The Atlantic: Does It Matter Where You Go to College?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-matter-where-you-go-college/577816/

Perhaps the important quote from the article is this one:

In other words, the claim is that the advantage of attending an elite college is not so much the education, but because of the connections and socialization into the high SES social circles. Note that the elite colleges still tend to draw about half of their undergraduates from the top few percent of the SES range (the students with no financial aid) and a much smaller portion from the lower half of the SES range (the students with Pell grants), presumably to avoid diluting their high SES environment that keeps them desirable to recruit at by elitist employers like management consulting and Wall Street.

^Well, I think that’s a little condescending. For example, medical, engineering and law schools don’t recruit on campus, yet there’s a long tradition of them being favored ladders on the way to upward mobility. The same is true of most PhD programs. The truth is, most colleges just want the hardest working, most intellectually curious kids they can find and are willing to back it up with ample amounts of sticker price discounting in order to persuade them to matriculate. The sad fact is that kids from lower SES backgrounds take one look at the high tuition rates at elite universities and immediately conclude that they are unaffordable unless an elite college recruiter manages to visit their high school and supplies them with the correct information.