New York City Life Bringing up baby By Bob Yampolsky	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
行き過ぎた「お受験」のてん末記 これはニューヨークがまだ好景気だったころ、バブル崩壊や米同時多発テロが起こる以前のお話です。主人公は当時、通信株担当の人気アナリストだったジャック・グラブマン。ニューヨークで最難関といわれる私立保育園に双子の娘を入れようと、必死になったグラブマンは、教育熱心の度が過ぎて…。

Every now and then, a story comes along that seems to capture the spirit of an age. Here is one from those happy pre-9-11, pre-burst-bubble days.

The hero of our story is one Jack Grubman, who at the time of this story (1999) was a stock analyst for the investment banking firm Salomon Smith Barney. That is, he studied companies and gave his opinions on whether investors should buy their stock. His specialty was telecommunications.

Now, stock analyst sounds like a well-paying job, though not necessarily a glamorous one (in his heyday, Grubman made $20 million [¥2.4 billion]). But Jack Grubman was a star. He appeared on TV shows and the covers of magazines, and when he said, "Buy," people bought, and because people bought, the prices of the stocks Jack Grubman recommended kept rising.

Now, Jack Grubman was the father of young twin girls. He wanted the best for them, or more specifically, he wanted his children to be enrolled in a certain private nursery school called the 92nd Street Y Nursery School.

Unfortunately, getting into a top-flight nursery school is no easy matter, even for stars like Jack Grubman. After all, while Woody Allen's child did get into the 92nd Street Y nursery, Madonna's didn't.

At the 92nd Street Y, the admissions process begins like this: At 9:00 a.m. on the day after Labor Day (the first Monday in September), parents must call the school to schedule a tour. Only the first 300 callers are allowed to schedule a tour, and only about one applicant in five will eventually be admitted. Needless to say, there are many frantic speed-dialers that Tuesday morning.

In recent years, many wealthy young families who in earlier years would have moved to the suburbs have chosen to stay in Manhattan, meaning that the competition to get into private nursery schools has intensified greatly.

The situation is complicated by the fact that most schools have a sibling policy - that is, if an older sibling is enrolled, the younger ones get in automatically, meaning that the number of available spaces becomes even more limited.

The competition is fierce, made fiercer, no doubt, by the fact that those competing are usually successful, wealthy and used to getting their way. Parents hire consultants and coaches for their 2-year-olds, get influential friends to write letters of recommendation, and make wild promises about how they will help the school after their children get enrolled.

All this is regarded as typical New York behavior. The anxiety-ridden parents worry that if Junior doesn't get into a good nursery school (tuition of roughly $15,000 [¥1.8 million]), he won't get into a good elementary school, junior high, high school, and then Harvard, thus bringing everlasting shame onto the family - this is a New York stereotype. But what Jack Grubman did has set new standards for "going the extra mile."

Grubman's firm is a division of Citigroup. Citigroup's chairman, Sanford Weill, asked Grubman to reconsider his unenthusiastic rating on AT＆T. The chairman of AT＆T, for one, sat on Citigroup's board of directors, and for another, Weill wanted AT＆T to become a Citigroup client. Grubman, in turn, asked Weill for help in getting his daughters into the 92nd Street Y.

This is what happened. Grubman raised his rating on AT＆T stock from "hold" to "strong buy." Citigroup donated $1 million (¥120 million) to the 92nd Street Y. Grubman's daughters were accepted at the nursery school.

The reason this came to light is that Grubman bragged about his achievement in emails to friends. The contents of the emails were disclosed because of investigations into whether stock analysts like Grubman were not necessarily objective in their stock recommendations - in particular, whether they recommended certain stocks not because they were good stocks, but because their firms wanted to curry the favor of companies in order to get investment banking business.

Since the bursting of the stock market bubble, telecom shares have collapsed, in some cases to about one percent of their peak value. It is amusing (provided that you don't own any AT＆T stock) to think that the bubble was caused, if only in very small part, by one man's efforts to get his daughters into nursery school.

For the record, all three parties - Grubman, Weill and the nursery school - deny that there was any quid pro quo. Grubman says he was lying in the emails. Weill says that he did put in a word for the Grubman girls, but denies that the $1 million (¥20 million) donation was tied to the upgrade of AT&T stock. And the nursery school says that the girls went through the same rigorous admissions process as everyone else. The district attorney's office is investigating.

Shukan ST: Jan. 3, 2003

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