Don’t paint those stripes

During my junior and senior years in high school, a few of my classmates attended private schools for some of their courses. These schools offered easy high grades as long as you paid tuition. If you needed the grades, and you could afford it, it was a good deal. It seemed like a no-brainer. Now, after a couple of decades of life experience, I’m realizing that it was just another way of borrowing from the future to pay for the present. Instead of studying hard in the moment, and earning a high grade, imagine a student choosing to score an easy high grade. Yes, it might improve their odds of admission (though there were unconfirmed rumors that private school grades get frowned upon). But even if they get into a good university, then what? The problem with most of these private schools, better known as “credit mills” (and not to be confused with the prestigious private schools with high admission standards) is that most students don’t actually learn much. They tend not to use the…