner than he had previously announced."

Ruh roh.

It's been weeks since Stetson's departure and neither the Daily Pennsylvanian nor the Philadelphia Inquirer have released the details of his rush for the exit. The Office of Admissions won't say a thing.

But that's OK, because as with most good stories, there are even better rumors. After the jump, we'll break down the Office of Admissions' silence-pact-on-crack, the Daily Pennsylvanian's status with the case and IvyGate's own findings. At least two of these involve sex.

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*[Ed. note: Nick here. IvyGate ticks off the subjects of its coverage fairly regularly. Usually, it's easy to parry their take-this-down demands and libel threats because they act like bullies and jerks. In 12 months, there's been one exception: Steven Roy Goodman, who says our characterization below is unfair. And after the exceedingly polite, rational and productive conversation we just had, I have to agree. He seems like a stand-up guy, and, thinking back to my own miserable college application days, it would've been good to have someone like Goodman around to make the process sane and bearable.

Anyway: It's our policy to never delete stuff -- if we make an error of fact or taste, we correct it transparently, not by disappearing stuff off the site. Were we to ever make an exception, it'd be for nice guy Steven Roy Goodman. NS]

The college applicant arms race for increasing levels of achievement, polish, and panache has a new weapon: mistakes.  An Associated Press article reports that snake-oil salesman* college counselor Steven Roy Goodman "tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application," like bumping a low SAT score up a few hundred- I mean, with a carefully-chosen typo.

What Mr. Goodman is going for is "authenticity" - an increasingly hot selling point in college admissions as a new year rolls around. In an age when applicants all seem to have volunteered, played sports, and traveled abroad, colleges are wary of slick packaging. They're drawn to high grades and test scores, of course, but also to humility and to students who really got something out of their experiences, not just those trying to impress colleges with theiréreséme'.

Authentic typo from the original text.

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Daniyar Nazarbayev had a dream. During those lonely nights on the plains of Kazakhstan, he would look into the stars and pray for admission into America's Ivy League. And then, according to a suit he filed Monday against a high-profile New York college admissions consultant, he got plaaaaayed.

Nazarbayev claims that his family wired Robert Shaw, co-founder and partner of strategic college admissions firm Ivy Success, $200,000 after Shaw "gave assurances the fee would cover a 'complete strategy program' for admission to a 'top-tier American university.'" Then, according to the suit, Shaw was all like, peace out:

Shaw, following an initial meeting with Nazarbayev, informed a family representative that "Daniyar is not Ivy League material," the suit said. Rather than offer a refund, the company "retained the funds and simply left Daniyar to his own efforts," the suit added.

This reminds me of middle school lunches where I would offer someone my sandwich for their fries, and they would give me their fries first and I'd say "You are not sandwich material. I am going to retain the fries and leave you to your own efforts." But I never got sued. Over that.

We ran Shaw through the system to see what he's all about. Before Ivy Success he was an admissions officer at Penn, also his alma mater. IvyGate tried to contact Ivy Success, but they have no phone number, e-mail or address listed on the website. Just this form thingy. Go Quakers!

As for Nazarbayev, he still got into his first choice, Columbia, and will start in the fall. He has no Facebook profile as of yet, so we're not sure which side he'll take in the ongoing War of the '11s.

The Kazakhstani wunderkind, with Ivy admission safely secured, simply wants bygones to be bygones:

The plaintiff, Daniyar Nazarbayev, "just wants his money back," attorney Sam Israel said Tuesday.

There's your attempted Borat joke.

--JIM NEWELL