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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Please do not even consider this.

Just because your kid sits next to the kid of a Master of the Universe in Chem 101 doesn’t mean your kid is in that circle.

In some cases these networks have been built over generations through marriage and business.

Their networking does not take place in a secondary school - it happens in private clubs and exotic locales where they all congregate.

Also you only get out of a network what you put in. A guy worth $100 billion is not looking to a single digit millionaire to add to his network. Same goes for his kid.

A network is not built on proximity. And other than an education, proximity is all a private school has to offer.[/quote]

Aside from some of the hyperbole, this lines up with my experience at a prestigious boarding school in the 90's. I was UMC and really did not comprehend fully the level of wealth and the social networks of a certain group of the uber-wealthy kids. They all kind of knew each other even though they grew up in different places like Palm Beach, Paris, and Central Park West. I realized later it was even more than a country club type of thing -- [b]it was an old money social circle thing.[/b] There was no way to truly break into it. Those kids had "friends" who were UMC but they were friends during the school year only. The friendships didn't endure after high school. And because a lot of those kids did not move on to typical careers (they don't really have to work but some of them "start companies") they were actually not even all that helpful from a networking perspective. More helpful in that sense were the UMC kids who ended up at top schools and are now heads of whatever at various banks or in politics.

Most of the kids who came from the old money circles were very polite and appropriate and would never have come out and said any of the above. Except for one guy who was quite clear once to a UMC friend of mine that he could sleep with (not the more explicit phrase he used) girls like her but he could never date her or marry her because it wouldn't fly in his social circle. [/quote]

Understand, that old money doesn't really carry much weight anymore.  The new money that has been created in just the last 30 years involves 100x more people and they have like 500x more wealth.  I mean, there is a tech company founded three years ago by three MIT dropouts and Grok may buy it for $60BN...each of the founders will be worth more than the entire Rockefeller family is today.

It may be just as hard to break into this group, but the world of the ultra-wealthy is dramatically different from your day.[/quote]

Yes. It's not really about the money itself. It's about where the money has brought your family to this point. It's where your grandparents and parents went to grew up and went to college and socialized with that brings an expanded network and connections. It's knowing the same types of people. Now, that may have changed at this point. When I was in college, coming from a private school in Manhattan, with parents who attended HYP/seven-sisters and having gone to tennis camp and spending summers at a private club all gave me cred to hang with the other private school kids from across the country who knew people I knew or whose parents knew mine.

Now, a good friend of mine went to Harvard and her network with the old money crowd going into there was 10x mine and she couldn't break into the group that included the international jet set kids. That's a whole 'nother level/ [/quote]

"Couldn't break into" -- was that like an aspiration or something?[/quote]

What an odd question to pose in a thread about people sending their kids to private schools simply because they aspire to expand their network.

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