None of the above.
It’s Goldman Sachs. Or the Supreme Court. Take your pick.
These parents weren’t buying their kids the best possible education, nor were they denying one to anyone else.
The Ivies are great schools, but we have a lot of great universities in this country. The education you might get at Harvard is not objectively better than one from a good state school.
Don’t believe me? Well, of the last 78 Americans to win a Nobel Prize in Medicine, only 18 attended a top 10 US university as an undergrad. The Ivies punch above their weight for sure—18/78 is much more than their proportion of the US undergrad population. They are indeed very fine schools, attended by the best and brightest. But going to a school like Indiana University, as my former mentor Norm Pace did (should have gotten a Nobel, had to settle for a MacArthur for re-inventing microbiology) is no hindrance to accomplishment.
Nor is an Ivy pedigree even an advantage in attaining a life of just ordinary material success. Students who get in to Ivies but choose to go elsewhere make just as much money as their Ivy-educated peers.
But if you want to be a Master of the Universe, Indiana University is not going to cut it. Nor even, are Brown or Dartmouth or MIT. Recruiters at top investment banks, law firms and management consultancy firms
…largely believe that the status of a candidate’s educational affiliation [is] a reflection of his/her intellectual, social, and moral worth, attributing superior cognitive and noncognitive abilities to students who attended super-elite (e.g., top four) institutions and assuming that those at merely “selective” (e.g., top twenty-five) schools had deficits….
[Ivies, extracurriculars, and exclusion: Elite employers’ use of educational credentials]
If you want to work at Goldman or McKinsey or become a Supreme (all sitting justices received their law degrees from Harvard, Yale or Princeton), then it’s Top Four or nothing. Those are the table stakes, and without them you are not even in the game.
That’s the scandal here. Blame our mandarin class, not those trying to play by rules they didn’t make.