Not really. Money helps to get in, but elite universities provide the most generous financial aid of any schools in the country. If you come from a anything below the middle class and get in, you likely won't pay a cent.
yes, money helps in so many ways. it sure does help you get in. It starts helping you when you are an infant. It helps the whole way. I know this because I worked in the tutoring idustry that helps people get in in exchange for money.
It helps, but it's certainly not the dominant effect. I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence. I've seen so many students who still didn't do that well even after extensive, expensive tutoring.
For example, SAT coaching only increases scores by around 50 points. [0]
>" I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence"
Oh, I sure do. The strongest positive correlations I've noticed with elite schooling are conscientiousness, acquiescence to authority and then wealth, in that order. Intelligence is a relatively distant 4th place, thought it still correlates positively, IMO.
"...what we've found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school."
For what it's worth, I agree with pg and don't think your college is the best predictor of anything (after all, I actually decided not to go to an Ivy myself). That being said, I reject the notion that it's trivial to buy your way into an elite university. There's a whole class of second-tier private colleges that exist primarily because it's not that easy for rich kids to buy their way into the truly top schools.
That's an extremely patronizing way of approaching this debate.
I'm well aware of the different kinds of privilege which money affords students. I grew up lower middle class but went to boarding school and university with some incredibly privileged people.
Money helps, but it's still not the dominant factor. If it were, I never would have gotten the education I received. Insinuating that those who went to elite universities just had enough money to get in and go is insulting to those of us who worked very hard to get there.
I'm not going to engage further with you, since you seem more interested in "teaching" me than engaging in a discussion of equals.
I don't think they're saying that money buys your way in a Ivy school, but in that it gives you a legs up with stuff like better and earlier education for example
I haven't taken the SAT in a long time, but I can speak on the GRE
For the GRE Verbal, you just have to memorize about a thousand words to basically get everything right except for the reading comprehension. that puts someone's score somewhere around ~158/170. I dont think memorizing 1k words is a very hard thing to do, though i am baffled that people dont do it.
For math, a person should memorize special right triangle ratios, prime numbers under 100, and some geometry rules. the rest is just practicing a finite set of question types.
For what it's worth, I boosted my SAT score by 400 points (2100 out of 2400) just by being more aware of the tricks used on those tests. My weakest subject was writing, but not because I am a bad writer, my handwriting is garbage.
It's just like taking IQ tests over again, once you know what to expect, you can game the system a bit by memorizing patterns. Scores on any standardized testing should be taken with a grain of salt.
I would disagree. Having money helps in a lot of things. For one, if you've got money, your family probably isn't struggling to eat. If you've got money, you're likely living in a better area of town.