GAMING THE ADMISSIONS SYSTEM. The latest escalation in the positional arms race called "My kid got into Harvard and your didn't" is college admissions camp. (At about $2500-$3000 for a week or two of preparation, is it a better investment than geting your grades up at a community college or state university extension for a year or two and transferring as a sophomore or junior?)

Joanne Jacobs, who headlines the story "Camp Compulsive," notes

It's true that grade inflation has made it hard to tell one A student from another, but the number of students with great SATs isn't rising dramatically. The problem is that increasing numbers of students are applying to the same list of elite colleges, which have limited spaces.

Where, once they arrive, they will be cossetted and counselled to deal with their perfectionism. Tyler at Marginal Revolution has picked up Joanne Jacobs's Fox News column, which highlights this and other stories.

Back at her site, Ms. Jacobs concludes,

We didn't think we could game the admissions system, so agonized a lot less about it. In particular, we thought our SAT scores couldn't be improved by studying or repeating the test. There were no essay-polishing services, much less marketers promising to craft our applications. We just applied, made sure to include a safety school and left it to the fates. It's a sign of how things have changed that my safety school was Middlebury, which is now very selective.

Ultimately, the gaming of the admission system is unproductive. Washington Post college columnist Jay Mathews reported, long ago on the nonexistent difference in lifetime achievements of similarly capable graduates of the name colleges and the mid-majors. If anything, the pampering of students admitted to Jacuzzi U. puts them at a disadvantage relative to those less favored.

RUNNING EXTRA. The investments the Jacuzzi Universities are making on spas and stress-free zones might prove to be unproductive, anyway. Why? Beanbags. There is a popular beanbag game that looks like the same idea as horseshoes, and some of the local students have made their game sets out of what looks like old plywood rearranged with a saber saw. It's the kind of do-it-yourself entertainment these students might have been deprived of at the age of eight, when they had only organized school and organized practices and lessons to fill their days.