nytimes - ethics of parental investment

"I may seem to be asserting that you must treat each child strictly as an individual, selecting the best school for the older and ignoring the effects of that decision on the younger. But parental duties extend to both children and require a more nuanced calculus. At mealtime, you would not let the older child eat her fill before permitting the younger to approach the table and consume only what scraps, if any, remain. Neither for lunch nor for learning do I advocate primogeniture.

In some cases, parents must indeed make a greatest-good decision. That might mean sending one child to a less-expensive college rather than to her first choice, in order to make some of the family’s resources available to her siblings. In such a case, you would rightly weigh the quality of the schools. If choosing the more expensive meant paying full freight at Swarthmore and the less expensive were McGill, you might reasonably ask your daughter to bundle up and head north, confident that she could receive a fine education. If the alternatives were Princeton or cosmetology school, you would make a different choice. (Assuming you and your daughter have conventional feelings about mascara.)

But your actual decision here does not involve the equitable distribution of family resources. Rather, you contemplate sending your older child to a slightly worse school to game the system on behalf of her sister. This is too discouraging a lesson about merit, about fairness, to teach either child."