Nicole thinks the world of college test prep is unjust. In the late 1990s, she was a program manager at a national tutoring chain. She coached preteens on how to pass the tests to get into exclusive prep schools and teenagers on how to achieve scores high enough to get accepted to the Ivy League.

Weve based a huge portion of our higher education system on an instrument that is eminently hackable, said Nicole, who asked HuffPost to not use her last name to prevent the identification of her former employer. Many of the kids she tutored werent particularly smart, but after a few weeks of drills, she could boost their SAT scores by a few hundred points.

But now, with her own son nearing college age, she paid for him to take the PSAT so she would know if he needed extra help. Next year, she plans to enroll him in test-prep courses so he could practice taking the entrance exam and writing his essay.

I feel trapped, she said. She works for a nonprofit and her husband works in sales for a software company. They are comfortable. But still, she worries that if she doesnt help her son get ahead, he wont end up in the same position she has. Hes a smart kid and no matter what he does, hell do well. But will he do well enough to get health insurance?

Nicole is not the only American mother making this calculation. On Wednesday, the FBI announced 50 indictments in a criminal college-admissions scheme. Wealthy parents, including the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, were accused of paying bribes to university officials and faking test results to ensure their childrens admission to elite colleges.

While the vast majority of families dont go to such lengths, even parents at the lower tiers of the wealthy are anxious about their childrens futures and are willing to pay for test-prep, private tutors and college admissions consultants to give their children whatever advantage they can.

It feels like you have to get your kid into this massive lottery to make it in American society, Nicole said. More people just accept it as part of what you have to do.

Some of the anxiety over college admissions comes from the fact that elite institutions are objectively more exclusive than they used to be. In 1941, Harvard accepted 1,092 students out of 1,182 applications. By 2018, the number of accepted students had doubled but the number of applications had risen to more than 42,000 . Even in the last 10 years, most of Americas most selective schools have seen significant drops in their acceptance rates.

Then there are the increasing benefits of a college education. In 2018, nine out of 10 new jobs went to college graduates. Workers with university diplomas earn more and have lower unemployment rates . Despite its rapidly inflating cost , college is not only a worthwhile investment for most Americans, but a necessary one.

The combination of the increasing importance of a top-tier diploma and the decreasing likelihood of getting one is inspiring wealthier parents to take on extra spending to guarantee their childrens place in higher education.

Im on the phone all week with parents panicking about their child not doing well on a math test, said Alexis White, the director of A-List Tutoring, a college consultancy in LA Though her clients run the gamut from upper-middle class to billionaires, she says the parents on the lower end of the wealth ladder are often more desperate to secure advantage for their kids.

Theres a carnal panic inside every parent, regardless of how much access they have, that their child will not be successful in life, she said. A hundred times a week, I have to utter the phrase, your kids will go where they are meant to go.

This increase in anxiety has, in mere decades, produced an industry to alleviate it. The test-prep sector was worth more than $25 billion in 2016. Education consulting, the industry with more intensive services and wealthier clientele, is worth an estimated $1.9 billion .

But the most important factor driving the college-prep arms race may simply be income inequality.

The greatest degree of wealth stratification is within the one percent, said Jeffrey Winters, a Northwestern University researcher who specializes in oligarchies. Parents at the low end of the top 1 percent earn around $420,000 per year.

Thats nearly 10 times wealthier than the average American, Winters said, but still almost 100 times less wealthy than members of the .01 percent. And because they may work for the same companies or their children may attend the same private schools, the lower-tier wealthy families are comparing themselves to people stratospherically farther up the income scale.