Reply to NYT: "Peak College Admissions Insanity"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The elite schools are basically a harry potter sorting hat for IB, Big Law etc.. and what they really are doing is creating a net work among the already rich/elite kids.  Middle class smart kids may get in but very few have the contacts and skills to net work themselves up that high.  The richer you are the less relevant your major needs to be[/quote]

I don’t know about finance but that’s not true for big law.  My spouse and I are both very very middle class kids who went to Ivy or similar colleges by working our butte off in HS and nailing the SAT (thank you Waldenbooks for that prep book!), getting great grades there and great lsat score to jump into the best law schools in the country then federal appellate clerkships.  Biglaw is filled with people like that.  The rich kids that aren’t working and just parlaying connections are not ending up at the top firms at least in DC.  They may do better in regional markets like Richmond if their families are regional power brokers.

I don’t work in finance but at least some of the very well off finance folks I know are children of immigrants who I don’t think come from elite backgrounds…just super smart who work their butts off.  The ricch family people I know are in commercial real estate or individual asset management.[/quote]

Myth of meritocracy so that we don’t change the system. Who bought you those sat books? Who encouraged you to apply to Ivy League colleges? Who paid for your tuition? The concept of the law school is very foreign to Europeans, who instead prefer the inns of court. This is because they recognize law schools for what they really are: bourgeoisie breeding grounds.
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+1, I'm a lawyer who went to a top law school and used to work in Big Law in DC and I don't buy PPs story. First I bet they were not actually "middle class." Many people like this call themselves middle class because they grew up a doctor's kid from the midwest, and that seems more middle class to them than attending Sidwell as the child of a Big Law partner. But it's not, really. The PP doesn't say whether their high school was public or private, but I'm betting parochial schools or public in a wealthy district where most parents are well-paid white collar professionals. PP also doesn't say whether they or their spouse received aid for college, since middle class families have never been able to afford the cost tuition at Ivies or top private colleges. So either their families had more money than PP is letting on or they wound up with a pile of loans, but I don't see any mention of that.

Actual middle class people go to mediocre public schools and in-state colleges, because that's what they can afford. Sometimes a very bright an ambitious middle class person will make it to an Ivy or similar, but that means loans and feeling like a total fish out of water during that experience. A very small number might wind up at Big Law firms or similar, but it's not common. At my AmLaw 50 firm in DC, the vast majority of my colleagues were the children of lawyers and doctors. Some were from extremely wealthy backgrounds but most were just from UMC white collar professional families where their dad was a very well paid, highly-educated professional and their mom was a SAHM. *That is not a middle class family.* And no, becoming an attorney or doctor when coming from a family where your parent(s) were an attorney or doctor is not the result of you being "super smart." It's a very typical outcome of kids following in parental footsteps.

Big Law firms in DC are absolutely not filled with a bunch of overachieving middle class kids who bootstrapped their way up. What an absolutely insane take.[/quote]

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