You sound like a student. So let me just articulate why we were happy to pay for private for one of our kids – in no particular order.
But it’s really the soft skills and personal qualities, and leadership potential that are in high demand at the elite institutions. These attributes correlate highly with success. They want to educate the future leaders, not just those who can learn information… It is what it is…
I really believe that one of the goals of a place like Harvard is to have every President, Vice President, Cabinet Member, Senator, Supreme Court Justice and Fortune 500 CEO to have some relationships with Harvard. It doesn’t matter if it is undergraduate, graduate/professional school, or faculty. Of course they will never reach that goal. But they must have been a little upset last election that none of the major party candidates (prez or VP) had one.
Close to half is probably a good estimate of high school students who would be Pell (including partial) eligible, but those from lower income families are less likely to go to college, so the portion of college students overall in the US with Pell (including partial) grants is more like a third.
You speak for all kids at all “elite” colleges? That’s not a uniform entity. Different kids at different colleges hold different companies in high regard. Based on comments in this forum, including from kids attending “elite” colleges, some kids attending such schools certainly hold this group of companies in high regard.
For me personally, associating the acronym FAANG with “elite” employment does not make sense. The acronym originated as a short hand of names of companies with a large market share in their respective field, rather than anything related to employment. If I was going to the list 5 tech companies that I’d expect to be considered most desirable to work for on average and/or the ones with largest number of tech hires from a particular set of “elite” colleges, it wouldn’t be those 5. My answer would also widely vary depending on which specific sub-field of tech, as well as the student’s particular goals.
In any case, I don’t think it’s clear that the overrepresentation of grads from certain “elite” colleges at some of these companies largely occurs because the tech companies are focusing on college name, rather than correlation with other factors, such as student self selection and a higher rate of being well qualified (acing tech interviews).
The idea the entire admissions system needs to be torn down in a way that significantly infringes on the rights of private institutions all because a student who felt entitled to a spot at Harvard has to settle for one at Penn, or one who felt entitled to a spot at Penn has to settle for one at WUSTL, and so on and so forth down the line, will never not seem wildly irrational to me.
These attributes are not confined to private schools.
I think I have the same sense of what I mean by private as @gluson does — a small set of well regarded privates for which there is always debate as to whether it is worth paying 80k /yr or not.
If you want to check all the boxes I listed , you can’t go to a public. You get what you pay for.
But you could of course go to some random small college and not get what you pay for.
Also our definitions could differ by what we mean by each of these terms - eg ‘top prof’, ‘prof giving attention’, ‘networking’, ‘top firms’, ‘feeder’ etc
1/2 the T10 schools for CS and engineering are public and maybe with the exception of flexibility (because you can’t switch into those majors, only out), they do check off all the boxes you listed. Not every student on CC is aiming for quant finance or big law.
The sweeping generalizations are just not helpful, nor accurate.
This!
I would call this a bug and not a feature :-). Not that kids should aim for quant or big law. Not at all. But you just don’t know what you don’t know in terms of opportunities that are available at some places.
Sure. But my point is - there are many kids who have absolutely no interest in quant, IB or management consulting. So it’s inaccurate to view everything through a single lens.
For sure. But even in other fields, some places have significant resources that are hard for you to imagine, even if those opportunities are not monetizae. For example my kid’s room mate has been on a dig to Greece every summer , fully paid. The depth and breadth of resources span most of the majors these schools offer for a small set of well endowed schools.
Of course there are some opportunities available to students at a handful of schools that they might not find elsewhere. Elite schools do confer some advantages. That being said, those aren’t the only places that a kid can get a great education that will set them up for a good future. What I push back against is the scarcity mentality that some kids (and their parents) bring to the table - that if junior doesn’t get into one of 20 schools they will never be successful (whatever that means). That kind of catastrophic thinking is, in my view, toxic and drives some of the crazy behavior we see today. There is no reason a HS student should spend their formative years curating a resume in the hopes of gaining admittance to a handful of schools. That some kids do this and feel all their efforts have been “wasted” if they don’t get into their elite school of choice is profoundly sad, to me.
I haven’t said any of those things should be done in terms of curating college tailored resumes, feeling depressed if you don’t get in etc. But @gluson was asking several people why people would pay up, and I was trying to answer him.
I don’t disagree re resources. What I’m saying was different.
I’ll pay up myself if S24 gets into one of his reaches so I don’t have any issue with spending the $$ on an elite school (if you have it - I wouldn’t put myself or my child into significant debt for any college). What I’m really reacting to is the underlying note of despair that some students convey through their posts - as if their entire lives balance on 4 years. I’m of the view that much of what drives success comes from personal attributes that stand apart from both your intellect and the college you attend.
As we get older we are well aware of all these things. Here is my comment on my college chat board two days ago 
“ ….also more aware of the somewhat lack of correlation between academic success and subsequent financial/career success later in life. This is part of the reason why they may go easier on their kids. ”
Came up in conversation on why dads are easier on kids than moms.
And I know students at non-elite schools who have been fully funded in their areas of interest every summer. As well as recruited to IB positions.
The problem with only really looking at ‘elite’ schools is drinking the kool-aid that they are the only ones with resources like funding summer opportunities and helping develop students into recruitable graduates.
It just isn’t true.
I’ll say one more time that a huge, out-of-proportion amount of the energy fueling all of this is born from the mindset that it is a unfair disaster to end up at Hopkins or UChicago; let’s not even speak of Cornell or Michigan. It’s insane!