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[quote=Anonymous]I grew up in a very white, middle class suburb of Toledo, Ohio.  I graduated from one of its public high schools.  One of my classmates won a Pulitzer Prize. Another graduated from the local, third-tier university and her work is part of the permanent collection at The Guggenheim.  A dozen or so of my classmates graduated from Harvard, Michigan, Dartmouth, Brandeis, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Notre Dame, Washington University in St. Louis, Yale and Cornell. Some of them became quite wealthy. Others are regularly interviewed by The NYTimes, CNN, etc for their expertise.

My husband has three degrees from Michigan. He also attended "good enough" public schools. Some of his like-minded peers from that district went to MIT and Harvard and became very wealthy entrepreneurs, surgeons and high-level executives at Fortune 500 corporations.

The guy who edited the newspaper of the "shameful" third-tier university we attended also went on to win a Pulitzer.  A guy who fixed the computers at the hospital I once worked at switched fields and went on to win an Oscar--he grew up middle class, graduated from a third-tier state school.  The research assistant from rural Ohio who sat next to me at that same hospital is a self-taught visual artist whose work was recently featured in Vogue.

What all of these people from rural and middle class communities in Ohio and Michigan have in common is deep engagement with a subject that became their area of professional expertise. It did not take a private school to produce those results.  They were bright, self-motivated, competitive people who would have done well anywhere--provided resources were decent/good enough.
   
If we had the extra money, I would still send my children to an expensive private. To me, it feels like insurance coverage.  However, I am just not going to lose much sleep over the fact my children are in good public schools.

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