
Originally Posted by
Ouisch
"Schlep" is a Yiddish word that literally means to haul or to drag an item or items from one location to another and the entire episode is a miserable experience. For example, "The service was so bad at the airport - there were no carts available and I had to schlep my bags all the way to the bus depot." Or "The hotel claimed that it had lost my reservation (even though I'd made it a month ago!) and they put me on a broken-down shuttle bus that schlepped me off to some place that should have been condemned years ago."
So in this case the student is being "palmed off" or directed to a "second-best" school. The people in charge are assuring the student that the Martha Graham Acadmey is just as good as Watson-Crick, yet he has to haul all of his belongings himself onto a rickety un-air-conditioned school bus that takes him on a miserable journey to Martha Graham. When he finally gets there he immediately notices that appearance-wise, anyway, the school is in no way comparable to Watson-Crick.