I went to MIT, down the street from Harvard. We had folks from all over. Among my social circle, I counted folks that grew up poor in poor suburbs of NYC, guys who grew up on farms, a pretty wide range.
> they will ask which yatch do you ride before they are even willing to answer your questions.
Yachts are really expensive. Like, stupid expensive in terms of total-cost-of-ownership. From the Harvard people I knew, I really think this is false. They might not want to answer your random questionaire because people get annoyed at being asked about their background all the time, but I'd be very surprised to see someone gatekeeping based on owning something so rare.
You could have ended your reasoning as soon as you wrote this. It is obvious what I said is an exaggeration, but it carries out some truth. Go ask around the people in America itself, outside a city like SF/NY, what do they think about it. I'm not even American. That's not what I see/read about. A country with some big time inequality, with little to none social mobility, possibly the worst social mobility since the country was founded. But no, everybody can get into Ivy League.
I didn't say that. I said that the universities offer scholarships which cover their assessment of financial need. They still have limited slots and are very selective.
> It is obvious what I said is an exaggeration, but it carries out some truth
I genuinely didn't know that you were exaggerating. I thought that was your perception.
We live in a world where lots of things are true in degrees. There is some amount of snobbery at elite US universities and there s some quantity of social mobility. But exaggeration makes it really hard to talk about how much or how little and that quantity matters to understanding the problem.
> they will ask which yatch do you ride before they are even willing to answer your questions.
Yachts are really expensive. Like, stupid expensive in terms of total-cost-of-ownership. From the Harvard people I knew, I really think this is false. They might not want to answer your random questionaire because people get annoyed at being asked about their background all the time, but I'd be very surprised to see someone gatekeeping based on owning something so rare.