[akhilcacharya]

I've said this before and I've said it again - I'm genuinely not sure about why we invest so much mental anguish about discussing $ELITE_SCHOOL's admissions process at all. If we're talking about opportunity, shouldn't we instead aim to provide opportunity for the 99.9% of people that either can't (me), or didn't go to the same handful of elite universities?

[trowawee]

Well, the cynical answer is that the elite schools churn out the people who go into the media, government, and various other halls of power, so a lot of the chatter is actual graduates of these schools discussing their own alma maters, and they've essentially worn down the rest of us into caring. But a slightly less cynical take is that this stuff all trickles down through the rest of the higher education system, because of the aforementioned dispersal of elite university grads into positions of power, so fixing the culture at those elite schools would probably result in positive changes in the institutions they influence.