I cannot emphasize enough how true this is. Growing up as rural poor, it was an alien concept to me that there were tiers of colleges with different academic specializations. College was just a single monolithic concept to my people. If you were learned real good, and pass that big test, you could be admitted to college just like all those kids who lived closer to town. There was no difference in our minds between the community college 20 minutes away and the public university an hour and a half way. And once you get to the community college and shake off that fog, realize that college is a granular thing, then it is just all you can do to drag yourself up to that state university. Your family has no understanding at all why you would want to move to the state university. Its much further away, harder for you to help out, much more expensive. It just doesn't make any sense within their understanding of the world. Forget about an elite university, its been two years, and you are only now discovering calculus, formal logic, the scientific method. How will you ever compete with the hoards of whites who have been saturated in this world from the beginning?

As one of the "hordes of whites", who grew up in a family of academics - 3 professors amongst my aunts and uncles; and pretty much "everyone" with at least a bachelor and often masters - even then it is not a given that you will consider an elite university.

I never thought about it. I considered ETH Zurich for a while because Niklaus Wirth is a legend in language development, but without any real idea of how it measured up as a school. In the end I stayed in Norway for university. I don't regret it, per se, but understanding the difference more later was a very strong eye opener for me when it comes to how much of social stratification is not really down to money but more broadly background and expectations.

It takes a very specific background before elite universities will even be on your radar, and a subset of that for you to believe it to be possible, and a subset of that for you to see it as the norm and what is expected of you. And then that needs to intersect with the understanding of your family to either pay or put in the effort to look for other ways of getting in.

Some portion of those will not be rich, sure. There are lots of options. Most top universities are good about grants and bursaries. But proportionally, a far larger proportion of children of wealthy families will go to top universities.

And this is a large part (but not all) of what "privilege" is really about: To grow up in an environment that teaches you to expect certain things that is not even on the radar of others.