The majority of students in the United States don’t have access to this kind of educational support. There is an enormous valley between the experiences of wealthy and low-income Americans as they relate to education and access to resources. Over the past few decades, wealthy — usually white — families have relocated to communities similar to where I grew up, a phenomenon dubbed “white flight ,” while low-income and non-white communities have often remained trapped in crumbling urban school districts. And because local property taxes help to fund public schools in the U.S., schools in lower-income areas receive substantially less money than those in wealthy ones, which contributes further to the educational disparity. So there’s nothing really new about powerful individuals paying hundreds of thousands, up to several millions, of dollars to get their children into elite colleges — usually, they just take a more indirect or socially acceptable route, like buying a building for the school.