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

Everyone agrees there is nothing more obnoxious than a baby in a "Future Harvard Grad" onesie. Whether the kid has alumni parents or came from the Ivy League sperm bank on the corner, she's not going to grow up normal.

Which is why this new trend of dragging siblings along to college orientations has us concerned. According to a recent Boston Globe article, at most schools the rugrats don't even have to sit through lectures on Pell grants, academic advising, and "the role of the university in today's world." Instead, it's all sorts of arts and crafts, science lab, birthday cake, moonbounce, pony ride fun.

That's healthy. Hey, Jane! Not only have we expected you to go to Harvard since before you were conceived and your sister got in, but you also have delightful childhood memories of it being the funnest place in the world.

Now go work on your admissions essay.

--BETH MILTON

The shepherds of diversity at Harvard surely cluck with approval at this morning's headine in the Crimson: "UNPRECEDENTED DIVERSITY IN CLASS OF 2011." Some stats to stroke: the 2,058 new kids make up "the most socioeconomically and racially diverse group [ever] accepted to Harvard," at 11 percent black, 20 percent Asian, 10 percent Latino, and 2 percent Native American -- "record highs for minority groups" -- and just under 20 percent are foreign/dual/etc citizens. And most significantly, fully one quarter will qualify for a program that waives or lowers tuition for families at certain income levels.

Attaway, Harvard. Hopefully the other Ivies' numbers will mirror yours when they come out. Credit is largely due to recent munificence from your admissions and financial aid offices, who should be feeling pretty swell today. But, um, when you're done toasting those guys, could you please send them the hell over to the athletics department?

Students on spring break last week may have missed this humdinger front-pager in the Boston Globe with an equally seismic headline about diversity at Harvard: "A COACHING VACANCY: HARVARD HAS 41 VARSITY SPORTS -- AND ZERO BLACKS AT THE HELM." Needless to say, there are also no African-Americans among the athletics director or his 13 senior administrators. "Harvard," the Globe reports, "has not employed an African-American head coach in any sport since Peter Roby guided the men's basketball team from 1985-91."

1985, you'll note, is the year before most members of the polychromatic Class of 2011 were born.

Must suck to live in a soap opera. Every episode it's a new ordeal: Your old boyfriend dies of AIDS, your new boyfriend is in with the mob, your father fakes his death and vanishes for 15 years, your mother miscarries after an elevator crash, and to top it off you get taken hostage and shot in the stomach. But none of these tragedies come close to the horror of ... gosh, it's hard to even say it ... the unparallelled heartbreak of getting into Yale.

We stumbled across this 1995 clip from General Hospital, in which Robin Scorpio -- who later loses her virginity, tests positive for HIV, and experiences all the terrible things listed above -- gets a "big fat envelope from Yale." Her reaction: utter dismay. See, she doesn't want to be far from her boyfriend, Stone, not for all the Whiffenpoofs in the world. Most girls with similar situations in the real world deal with this by trying to keep up a long-distance thing (racking up $140 Cingular bills and listening to a lot of Lifehouse, before the inevitable "love you too much to do this" breakup and ensuing hookup spree). The GH screenwriters solve the dilemma just by, uh, killing him off.

We knew there was a reason we hadn't yet written about Jian Li, the high school senior who sued filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton for discrimination after they rejected his early application. (He claims they held his Asian ethnicity against him.) And boy are we glad we waited, since now he can probably add the Daily Princetonian as a defendant.

In yesterday's annual "joke" issue, the Prince ran, among other laugh-laugh-sigh satires, an op-ed by one "Lian Ji" titled, "Princeton University is racist against me, I mean, non-whites." "Hi Princeton! Remember me?" it starts off. "I so good at math and science. Perfect 2400 SAT score. Ring bell?" Having upturned that modest divet, they keep digging for another 550 or so words:

"What is wrong with you no color people? Yellow people make the world go round. We cook greasy food, wash your clothes and let you copy our homework. Brown people are catching up, too but not before the 2008 Beijing Olympics."

WOW. I mean, wow. After the year that brought us the Dartmouth Review Native American flap and Yale Rumpus' "Me Love You Long Time" ado, it's as if someone just pushed reset. Let's see that again! There should really be an award for the student(s) who, every year, think they will be the ones to transcend racism by displaying it in its crudest form. And who, every year, make utter fools of themselves (and learn that irony isn't a defense). So kind of them not to spell it "Orympics."

If this doesn't blow up in their faces, it's by the grace of God. Princetonian Editor-in-Chief Chanakya Sethi '07 told us he was "aware there were concerns" about the piece, but hasn't heard any direct complaints yet. Then again, students are in reading week. "If there are people who are concerned, I'm concerned," he said.

The best part is, the people responsible for running it -- the outgoing board, Sethi included -- won't even have to deal with the (still hypothetical) fallout. The hate mail, the meetings with deans, the sensitivity training seminars -- all will fall squarely on the shoulders of their successors. Thanks, fellas. It's been fun. Don't let the picketers hit you in the ass on the way out.

P.S. -- The Globe's must-read Brainiac had this first.

You know those useless but entertaining online translation programs? We're starting to think the WB is like one of those, except for life. With the right combination of jump cuts, reverse video, Jimmy Eat World, and splashy cut-out freeze frames, they could make a Senate confirmation hearing look like an episode of Room Raiders.

So you can guess what happens when the WB decides to start producing hosting college tour videos. Behold theU, the cinematic lovechild that would emerge if Mischa Barton had relations with a Princeton Review handbook. TheU's founder, 25-year-old Columbia pseudo-alum Doug Imbruce, says he got the got the idea while watching "MTV Cribs." It shows. Here's theU's narrator on Brown University: "Brown is like the token cool mom of the Ivy Leagues." Or her thoughts on the World's Greatest University: "Harvard won't reveal its selection criteria, but it's clear that talent, ambition, and genius are key." They even have the lovable Penn frat boy, caught on camera in his natural habitat: "I don't remember Spring Fling. I've been told I had a really good time. I had relations with a tree. It might have been an elm, might have been a cedar. I don't really know."

There are some inspired moments, like when a narrator points out that "Princeton definitely isn't a crazy hookup scene" as we watch boys and girls juggling pins on a lawn. We know TheU means well. Of course, it also means to do well, by making shit-tons of money off terrified, TV-happy high-schoolers for whom an endorsement from "Everwood"s Chris Pratt seals Brown as their first choice.

Brown tour:

Harvard tour:

Penn tour:

Students at the University of Chicago are furious with the school for considering a switch from its beloved "Uncommon Application" (sample question: give a definition of your "he'lade," or "Place Having Everything Right," relating to the Kwakiutl tribe of British Columbia) to the humorless, Soviet-reminiscent Common Application, that generic form you can fill out once and mail to 298 schools.

It's a complicated issue, balancing school character and tradition with the need to remain competitive with other elite universities in today's hypercharged admissions climate. But the U of C kids are waging their side of the battle with pure Ivy-trashing abandon, so naturally we side with them.

If students are going to attend a rigorous institution, the students say, they should be able to handle a rigorous application.  "If you are smart and don't want to work hard, then go to Harvard, or better yet, go to Brown," said Roger Fierro, a senior who is chair of the Prospective Students Advisory Committee. ...

"I cannot express how much the Uncommon Application meant to me during the soul-destroying ordeal of the college application process. Please don't let our goddamn Ivy League penis envy force a move that would infinitely diminish the school in the eyes of current and future students," wrote one student. ...

In an editorial called "Who Wants to Go to UPenn, Anyway?," the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, wrote that the students fighting the change feared that the university could become a "generic elite private university." ...

Long live the Uncommon App! More Ivy slurs! Crescat scientia; vita excolatur!

[Via Chicago Students Rally to Be Uncommon @ Inside Higher Ed]

Did the Ivies suddenly get a conscience? First Princeton bags its preferential early admissions policy (eating Harvard's dust). Now Columbia eliminates loans for students from families that earn less than $50,000 a year (eating Harvard, Penn, Yale and Stanford's collective dust). Where does the admirable, praiseworthy madness end?! Next thing we know, Harvard will be donating its endowment, Buffett-style, to end world poverty.

Of course, Princeton still beats them all with its grants-only aid package royale. We might need to update our Ivy stereotypes manifesto ...

We're blowing this up to poster size and tacking it to our dorm-room ceiling, so it's the last thing we see each night and the first thing each morning.

"The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates," by Dan Golden [Amazon] 

EARLIER: Could It Possibly Be True? Wealthy Kids Get P...P...Preference in Admissions?

Harvard is announcing it will eliminate all forms of early admission, starting with the class of 2011 -- finally acknowledging that such programs are the grotesque province of hypercynical applicants bent on improving their own odds at the expense of the disadvantaged.

Forgive the editorializing, please. This is both shocking news and yet long overdue, and it stirs all our leftover resentments about the college-choosing process. Yeah, we got in early decision. And everything about it was strategic -- from the higher early acceptance rate to the promise of smoking pot and getting D's from Dec. 15 till high school graduation. It felt okay, because early applicants think they're calculating mostly against other equally calculating students. But there are undeniable consequences for students in school districts without top counselors, without adults who know how to grease the admissions process. And the universities themselves are just as complicit in the rankings-friendly game.

So anyway, we applaud this move by Derek Bok, who is apparently under the delusion that he's actually president of Harvard, not just a post-Summers stand-in. It's like King Ralph!

College Rejects Early Admission [Crimson] 
Harvard Ends Early Admission, Citing Barrier to Disadvantaged [NYT]
Harvard to eliminate early admission [harvard.edu]