@epiphany “In addition, for some students, the accidental existence of a high proportion of intellectually gifted students at elite universities has been beneficial after the fact, since the one thing that gifted students most often lack in K-12 education is the opportunity to develop relationships with those on their level.”
I thought you made some excellent points about why rich parents prefer elite schools, but the above comment was not one of them.
That comment presupposes that a “gifted” student who has 1,000 other gifted students in his class to hang out with at a large state university would not find the relationships he would get at an “elite” university where there are fewer than 300 students in his class who are gifted. And somehow the reason this would be hard is that there are 4,000 regular smart but “ungifted” students instead of 700 “regular smart but ungifted” students or because the 700 regular smart students at an “elite” college are academically stronger than the 4,000 regular smart students at a state university.
I don’t believe it matters whether if the 700 students who are smart but not especially gifted at an “elite” college are superior to the 4,000 students who are smart but not especially gifted at a state university. Who cares? Only the parents of those 700 students who want to make sure their child gets the benefit of being considered superior to all the students at the state college merely because of their presence at the “elite” college.
To me, that’s the reason rich people prefer elite schools - so that their children are considered among the “elite”. Even if they are not. Even if there may be 1,000 students at the state university who are academically superior to them. Because they know that because those 1,000 students make up only 20% of the freshman class, they don’t get the benefit of being automatically perceived as “intellectually gifted”.
But there is no reason that a gifted student at a public university would have trouble finding other gifted students among 1,000 gifted freshman among a class of 5,000.
There is this unspoken assumption that the mere presence of less academic students brings the other students down to their level. Somehow if those less academic students are 50% of a class instead of 25% of a class, it brings the whole class down. And those gifted students will struggle to find suitable “peers” because nearly all the students at those “elite” schools are peers.
Really gifted students don’t care about what the students in the bottom half of the college are doing. It doesn’t matter to them whether the bottom half is taking easy math or science classes or is taking somewhat more rigorous math and science classes. What matters is what the students who are at the top are doing and whether there are advanced classes to challenge them where they will find their peers. And that certainly happens in large state universities where there are so many students that there are many hundreds to fill those advanced classes.