Expensive, prestigious private high schools are made up of 80-90% full-pay families and a huge number of Ivy-T20 educated parents. I don’t doubt that the expensive, prestigious private high schools add value, but I bet the difference in admit rate for easy full-pay legacy kids who go to suburban publics, e.g, is a lot smaller than you think.
EDIT: apologies, this was meant to be a reply to @parentologist
Yep. At one point I was interviewing at a school with a prestigious prep, and holy crap, was it a beautiful place. I wanted to go there myself. I mean the library alone. A high school library with a complete, spanking-new Grove encyclopedia. And really good books up and down the shelves. Actual readers in that place. The facilities, the teaching, unbelievable. But it was also apparent that a large part of the point was to be a pipeline. And it goes all the way through, at this point. I see it in the grad programs here: even though our programs are mostly unimpressive, the snobbery about the applications is wild. It’s worse when it comes to hiring faculty, even though we get burned time and time again. (The same is not true at community college level, where they want people who actually know what they are and are trained to teach their students. A public-U MAT festooned with certificates beats an Ivy PhD.)
Once the kids are in the grad programs, there’s the fellowships game, and while it’s possible for grad students who haven’t been trained for nationally competitive fellowships since 3rd grade to get there, the ferocity of the mentoring needed is hard to come by. Essentially it works only if the untutored get their bearings immediately in grad school, have strong mentors available, and immediately become a tornado of “play up, play up and play the game.” Otherwise they don’t get the fancy fellowships, which means they’re on some equivalent of a mommy track. They’re not hired preferentially in prestige places. They’re not fast-tracked to the right conferences and parties, not top of brain for leadership roles. And you wind up with these ponds of privilege that just collect. I was thinking about that a few years ago when I was about to start a session with a bunch of grad students, and I was checking my facebook where some FOAF MIT grads a bit younger than me were dissecting the latest Space X fail; they knew people working on the project and financing related projects. One guy worked for Buffett. Elsewhere in my feed, variously decorated and powerful people from arts, sciences, law, media. And I looked up at the kids around the table and thought “they don’t know these conversations are happening.” Nor would they know where to go to find them. There’s no door, no application. I don’t even know how I found them except that I had the right friends. Because of where I went to school, and because of conversations from days of a more open and less populous internet. In other words, because of where I went to school.
CCNY (and the special schools) needed something beyond the smart boys’ (and girls’!) presence: they needed a LaGuardia. They needed active support and promotion from top to bottom, and they got it. And they were in an environment of visible and intense competition. The same is not available here: the “leadership” will just sit and stare at the kids and then take credit for their test scores. But when I say that the public kids will have to “make them notice and take back access”, I mean they’re going to have to make the rich kids notice, after college. For the rest of their lives. They’ll have to be very noticeable to the kids who’ll be running the institutions, eventually, and who are generationally part of the same group, but have not been in contact with them except on social media…ever. They’re going to have to come for those kids’ privilege throughout life. In their favor? In the beginning, for one thing, 4000 public-high-school AP courses. They show up well-schooled in the same foundational curriculum the T20 kids have. I would not be surprised to see a resurgence of interest in law school.
Could be quite interesting. Oddly enough, the night before Trump’s inauguration, I had just the worst nightmare involving CCNY, which for some reason had moved oceanside in Queens, and there was a tsunami, and it didn’t play so well with the 1960s plate glass I’d decided the building was made of. I can still hear that smack of the water on glass. Malign.
The “good profs are everywhere” thing is true-ish. Some PhDs just happen to be good at going to school. End of day it’s 5-8 years of school, not Nobel-worthy work. But assume that most are more than fine. At a wealthy university, once tenured, the main pressure they face is mining more prestige out of the prestige mind. Publish, be tops, best best best. They’re lavishly supported in this endeavor and their facilities are spectacular. At a flagship or state that’s just trying to keep the pulse going, they’re crushed at this point, especially if they’re also expected to bring in research funding. They’re supposed to do six people’s work in the midst of serious institutional dysfunction and, often, legislative and even student hostility. Travel funds and facilities don’t exist, they don’t show up often enough at big events, and they’re cut off from collegial conversations. Their students are poorer, less well-prepped, and more troubled. Entire staffs are missing – someone used to do that job, but it doesn’t exist anymore. And the grad students they lean on are also less well-prepped and often less on the ball than the top-school grad students are. So what’s actually available to the students at a state school…I’ve told my daughter to steer for the assistant profs who’re still knocking themselves out, might not have kids yet, and are still hopeful, and the old profs who don’t give a damn anymore and have resorted to teaching things they love and telling admin and their colleagues to go to hell. Mid-career are strictly for networking beyond the university: they’re much too overworked, demoralized, and pissed off otherwise. Beyond that, she’ll need to physically leave the university, go to cities, and meet people in careers she’s interested in often and early, build that network, because her profs are hobbled, compared to more privileged kids’ profs.
A fairly obvious solution all around is to do a LaGuardia on the state schools so that once again they take all comers. Anyone has a shot. That involves a recognition that even poorly-paid, mundane jobs are now complex enough that you do actually have to be able to think and communicate well and know some things in order to do them, and a recognition that state universities need to be funded properly rather than shifting the burden to students and their families. If you do that, and make public universities everywhere strong enough that they’re terrific value for the almost-nothing tuition, it becomes much more difficult to sell a private-school year for $70K, and the campus-building arms race for the top of the market and “destination” niches also calms down, which markedly reduces institutional costs. You get state Us that (a) kids from that state can actually get into; (b) have lovely profs; © have lovely profs who actually have time to teach and institutional support. You’re still left with massive institutional debt piled up over the last two decades from those battles, but you’re on the road. I estimate it’d take about $100B a year for many years to get us there nationwide, which means that’d have to be federal money. My sense is that this is the direction Biden’s been heading in, but not hard enough; I think there’s about $40B for universities in that Covid relief act. He has the right people on his advisory panel, though.
The old CCNY didn’t exactly have much in the way of resources besides the brightness and drive of the students and faculty who cared. But I doubt the CCNY faculty were among the best supported, resourced, or the top of their field. And it certainly wasn’t open to all (open admissions) though there was no discrimination other than by merit.
BTW, my understanding is that public honors college classes tend to be taught by those old profs.
So would you like the ASU model?
The products of prestige schools tend to be the ones who lay down the rails the society runs on. If we’re talking excitement, though, and you want sales, what’s the biggest thing that helps someone in sales? Access to people with money. Who’s got money? They’re well-concentrated on Parents’ Day at prestige schools. Consider how finance and garage startups have worked in the last couple of decades: I don’t care how terrific your salesmanship is, it really helps to have a large circle of enormously wealthy friends. (God. I remember working in a bookstore near Brown, and one Parents’ Day some petrified woman in Brooks Brothers handed me a book, without looking at me, and asked through her lockjaw how much it was. I flipped open the cover, read her the price, and then said, “And twenty dollars for the reading fee,” then handed it back to her. She didn’t bat an eye.)
(As for whether sales is exciting? Well…it’s not for nothing that the elites look for kids who want somehow to be world-changers. There’s world-changing salesmanship. You also need to be good at it in worldchanging fields. But as a career? I’ve worked in sales (and marketing), and there’s a lot there on a human level that’s deep. Mamet knew. But end of day you’re shifting product. It’s not societally influential, you’re lucky if you get to be ethical, you’re astonishingly lucky if you’re selling a thing worth buying, and you’re looking in part to find a thing that works and pump that pump till money stops coming out. So except for the human game, which again is frequently unethical, it’s not all that interesting, imo.)
STEM is, educationally, very different from non-STEM, for good reasons and bad. At bottom the approach to to the world, and to being in it, is pretty profoundly different, which is why the two have such trouble communicating with each other. You have to get very fancy in STEM before you start wandering near humanities, say, and I’ll let you know when I meet a good matchup with arts.
Blockquote The old CCNY didn’t exactly have much in the way of resources besides the brightness and drive of the students and faculty who cared. But I doubt the CCNY faculty were among the best supported, resourced, or the top of their field. And it certainly wasn’t open to all (open admissions) though there was no discrimination other than by merit. BTW, my understanding is that public honors college classes tend to be taught by those old profs. So would you like the ASU model?
If it didn’t come with Michael Crow, possibly. Dude’s a charlatan.
It’s not necessary for a great public to have top anything or lavish facilities. It does need to be the place of choice for a lot of bright, bright kids, and its faculty needs to be free to teach them. That’s pretty much the whole game.
Public honors are taught by all kinds of profs – it depends on the incentive structure for faculty at any given university. At mine you see a lot of mid-career profs teaching honors, fishing to stock their summer programs and building their CVs for tenure & promotion committees. Also having a break from the massive courses that frequently leave them feeling that it’s all pointless.
A sincere question, are tenure track/tenured professors really feeling all that overworked and demoralized? Do they really need staff support that has been cut? I am trying to compare this to similar level managers in corporate jobs.
I see the confusion – you’re looking at “can they get a decent job”. I’m looking at “can they get the kind of elite society-defining job that the kids coming from the elite schools have a straight path to.” Yes, you can come out of a state U and get a decent job in an industry with relatively high salaries and have a comfortable life. It still helps lots to be well-connected, but I don’t think that’s in question.
Definitely true for STEM now. Go on the market with a PhD from U of ____ vs one from any of the top privates and watch what happens. It’s true at the undergrad-> grad juncture now, too. If you’re coming out of your program in STEM and want to go to industry, your network is likely to be very different at an expensive school than it is at your bargain state school. Still open from state, afaics: STEM jobs with GS salaries. Go national lab, go agency, work your way up.
Media: if you look at NYT, it’s currently being populated by the Gizmodo fresh faces of 10-15 years ago. And if you look at their bios, that ain’t in general state-school. Substacks will not support you. Neither will most media jobs that you won’t get without the nice boost from Williams or wherever. But a media job plus help from your wealthy parents and/or your hedge-fund/lobbyist husband/angel-investor/professor spouse who went to a school like yours – now you’re talking. A terrible idea: journalism major you and your parents borrow serious money for because you don’t have that kind of money on hand.
City biz: I sometimes help state-school grad students get fancy competitive summer internship/tryouts that lead to these elevator-to-C-suite jobs (which really are sales, yep). They come back all pissed off because all the other kids are from fancy schools and evince shock that there’s a state-school student among them. They also field a lot of questions about why they’re at that school.
Non-STEM federal: Being in DC does help a lot, and at the undergrad level the schools are AU and GW, both very expensive and stingy with aid. Flagship DC internships are limited to the students who have money to support themselves in DC while working for free, paying for summer credit, and not working a paying job to pay for part of the following year’s expenses at college. Plus getting back and forth somehow. When the internship is over, you disappear; there are thousands of ambitious local students right there at the door. I’ve often had to have a quiet chat with state-school advisors who push poor students at these opportunities, which are not opportunties if you can’t pay for them.
Don’t forget that when you’re looking at people in top jobs now (like F500 chiefs), you’re looking at people who came up through a different system. Not only was it much easier for someone not rich and at an elite prep to go to a name school, but it was still relatively straightforward for a hotshot from State U to find the elevator and ride it up. My point here is that the access points have tightened up considerably: starts very early and undergrad admissions are the first real snap-off point.
Wouldn’t the effect of school prestige in the PhD job market be based on the in major school prestige, not the overall school prestige? In some majors, the highest prestige schools are not the usual “top privates” of overall school prestige.
Hmm. Looking at Truman Scholars, it looks like publics edge out elite private research U’s (“elite private” being NYU’s level and above). LACs don’t match in number but probably punch above their weight considering how tiny they each are.
Granted, by sheer numbers, there are way more undergrads in publics. However, only a small percentage of those kids would be in public honors. By per capita, is it really tougher for public uni kids in honors to get in to elite grad programs compared to elite private uni kids?
I do agree that at the grad school level, eliteness matters.
And definitely, in the (old-school) consulting and the (Northeast-dominated) high finance and media industries, private school pedigree dominates.
But in the tech industry (which is eating the world), I follow a few thought leaders and they come from both private and public undergrad.
Oh, without doubt. They’re crispy fritters. It’s why I don’t have them over for drinks anymore: it’s always a seriously depressing evening full of sniping. The differences between state and private are pretty significant, but 80-hour weeks are routine. At your average threadbare state U, they’ve been through endless rounds of budget cuts for decades now, and everything from admin support to student support to janitorial service is a shadow of what it used to be. (Exception: disability services, though they haven’t kept pace with actual student disabilities. Kids come in much sicker and poorer than they used to, and many aren’t kids.) Your average state research-U prof is supposed to be inventing nationally competitive student-attracting programs, getting intensely competitive research funding and/or writing prizeworthy books, recruiting grads to the program and undergrads to the major, doing outreach, attending and/or running conferences with little or no staff support and colleagues backing away when they ask for help, developing and teaching classes of 300-1000 with TA support that hasn’t got enough training to find the building reliably, supervising grading and exams, producing makeup exams for dozens if not hundreds, dealing with students who are suing them/the university, serving on multiple university committees, serving on departmental committees actually needed to make the department function (curriculum review, hiring, salaries, recruiting, etc.), training grad students to do useful research and write papers, also shepherding them to conferences, running summer programs for undergrads, attracting good promotional media attention, being trained to spit it out in 30 seconds for such media, making nice with legislators, assisting students having breakdowns or disclosing rape or other serious problems, serving as external reviewers for other universities or agency grant proposals, serving on PhD committees, dealing with students’ visa and housing problems, taking visiting profs and prospective hires out for meals, getting terrific student evals, answering student emails within 24 hours, answering/deflecting parent emails within 24 hours, doing their best to produce IP that the university can make money from…these are just the ones I’m thinking of off the top of my head, and it doesn’t touch the fact that frequently they don’t have the facilities and support they actually need to do their work, even if they do go out and drag home the money for doing it (and hand a fat slice of it to the institution). Libraries, journals, equipment, promises of institutional money/support/teaching-release that will persuade agencies to make grants, travel funds.
This was all pre-pandemic and pre-George Floyd. Now there’s also the question of how to do everything remotely and many more meetings, many more urgent and emotional conversations, more fights over who gets what and why.
Salaries for most state-U profs hang out around $80-130K unless they’re also doing admin work (oh right, they’re also supposed to take turns as dept chair) or big producers. You make more doing corporate work, which is why it’s relatively easy to poach profs to industry, if you want them.
I forgot the chronic reorganizations and tendencies of admin to come and kick over whatever sandcastles the profs are building. That never goes down well.
The demoralization comes from the eventual sense that it’s not going to be possible to do anything well, that this is neither wanted nor allowed, and that it’s an almighty struggle to advance at all in these environments. These were all once high flyers, also rule-followers sensitive to social tremors. You don’t get a PhD by striking out on your own or ignoring hierarchy. From the admin side…the state cuts are real. There really is only so far you can hike tuition, only so many OOS rich kids you can pull. End of day, the business of most state Us is undergrad butts in seats. Tens of thousands of them. During hiring, people will say all kinds of things about opportunity. But is the institution there to support the prof’s work and career…well, it’s usually a few years after tenure that the prof’s forced to conclude that genuinely nobody there cares about anything much but the butts in the seats. However, moving is a herculean thing and payoff is uncertain. It’s not like jumping company to company. Which is part of why university admins can treat the profs this way: they know they’re pretty well stuck.
Yes, for sure. Also the prestige of the postdoc school and lab. However, savvy parents like CC readers take that into account, so if a kid is a promising young marine biologist, Scripps (UCSD) and the WHOI/MBL-related schools are already on the radar and the parents are working backwards to the feeder schools for them. These things also change relatively quickly now as the schools with huge endowments play chess with them. Ten years ago, for instance, that young marine biologist probably wouldn’t have thought about UChicago, but UChicago bought an interest in MBL and has been pouring money into physical sciences, so now it’s a plausible package and a good springboard to, say, UCSD.
A major question in STEM PhD hiring at universities is whether the prospect will hit the ground running and hoover up grant funding, which relies on not only having great and fundable ideas but the publication record to show you can produce. So many top publications from a prestige group at a prestige university will help dazzle, as will the family network and expected continued mentorship from your very successful PhD and postdoc advisors. Also funding-agency postdoc/trainee fellowships that lead easily to the families of individual-investigator grants. Physical/bio STEM prof hires get 6-7 figure startup packages meant to kit out and staff their labs for a few years, but ultimately the university wants much more money coming back the other way in the form of research grants.
I’m confused by this statement. If “U of ____” is Berkeley then is there really a difference with “top privates”? Isn’t it just that it is even more important to do your grad degree in a top program?
Surely the question is whether there is a path from state universities to top graduate programs (law, PhD, MBA). That does seem to be possible for the very top students.
I agree that there’s a question of expectations. When you talk of “elite society-defining jobs” I think that it is much easier to aspire to these opportunities when you have parents who understand what that entails and what is needed to get there. I would be interested to see whether the university that kids attend is as influential as the milieu that kids come from. The research indicating that kids who get into elite universities but choose to go elsewhere do as well as those who do attend, suggests to me that family background (and the expectations that kids grow up with) may be more important than the actual university attended for undergrad. At least in our neighborhood, where many parents have similarly elite ambitions for their kids, I’m not seeing a big difference in outcomes for the comparably able kids who chose to go to Berkeley or UCLA vs those who chose to go to Georgetown or Duke. Maybe the less able students get a boost by paying up for GWU or AU but I’m not seeing them catching up with the more able kids.
Thanks for the insight. These are the average flagships, right? What about the elite flagships (though the UCs and Wisconsin have seen cuts recently, though Cal has the brand name to launch a bunch of expensive masters programs) and the publics that are almost private except in name because they have gotten so little financial support from their state for a long time now (UVa, PSU, and CU)?
Marshall Scholars also looks balanced between publics and elite privates (NYU/Tulane level or above though the vast majority of those kids come from Ivies/equivalents). A handful of LAC kids.
Okay, Cal is a special thing. I shouldn’t speak so broadly. Sure, Cal, UMich for certain things, I just mentioned UCSD for oceanography/marine work, Iowa for grad creative writing, there are top grad programs scattered about at public universities. However, that’s not most state-school PhD programs.
Family background, support, and connections are important, no doubt. Childhood environment, sense of competition and direction, sure. However, there’s also the question of what your undergrad school is trying to do and what it has available to do it with. If your classmates are just trying to graduate and won’t think seriously about a job till the July after graduation, and your school is content to let that happen because the focus is on running classes and getting kids out the door, that’s very different from going to a school where you’re being directed toward internships from your first semester on, being introduced to stars in your intended profession who’ll offer you opportunities, taking part in symposia/expos that show all your classmates with jetpacks on careerwise, seeing alumni hovering around the edges and not just for tailgates…yeah, it has an effect. Trying to do these things on your own in an environment that isn’t built for that degree of success it is very difficult. Not impossible for all. But very difficult.
What I see is that where a kid at an average state U lucks out is in meeting a well-connected and vigorous prof who still really cares, and will mentor that kid like they’re at an elite. That’s a huge gift. But it relies on those individual profs, not the culture and deliberate priority-making of the institution. Again, that’s harder to find than it was 20 years ago. Those profs have to have the time, energy, and optimism to keep going with that work.
Studies looking at new grad salaries that control for student characteristics usually find the salaries follow student characteristics, rather than the college name. The classic example is the Dale and Krueger study, which found that average earnings were similar among students who applied to and were accepted to a similar set of colleges, regardless of whether the student chose to attend a highly selective or not highly selective college. The individual students and their backgrounds were the driving force for their future earnings, rather than prestige of college name.
However, such studies are not specifically looking at “elite society-defining jobs.” I’m not sure what types of jobs qualifies, but I’d expect that “elite society-defining jobs” are generally mid/late career type positions, rather than first job out of college. As a general rule, the longer you have been out of college, the less where you attended for undergrad matters. In the the overwhelming majority of fields, where you attended undergrad decades ago has very little direct impact on future employment. Far more influential is what you have been doing in recent previous jobs and connections made in recent previous jobs. It’s rarely a simple pipeline in which you must attend a prestigious private as the first step in that pipeline for the desired career decades down the road, although I cannot go into specifics without more detail about the specific jobs that make up this group.
Absolutely, the ones wanting to abolish merit based criteria are doing significant lasting damage that will further increase inequalities. Instead of leveling the playing field it feels like there are 2 completely different games being played with vastly different outcomes.
But at “average state U” how many kids actually have ambitions to work in “elite society-defining jobs”? I see the degree to which a college focuses on providing the opportunities you mention as correlated with the number of kids who have those ambitions. If there are only a very few kids with those ambitions then individual ad hoc mentoring for those who seek it out may be optimal. With slightly more of those students an honors college may be the way to go. There are probably many more of those highly ambitious kids at a flagship in California than at (say) a flagship in the Mountain West and at a Berkeley or UCLA you do have a lot of the examples of success and involved alumni to lean on. So it seems like a chicken and egg situation.
But I do share your concerns about the end result - it was very noticeable that at S’s internship with a well known DC think tank, the vast majority of interns were from top privates and appeared to have got their positions through networking rather than just applying in response to a job posting.
Hmm, sure. But what about the honors college kids and kids in the named cohorted scholarship programs? OK, granted, there is a lot of variation among all those programs. And I agree that most undergrads at publics are just a number. But I also know the top public engineering schools have a lot of connections with industry, which I would think would help a decent amount.
So – it depends on where you are.
I’ve been around for the shift from pride-and-joy flagship for all to more-beer flagship for suburban kids (plus whoever else turns up). In the pride-and-joy days, we had a lot of seriously ambitious kids and faculty who had time to hand them up the ladder. It was great. Nice kids, very smart, great sense of humor, relaxed people who just went off into the world hitting homers. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works anymore.
Even if a ton of the kids at “average state U” were still seriously ambitious, the universities themselves are not currently equipped to aid them in those ambitions. The universities that do attend to these things are keenly interested in their alumni networks, and that’s part of the point of those institutions. They’re power centers. The same is not true of average state U, which at this point is limping from semester to semester, trying not to cut programs while literally playing the market with money it can’t afford to lose, but needs a fast buck out of. That university’s goal is to check kids both in and out, graduate them. What becomes of them afterwards, that’s their problem. When an institution is that strapped, it hasn’t got time or people to build persistent connections to industry and power (except in these elusive public-private partnership deals which are really just marauding adventures for equity. University sells some part of its infrastructure to a private concern which then leases it back to the U longterm at favorable terms. The U gets fast cash, loss of control, higher overall expenses, and a whole lot of risk. The concern gets a captive longterm client backed by a taxing power.)
You see this in how the funded programs work there: say a few profs decide the situation’s dire and they have to get outside money to build a pipeline to industry for their hand-picked ambitious students. So they go to NIH or NSF or somewhere, get the money to pay for the temp staff to support such programs and the professorial time and student stipends, and build it. They’re able to do that because one or two people have some connections to industry. When those profs retire or die, so does the program. Or someone decides he’s on a rescue mission to stick Fulbrights to students and boost them out. That’ll happen until that person leaves or is fired or dies. The replacement is unlikely to pick up the mission, because it’s just too busy surviving day to day. “Get Fulbrights” is not part of the institution’s core mission. You see this sort of thing all over the country at these places: individual profs and staffers go knocking themselves out to do these things, and the institution is happy to collect credit, but all these people are very much on their own, and it’s like watching sparklers. Flash and vanish, as if the programs never were.
Similarly, for good ad hoc mentoring, you need profs who are able to maintain a rich network of powerful connections in and out of academia, who have time to lavish on individual undergraduates, and who are going to be rewarded somehow for building this network. If the institution doesn’t prize influential external networks, it’s not going to help the prof do anything but feel good while feeling even more exhausted (unless a former mentee becomes successful enough to rescue the prof). I remember when the tipping point came here – it was sometime around 2008. It became very difficult to just go chat with a prof, not because they were jetting off to conferences but because they were all busy jumping at every email that came through. They just had a lot more customer service and admin-pleasing to do, many more tasks.
So you wind up with these dual accidents of birth. What kind of family were you born into, and then what state did your parents bring you to. If you haven’t got money, your option is probably in-state. Whether it’s flagship or not depends a lot on who else lives in your state and what inequality looks like there.
Maybe as damaging: because even the state U is so expensive now, wherever you are, the kids are unlikely to take risks. They can’t afford to mess up their course planning or get weak grades while playing around and finding things they really love. I asked a room full of undergrads the other day whether they’d be in their current majors if tuition cost $5K for all of college, and only a third of them raised their hands. Emotionally, they can’t really afford to pay attention to the thing they know is probably true: there may not be jobs in this after all. They have to believe in order to justify the massive expense and strain of what they’re doing. They’re not even expecting jobs and lives they enjoy: they just hope for steady jobs that pay enough for a house and to be able to pay off their loans. The same socioeconomic classes, going to state universities, gave the US some of the most risk-taking, innovative, society-transforming people we had 50 years ago because the society itself underwrote their ambitious youthful risks. That, to me, is the major societal loss, and I think it’s one we’ll regret.
“Honors college” can mean lots of different things. At a competitive flagship or non-Ivy selective, it can mean some serious mentoring and door-opening, and that’s fine. But at a state U that isn’t part of that grab-the-gold culture, a remarkable amount of effort can go into just assuring the kids that it’s all right to be smart in public. Don’t forget, a lot of these kids are coming from environments where it’s physically dangerous to sound smart. They haven’t been encouraged to be ambitious, haven’t been pointed at opportunities. On the contrary: people have been seriously annoyed by them for most of their lives. There will be extra opportunities, but the likelihood is they’ll be on-campus. Very much a ymmv proposition.
An interesting thing is that even though inequalities are apparent to pretty much everyone, this conversation is saying to me that most of the inequalities and their growing depth really aren’t too visible from the outside, even to people who have a real interest and spend time thinking about universities.