You are a good parent. You want the best for your child. You put their name down for a top school while they were still in utero. To seal the winning-in-life deal, you send your five-year-old to etiquette classes to learn the value of good manners and eye contact. After all, those places at an Ivy League university, Oxford or Cambridge don’t just arrive by accident.
You’ve even built a small nest egg to get them on their way — a junior Isa investment account in the UK or a US 529 plan, perhaps?
Then, the US college admissions scandal broke. And you realised that, actually, you’ve been slacking on the parenting front. You may have thought your child would get ahead with raw talent, hard work and a small army of highly sought-after Mandarin-speaking, violin-playing, mathematics-geek tutors. Well, more fool you. A coterie of ambitious wealthier parents were buying better test scores and university places — risking prison in the process.