What is a surprise is that the Ivy leagues and the wealthy are ashamed to admit this.
I think people wouldn’t get all worked up about this if people would be more honest.
Yes, there will always be some income differences, yes, some people self fragment into groups by race, class, interests, etc. when given a choice. What you see are natural consequences of people’s decisions.
I worry about the collateral effects of these attacks on meritocracy and the SAT. As immigrants, my family and I didn’t have social connections and deep cultural familiarity. Applying to college, doing the “right” extra-curriculars, etc., was actually quite a challenge. We never knew to work teachers for extra credit or retakes on exams to keep our grades up. What we had to distinguish ourselves from other upper middle class kids was our SAT scores.
Today, my wife and I have vastly more resources and cultural competency to navigate “the system” than my parents did. My kids go to a tiny K-12 private school where their teachers and guidance counselors will know them from preschool. We know the trendy extra-curriculars, how to craft admissions essays, how to put together class schedules that look good on a transcript while minimizing GPA risk, etc. I feel like deemphasizing the SAT and objective measures is going to help established families like mine at the expense of the kind of family I grew up in.
Still: your family was already well near the 75th percentile nationally for the time. In what sense would that not be wealthy?
As someone who attended an Ivy, it is simply untrue that it's mostly blue-blood old money hobnobbing around.
First, there's not enough of them to fill the classes every year. Second, wealthy people themselves want their children to be educated with other smart kids.
The stereotypes just don't fit and haven't for some time.
It was very much a surprise to me until I was like, 25-26 years old, which was when I really learned how the world works.
There's some very strong propaganda out there that you can do anything if you just apply yourself.
Heh, do people really fall for that? Even if the "can do anything" part is possible, it's not probable (compared to starting from a wealthy family and applying 1/10th the effort). Rich play life in easy mode, news at 11.
But business/academic success/jobs/monetary success/is...
Not saying there aren't great scholars coming out them.
The question is how good can educational institution get, when it is design to be a investment vehicle for the wealthy?