I agree with @roycroftmom that I don’t see that being the case (and I’m talking about what I’ve seen this century). (Immense) drive and an entrepreneurial spirit can get you very far. Take a look at Barry Ritholtz and Josh Brown. Stony Brook and UMD respectively for undergrad. The one successful entrepreneur among the folks I still keep in touch with from HS also went to a state school for undergrad (UIUC) and his startup was started this century.
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Not really. What that example shows is that while the sorting/evaluation mechanism isn’t perfect (and none ever will be), in the end, drive and guts is what will get you far. So why does it matter if the evaluation mechanism isn’t perfect? What major benefit would have come about if they had entered a Big 4 right after undergrad?
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It is also worth considering whether you have romanticized the elite college experience. Relatively few elite colleges are focused on undergrads, and tho their faculty support is generous, the focus is usually on research and grad students rather than mentoring undergrads. Professors there may have plenty of money, but were not hired nor promoted based on their undergrad teaching, and frankly, may not be interested. The peer influence of smart highly motivated classmates is enormous, but can be found in honors colleges and subgroups at state schools.
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You’re returning to a solution that I’ve been trying to point out to you is not a solution. Unless, that is, all you care about is the ability of an extraordinarily small proportion, and a deeply unrepresentative proportion, of non-wealthy people to be instrumental in how a democratic society runs.
Immense drive, extraordinary ability: as I’ve mentioned, if you have these before college, you’ll go into the elites by the EA door anyhow. The reason the elites need these people is that a lot of the wealthy ED kids are quite ordinary-bright. You’ve got to keep the stats and lustre up somehow. The point is that there is not equal opportunity for non-wealthy kids who are as bright and driven as your average ED admit.
Why is that bad? Because off they’ll go to state schools, where the courses are and at this point must be geared for kids who’re poorly prepped, sometimes very poorly prepped. “Honors colleges” are not generally a solution to the problem, because (as I’ve explained) the institutions themselves are not set up for serious career prep, but for checking kids in and out while collecting enough tuition to keep breathing. When the non-wealthy, average-ED-bright-and-ambitious kids emerge from their state Us, they’re far behind their high-school classmates who went off to elites, and they’re carrying a label that, as socaldad points out, hampers them.
Getting in the door to graduate school, necessary to most of that society-defining work, becomes much, much harder. I’ve seen this one from the inside. Those kids have to become Olympic pole-vaulters by coaching themselves, every single day, to do it. I see a very few manage. I see many more implode. Just fall to bits. It’s too much for a kid to do on their own.
What you get, then, driving and defining our society, are two kinds of people:
- Former rich kids who’re pretty bright and ambitious (big majority)
- Former non-rich kids who’re supernova bright/ambitous/driven. (seasoning)
Do you see any problem with this for a democracy?
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There is a finite amount of positions in Big 4 accounting and these firms routinely hire from colleges where the undergrads have a good track record of being high quality employees.
I worked in the LA office of one such firm and USC / UCLA were our go to colleges, and we heavily recruited summer interns from these two colleges. If we had 50 interns in Tax, 40+ came from these two colleges. And if you interned with us, you were almost certainly offered a job when you graduated.
Is it a perfect system, no, but it works fairly well knowing that we were getting some of the best graduates in accounting.
Lastly, most accountants have never worked for Big 4 firms but work for smaller, regional firms where they have successful careers. At the end of the day, goals, drive and work ethic overcome many obstacles.
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There are rich kids who are super-bright too. The traits aren’t exclusive. With admission rates of 3 to 5 percent, I do not think many ordinary bright kids are getting in, regardless of wealth. At least 75% of Princeton legacies are rejected, for example.
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Well, you’re doing a fine job of justifying your firm’s part in driving the problem, but this doesn’t actually address the problem. Your firm had “go-to colleges”. I know about this, because the place where I work is not a “go-to college”, which means I have to fight to try to get anyone to look at students in my dept’s program. Usually they refuse. So once again, there’s the gate for these supposedly able and wonderful students who can have just as good a blah blah blah as anyone blah. Why does your firm do this? Because you’re relying on the selective school to have done the screening for you. The selective’s gate is your gate.
While I understand doing that, it then becomes disingenuous to talk the line about how anyone from anywhere if only grit ambition etc.
Incidentally, I had one of those internships at what was then a Big 8 in an overseas office, and I was, just as you say, felt out on a job offer at the end. (I said no.) It was one of several such internships. Which makes me all the more keenly aware of the opportunities that come around on the silver tray for kids at elites that do not get offered to those at ordinary publics. Hors d’oeuvres, I used to call them. Perhaps mademoiselle would care to try the Fed this evening.
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Even those two industries have a not insignificant percentage of non-elite grads working there. So clearly that path isn’t closed off to others. I can’t think of a single path completely closed off to non-elite school graduates, as the OP claims.
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There are rich kids who are super-bright, in modestly higher proportion than among the non-rich. But you’ll find many, many more of the rich super-brights in elites than you will non-rich, and that’s because not only are they super-bright, they’ve had 18 years of exquisite and expensive prep, including social prep, before applying.
It’s in the state Us that those other bright kids used to flourish and then move into the jobs their abilities suited them to. I’ve discussed above how that road has become vanishingly narrow.
Many more of the rich? Most of the elites have half or more on financial aid, so they must not qualify as rich.
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The half not on financial aid come from families with $250k+ incomes to be able to afford $80k cost of attendance, so even many of those on financial aid at the elite privates have parents in the upper range of income compared to the general population. Based on Pell grant percentages at the elite privates, probably only 10-20% of their students come from the bottom half of parental income.
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The point is that the super-bright rich kids don’t need to be super-bright to get in, only average-for-that-institution bright. It’s nice for the elite U that they’ve brought something extra to the party, but what’s nailed the spot for them is the money. While they do need super-brights in there somewhere, there’s a limit to how many not-rich bright kids they’ll collect from EA. If they can get them all from ED, they will.
Tuition is not a major source of revenue for the most elite schools. I think you drastically overestimate how much full-pay matters at that level. Three percent of Princeton revenue is from tuition. Lower level schools depend much more on the full pay advantage.
Tuition’s only one inning. Let’s take a look at the rest of the game:
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money for 18 years’ worth of attention, prep, tutoring, expensive summer programs, expensive schools, expensive activities, a parent free to make all of this happen.
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gifts.
When those schools admit students, they’re admitting future alumni. They understand this. Students will be alumni far longer than they’ll be students, and if you admit primarily wealthy students, not only do you save your endowment for real estate and admin salaries and buying other faculty and schools, but you make life easier for your development people. To a degree greater than we’ve seen in the last hundred years, wealthy children are likely to be wealthy adults, and non-wealthy children are likely to be non-wealthy adults. If the development people are on their game, they’ll be collecting from three generations of the same wealthy family at once. But they do rely on admissions for the assist, with the exception of need-blind schools, and as you know there aren’t many of those.
That’s great admission result for public schools. One question - When you say the Yale kid is a strong STEM kid, does it mean he was strong in all Science, math, Engg and Math? or only one or two areas? because it’s so difficult to maintain high gpa as well as achieving national level recognition in all these areas like (USAMO, USACO, USABO etc etc)
I think there’s potentially something of a distinction between getting in to these institutions and moving on to the “elite society-defining jobs” after graduation (depending of course on how you define that). I absolutely agree there were a bunch of students from my kids’ not very elite high school (albeit in a city with plenty of elite parents) who got into prestigious colleges not solely on the basis of talent - the Stanford legacy, the Georgetown rower and the MIT URM, but will these kids ultimately get those “elite society-defining jobs” in competition with the super-talented striver at our state flagships?
I’m not wholly convinced of that (though at the next level down the advantage seems clearer). Given the higher concentration of super talented kids at top private schools, what percentage of “elite society defining jobs” would have to go to those schools before you concluded they were hiring less talented kids from top privates instead of more talented kids from state flagships? If anything, what I’m seeing at the moment is an overt attempt to rebalance (in elite scholarships for example) towards those who have overcome significant disadvantages but may not be quite so accomplished.
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So erase most of what you’ve got, roll the clock back, and put a brick wall between you and where you want to go. It will take you the better part of ten years to get around that wall and odds are you won’t, no matter how good you are. If you get to the other side you’ll be competing with rich kids who’re your age now (as you’re staring at that wall, not you in rl), and will have to prove yourself to them repeatedly.
Cool with you?
My understanding is that he had a high GPA, was strong in two areas, and achieved national recognition in one of these two.
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I earlier described examples of strong students from our town doing exceptionally well with elite college admissions.
I didn’t mention that most of these are children of immigrants. Now these children do have some real advantages. Most come from two parent households that heavily emphasize education. And their family income levels put them generally into the top 10 percent.
These are very real advantages that most people do not have. But some of the parents also came into the country with a number of disadvantages, such as the parents speaking English poorly, and not understanding social norms of upper class society.
But in a generation their parents managed to fit into the culture and understand it well enough to have their talented children play the college admissions game, and win.
What about the less fortunate? Is it ok that they cannot as readily make that jump from meager means to the brass ring?
I say that it actually is ok. Hear me out.
One lesson that I tell my kids regularly is that “success is multi-generational”. My father was so poor growing up that he was malnourished to the point that his growth was stunted. My brother and I are six inches taller than him, and a full foot taller than my mother.
But my father did the heavy lifting of moving to the USA by himself when we were young. A year later, he saved enough money to bring the rest of his family over. I didn’t realize we were poor until much later. We literally never went out to eat ever until I was in my teens. By the time it was time for me to go to college, my dreams of MIT were replaced by the state flagship that offered a full ride.
Even though that meant I missed out on opportunities that MIT kids had, I was able to become successful enough to afford selective private colleges for my children, and the ability to guide them on this process. Yes, this means they will have more opportunities before age 22 than I had until my 40s. But this was a three generation lift.
To me, this is the American dream: The opportunity for your children to do better.
And it still exists.
Immigrants readily see it. I can’t help but wonder why others don’t.
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Replace “super-talented” with “as talented as your average elite-U student”, and It’s a fair question. It’s also one I’m in some position to answer, having worked for many years now with super-talented and regular-talented flagship strivers in non-famous programs after growing up in elite-U world.
I can tell you that yes, the elite-U kids will not only get the job/opportunities, but that the odds are excellent that the state-U kids will never know the jobs or opportunities exist unless someone like me, who’s essentially doing volunteer work but knows where to look, takes time to find out, let them know, and tries to orient them. Now that a competition is possible, the state-U kid will still likely lose, because they’re not socialized into the manner of the elite U student, will not be coached step-by-step, and will simply, as a friend once memorably put it, “have the wrong smell.”
If you do move on to that rare super-talented flagship kid, then the question’s about (a) whether the kid can self-coach in a way that can compete with an elite U’s worth of faculty and staff plus rich parents, and (b) whether the kid can hold together financially, physically, and mentally while doing this for four years. Every day, at the age of 18-22, ish. I see kids like this hit the wall and break up like tie-wing fighters on the regular. Yes, they get scholarships, but their families aren’t often in good shape, and they’re also responsible people – if mom’s sick, if the autistic brother needs looking after, they’ll leave for a semester that turns into three, and I’ve yet to see any come back with the same momentum. And if poor advising means they don’t find out they’re in the wrong major for their talent until semester five, they don’t have money for an extra full-pay year, even at the state school.
I cannot underscore it heavily enough: the state Us are not equipped to support that kind of talent and drive it to join up with the elite-U kids at graduation. The state Us are concentrating on retaining a pulse.
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