The "dumb|lazy rich kid" stereotype is very old and no doubt has some basis, but in the few rich families I've known, the kids were pushed extremely hard to achieve academically.
Both households can try to "push hard" but what the rich household can do for a child is a strict superset of what the middle class one can.
A lot of Ivy League school entries are "legacy" which means a parent went there.
Remember if you let in a minimum number of something that means you wouldn't have without a limit.
Legacy students aren't more gifted academically or they could get in as part of the academic pipeline, right?
While certainly it has been shown that students with better upbringing perform better on such things the amount of that is way less than the difference in students.
Thus it isn't as simple as "those who are given all the tools do better" there is also an aspect of something else.
After all "they are just better students" would imply only a similar increase in application acceptance.
The is a large trend of "overrepresented groups are just better" again and I prefer to push back on "I don't have evidence of why else there is overrepresentation so obviously it is fair"...
Especially when Legacy is literally the opposite of fair.
If we let things fall into a reinforcement loop the result is a bimodally educated society: from there does the intelligentsia then go and rule over the rubble?
Differentiation based on traits is not stable across many generations, and the commoners will always eventually generate individuals who are better along whatever dimensions than the aristocracy does.
I don’t think we have to worry about this problem, so long as we prevent the actual corruption. If we are really looking at merit, the families will cycle out after a few generations (again, we do have to prevent the actual corruption).
You answered that:
> it functionally doesn’t work well.
We're not talking about taking the dregs of society and throwing them into ivy league schools: we're talking about people who didn't have 4 years of debate team and lacrosse and water polo but still managed to do quite well for themselves.
It creates a better environment for everyone involved, since like you noted, creating an aristocracy has traditionally not worked out for either side of the coin.
/s (if that wasn’t obvious)
My point is that letting in applicants by (aspirational) merit does not create an aristocracy, even if some of the high performing applicants are wealthy. Aristocracy is created through corruption of (aspirational) meritocracy, because you need some non-(aspirationally-)meritocratic force to hold the same families in place generation after generation. They won’t continue to perform well forever. If they did perform well forever (again, they don’t), then aristocracy would be a more workable system than it is.
- low-income families are 3x more likely to have problems with their cost: https://mottpoll.org/sites/default/files/documents/031819_Pa...
- many programs and activities that stand out aren't likely to be offered in poorer school districts
- the time outside of school hours they take has a cost: it can be in terms of needing additional transportation, or changing childcare plans for example.
College applications don't measure aspiration, they measure proxies for aspiration we've long known are flawed and heavily affected by wealth.
Honestly it's telling that affirmative action was struck down which in turn is threatening legacy applications, and not the other way around, when it's well known historical fact legacy applications started out as a way to keep out immigrants: at the end of the day these schools have been putting their endowments ahead of what benefits society, and that's not really how things should work.
This is a failure of K-12 public educational systems for not preparing students as well as high income families can.
I think the biggest difference is that kids without family money don’t have the option to coast.
They may not have had teams of tutors, one for each subject, but I guarantee you that they worked with people at some point in their academic careers.