Compare your struggle as a well off person attending an elite university to what your poor counterparts were doing at the same time. They were cleaning bathrooms, waiting for buses in the cold, dealing with criminals in bad neighborhoods, and living in apartments with cockroaches.

While they worried about buying food and paying the rent, you "worked your ass off" doing homework in total safety and comfort.

But I was wrong. Poor kids who get into MIT ("Recipients of a Federal Pell Grant") only graduate at a rate of 87%. It's just the wealthy students with such incredibly high graduation rates.

http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/graduation_rates.html

Poor kids don't make it to top tier schools. It's hard to have good "intangibles" when you have to work while going to high school to pay for your own room and board. Maybe you can get a 4.0 and good SAT scores, but so can a 50,000 other teenagers.

-> It's hard to have good "intangibles" when you have to work while going to high school to pay for your own room and board.

OTOH, that sounds like a pretty darn good "intangible" to me and would certainly warrant further consideration in my book.

I agree, but even if you considered that a good intangible, there are many students who have to work to support themselves and their families. By definition, the things the 1% do to be impressive will always be more unusual and stand out. You pilot your own hot air balloon, are fluent in Farsi, and put in 500 hours helping the underprivileged(a) write resumes? Impressive.

(a) If you are underprivileged, you might have time to volunteer somewhere, but typically supporting your family doesn't count as helping the underprivileged. Changing grandma's bedpans isn't volunteer work, and it's kind of exploitative to make that a major portion of your college application.

> Compare your struggle as a well off person attending an elite university to what your poor counterparts were doing at the same time. They were cleaning bathrooms, waiting for buses in the cold, dealing with criminals in bad neighborhoods, and living in apartments with cockroaches.

No, nobody at my school was doing this[1]. Top-tier schools leverage their massive endowments to provide substantial need-based financial aid. Basically their mission is to ensure, if you get in, that there is absolutely no financial friction to attend. In one high-profile instance Princeton University provided a full scholarship entirely from its own endowment to a formerly homeless undocumented immigrant who went on to become his class's salutatorian[2].

[1] except the cockroaches but that applied to everyone as many of the dorms were quite old.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan-el_Padilla_Peralta

Historically places like Yale, MIT, Princeton, etc. had what are called Gentleman Cs. George W. Bush is a famous recipient of this. One can absolutely work hard and excel at MIT, Yale, etc. But also can get (or used to?) Gentleman Cs and still have access to great opportunities after school. Those places have much higher networking effects than Mid Tier State U.

I don't know that this is bad as such but the high end schools aren't exactly very good about educating large numbers of people. That is, very large endowments per student. Large state universities do much better in this area. Also large state universities do a better job of recruiting students outside of the top 0.1% of society.

I believe you when you say you worked your ass off- but did you have to work a full time job while you were doing it? That's what I was doing. It was mostly my own fault, in my case. I went to school later, as an adult, and had to pay my own way due to misspent time as a youth. But for many people the option of not working is just not an option.