> For them, Jiechu's price – $650 for a seven-week summer course, four hours a day, Monday to Friday – is a doable stretch. That comes to a bit less than $5 an hour, which is not exactly the “thousands of dollars in test prep” that Mr. Carranza cited.
So 2 weeks' work is a considerable amount of work, but it's also certainly within the realm of possibility for the vast, vast majority of people. I'd really say this just highlights how some communities value educational attainment and others do not.
Sure, it's much easier to come up with $650 if you're rich than if you're poor, but that's true of just about anything. $650 is certainly within the reach of nearly everyone, it just depends on whether your parents are willing to sacrifice for it.
The only thing is… I can’t find more hours in my week.
And the real bigger issue is, even through I can afford it, it may be hard to justify it because it amounts to a major opportunity cost.
For a working class family, they probably are going to find it difficult to source $650. …Especially if no one has gone to college and no one even knows the importance of that $650.
If $650 seems like nothing, all that you are saying is that your social group is limited to people who find $650 to be nothing. It’s like the Lucille Bluth banana quote in living…
If your GPA is bad, a tutor will help far more with GPA than test prep will help with your SAT and cost far more.
School project, if you live in a household where one parent doesn't have to work, they can basically do your whole project moving a 50 to a 95.
Extra curriculars, these require a large investment of time and money that is harder for a single working parent to pull off.
College entrance essays. You can literally just pay someone to write them.
You can't look at SATs in a vacuum. You have to compare it to the other possible metrics which all privilege the privileged more.
That is demonstrably not true. Wealthy people can and do spend legions on test prep and tutoring.
But that said, I generally agree with some of the underlying sentiment, which is that many wealthy people value education and status that can be attained through scholastic achievement in a way that many poor people do not. I think that even if you had loads of high quality, free SAT prep classes and tutors that you'd still see a large test score gap.