The elite schools have always been a caste system, we just convinced ourselves after WW2 that the entire country belonged in a global upper caste. The notion seems just as absurd today as it did in the 1800s.

I attended public high school in rural upstate NY in the 90s and scored a 35 on the ACT when I was 16, without preparing at all. With some amount of studying I had a 1440 on the SAT that same year (1998 or 99) and didn't bother taking it again. I've always scored well on these tests, but it never translated into much acclaim or academic success. I smoked weed at lunchtime every single day my junior and senior years of high school, which was the kind of achievement that gets celebrated in those parts. For a while there we all dropped acid on the weekends too, the winters upstate are brutal. Unlike most of my friends, I went to college where I slacked my way through a 2nd rung liberal arts school with a 3.7 in subject (mathematics), graduating in 2005. By 2010 I was in a hurry to leave the miserable customer service/QA engineer role I had worked for 3 years at Surveymonkey.com, so I took the GRE. After about a week of half-assed prep in the evening I scored a 790 math 670 verbal 6.0 writing, enough to get me a scholarship for my Masters. Turns out going to school to escape your shitty job isn't the best decision, but I didn't have a lot of other options. Surveymonkey is worth what, a couple billion today? Well they didn't treat me very well back in 2007. In today's climate of online outrage I probably could have parlayed that mistreatment into something, I am a protected species afterall (gay).

From my perspective, the problem with this whole system is that smart kids are not challenged enough. Everything is too easy in public school, and bad habits are never corrected. There's also no role-models to show smart kids that they might go somewhere in life. Upstate New York is in a permanent state of decline, there's nothing these kids can look forward to and they have no money to go anywhere else. Depression and doubt, difficult home lives, access to all manner of drugs, child abuse etc. The best results from my high school came from a few Indian immigrant families who sent their daughters off to Harvard and the like. We still got those girls to drink and smoke weed with us though :).

There was another local (ie, white) kid in high school who was really smart and smoked lots of weed and got into trouble the same way I did. A real math talent. We took a double period of AP physics together right after lunch, so we were both high as hell in the back of the classroom. We both scored 5's on the test at the end of the year, too. He is a seasonal worker now, puts up tents for country fairs and the like during the summer.

The alcoholism in upstate New York is something people out in polite society would not believe. Lots of DUIs in my old friend group. These guys are conscious when they blow a .4 (or higher) on the breathalyzer. One ex-marine friend is a fire jumper (seasonal as well) and went to the hospital with a .6! He was joking with the doctor while they were pumping his stomach, a real character. No small number of these kids are dead.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, ain't nothing new under the sun.