Here is the bare facts: once you take into consideration the starting advantages of students going into “elite” colleges, i.e., income, socioeconomic status, parental connections, academic aptitude, interests, etc, the benefits of attending an “elite” college dwindle to almost nothing.
The colleges which result in the largest change in socioeconomic status are not the “elite” colleges, which mostly just serve the wealthy who then get the well-paying jobs which are already reserved for them, whether they attended Harvard or Rutgers.
As for kids at “elite” colleges being “smarter” - the only real proof we have of this is the SATs and GPAs of these kids. However, so many organizations promising an increase in up to 200 in SAT scores, and it is a fact that private tutoring, quite places for homework, better nutrition, etc, can increase GPAs by at least 0.5. So there is no way that anybody can honestly say that a set of rich kids with average SAT scores of 1500 and GPA average of 3.9 are, in any way, “smarter” than low income kids with SAT averages of 1300 and GPAs of 3.4. So these are useless indicators for the “quality” of a college.
There is also a lot of rank classism in the continued claim that “elite” colleges are better, especially because of the fact that the occupations that is trains for are occupations of the ruling elites. There are few “elite” colleges which focus on agriculture or natural resources, few which focus on training K-12 teachers, few which focus on training the people who actually make the world run. They almost entirely focus on training people who make their millions by playing with the wealth created by the people who actually produce things or who provide critical services, people who make their millions by creating the rules, and people who make their millions interpreting and manipulating the rules. The major occupations of the graduates of the “elite” colleges are business, law, and politics.
So looking at “elite” colleges as being the “best” is simply another way of considering bankers, lawyers, politicians, industry CEOs, etc, as being “elite” occupations, and the people who hold these occupations as being an “elite” class, who deserve to be in charge, since they are “better”, while the farmers, teachers, electricians, carpenters, etc, are all of the “lower orders”, whose main job is to provide services to the “elites” who all, of course, attended “elite” private high schools and “elite” private colleges.
The obsession with the idea that these colleges are “elite” also indicates a belief that the most important indicator of being “elite” is wealth. So “rich” = “high quality person”, and “poor” = “low quality person”.
@Coloradomama Once again, your indication of “quality” is deeply embedded in wealth and privilege. Poor kids who are attending college on their own coin cannot afford to spend days on end training for math competitions. In fact, they cannot even afford to study math in college, since it will not help them get out of poverty.
Moreover, colleges like Harvard often recruit the top test takers from the middle class high schools. The same way that they recruit athletes so as to provide spaces specifically for Wealthy White kids, and to beat Yale at rowing, they recruit kids who are really good at solving existing math problems, so that they can receive as many prizes as possible.
PS, counting the number of NMFs is meaningless, since A, it is again, just an indication of skill and training at test taking, and B, the different state cutoffs mean that, for example, CA has, aside from its 2000 or so NMSFs, another 3,000 or so who would have qualified for NMSF status if they were in Idaho or Nevada. So is a college which gets 200 NMFs from states with SI cutoffs around 215 “better” than a college which has 300 kids whose PSAT/NMSTQ SI scores were higher than those 200 NMFs, but are from CA or NJ and so didn’t meet the cutoffs for their states and therefore did not make NMSF status?
