<p>
</p>
<p>Vance Packard wrote in The Status Seekers in 1959 that Princeton had only recently (i.e. late 1950s) started admitting a majority of students from public schools. In those days, the public schools were the source of the academic strivers who gave HYP the academically elite status, while the the boarding school graduates were the scions of the SES elite who mostly showed no special academic inclination, being content with “gentleman’s C” grades and looking down on the academic strivers who needed to do well in school because they did not have the advantages of family connections and inheritance. I.e. it was back then that inheritance and breeding were far more important for social status relative to individual merit or achievement, compared to today.</p>
<p>The preference for the SES elite boarding school graduates had a lot to do with keeping the donations flowing, similar to how legacy preferences (and the less common “developmental admits”) exist today.</p>