Reply to Where are all the Ivy admits coming from you wonder? Dalton NYC 2023 Matriculations

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m not upset with the kids or their parents, they have figured out the system and are playing the game. What I find appalling is the elite colleges who claim to want socioeconomic diversity, racial diversity, cultural diversity, regional diversity, etc etc, but then take all these kids from one school. An elite upper class private in NYC.[/quote]

Wealthy, smart kids concentrate in the same place.  What did you expect?[/quote]

Wealthy, yes. Smart tends to be defined in a way to be synonymous with wealthy in this country, especially by the time you get to high school seniors. Are the kids at Dalton "smart" because they are inherently more intelligent than children elsewhere? Or are they smart because they are of average to above average intelligence and then have had exposure to the best possible education money can buy?

I am always fascinated by how often this argument is made among private school families (of which I am one, but I personally grew up middle class and attended mediocre public schools all the way through college). The smart kids at elite privates are not smarter than the smart kids at even just okay publics. They are more sophisticated (better traveled, more well-spoken, more comfortable with adults, etc.) but that's a different metric. And it's entirely based on exposure, not inherent qualities.

What I've learned is that wealthy people have a coded way of speaking and interacting that they ascribe to intelligence or simply superior choices but are just a form of gatekeeping (to keep people like me out, I think, but being very perceptive I've learned the code and how to fake what I need to fake so that people accept me when that's what I need, for instance in private school circles where this matters so much to people). The children at Dalton are not inherently more intelligent than the upper half of a class at a good suburban public school. In many ways the kids at the public school are more worldly because they have experienced a much wider range of people and usually have not been raised to believe they belong to a special class of humans who deserve more and better of everything. But they are less sophisticated in the ways that count to rich people, so they will be deemed less intelligent. It's all just a self-protective stance.[/quote]

Are these kids smarter or are they not allowed to fail? My friend moved to NYC in her early 20s to be an actress and ended up working at a test prep place. She was tutoring Kevin Bacon's kids and writing their papers and even spoke to Kevin Bacon on the phone (sadly, the closest she got to acting while living there... she ended up being an early WeWork employee but that is another story). Most kids don't have multiple tutors helping them.

I went to Columbia (grad school - MBA) with a kid who grew up on Park Ave, went to Horace Mann, went to Penn undergrad... and ended up just floating around after undergrad before grad school. She wasn't stupid, but she didn't have a work ethic to speak of (neither did her brother) and she'd never learned basic lessons that most of us learn from failing when we are young. She didn't understand time management, she didn't have basic life skills (she would ask me things that she could have googled, I would literally text her screen shots of her question in google), and she didn't understand her own privilege. Her parents actually cancelled their ski trip to help her write her MBA essays (she was like 27 or 28 at the time) because she couldn't write them and complete the application without their help. She ended up being asked to leave the program for a variety of reasons. The varsity blues scandal really illustrates how far people will go to keep their kids from failing (i.e. going to a lesser school) and it's really sad because I think there are handfuls of kids who have stellar resumes but really don't belong where they are and they don't end up succeeding when they are put into the real world because outside of employing them (which many end up doing) their parents can't help them. [/quote]

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