As someone who was born into a bottom 20% family and went to a supposed "Ivy Plus/Elite College" this is not shocking to me at all. The culture shock for me personally was amazing. In particular, I'll never forget when some students wanted to go to Asia of all places for a 4 day weekend.

Though I've personally benefited from diversity recruiting for low income, first in family to go to college, etc. I still believe the solution is to fix K-12. In particular, Boston is an example of there being great higher education, but terrible public schools.

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Short of that, I would recommend for the following actions:

1. Anonymous interviewing for all companies, mandatory. Let's be honest, those attending elite schools are the biggest beneficiaries of "discriminatory recruiting." Oh, except, not if you're the stereotypical beneficiary of affirmative action [1] (ironic because really white women are those who benefit the most [2]). The idea here is to level the playing field. I imagine most resistance to this will come from people who went to schools similar to mine.

2. Banning of private schools. This probably won't happen, but private schools simply perpetuate the problems with access. How is it that rich cities like Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco have terrible school systems? Don't get me wrong, this isn't THE solution, there's still the rich suburb effect [3]. Practically, this probably wouldn't work. Those in control generally either live in rich suburbs or send their kid to private school. It would take one heck of a politician to pull this off.

3. Affirmative action should now be implemented at the beginning, not at the end. Helping people who already succeeded is unnecessary for real change, and expensive. Not to mention it's cheaper and more effective [4]. The tin-foil hat in me says that people wouldn't want this to happen, simply because it'd produce better competition. Affirmative action at the end is more tame.

4. More advocacy of college alternatives. Personally, I went to a two-year college and transferred to an "Ivy Plus/Elite College" in order to not pay loans. Ironically, that was not necessary since they paid for everything anyway, but hey, I didn't know that. For many, college loans are just entrapment [5]. Two year college is a factor to help mitigate the pain, in the short term [6].

5. Complete banning of for-profit school. There's already been movement in this direction, with the prevention of enrollment of students with federal aid to ITT. [7]

I have many more ideas about this, but unfortunately things are very complicated. The intersection between the economy, parenting, culture, the government as well as racism, discrimination and access make it very difficult to propose a general solution.

I disagree with my own advice above depending on the city, and the circumstances. Ultimately, this is too tough a problem to solve merely with broad strokes, but I do believe the sentiment "fix K-12" summarizes my view.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/06/elite-college...

[2] http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/17/affirmative-action-has-help...

[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/even-if-...

[4] http://thefederalist.com/2016/06/24/we-wouldnt-need-affirmat...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/upshot/student-debt-is-wo...

[6] http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/brief/make-first-two-...

[7] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0828/For-profit-...