The dining hall of Massey College, the campus for graduate students at University of Toronto, my alma mater

By Caitlin Kelly

Here’s a depressing reminder of how much money really counts if you want to attend an elite school in the United States.

From The New York Times:

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.

A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.

You may think this doesn’t matter — or matter much — and maybe it doesn’t for some students and some schools. But there are entire industries and cities/regions where an Ivy or elite school degree means the difference between your resume getting read, let alone getting a job interview. Journalism is certainly one of these! I arrived in New York City at the age of 30 in a recession with Canada’s top university — University of Toronto — on my resume.

It might as well have been blank. I was, and always have been, facing competition from people who attended East Coast prep schools (mine was also in Toronto), then Ivy colleges and often Ivy graduate school. If a hiring manager is only looking for those people…forget it!

But there is so much unfair about this American arms race to groom even mediocre students with a lot of family money — while smart, talented lower income kids never even get the chance to compete.

I live in a middle income town in a county north of New York City that also has some extremely affluent towns — Scarsdale, Bronxville, Rye, Bedford and Chappaqua (home to the Clintons) — and whew, the endless tutoring and coaching and making sure Muffy and Jeff keep a tight hold on the best possible chance to keep climbing the ladders of affluence.

For a very brief time, I knew a local woman with tremendous wealth whose daughter said she wanted to become a journalist — an industry whose pay scales are low for all but a very few. The only question she kept asking me — how much money would her daughter earn?

Sorry, wrong question!

Certainly for that industry.

I find this endless focus on money so depressing, especially after being a Big Sister (volunteer mentor) to a 13 year old girl a while back. I should not have been so shocked to see the many obstacles she faced but I was: a noisy and chaotic household, a mother who disappeared for years only to reappear and spend her days playing video games, no quiet place to even do her homework.

The very basics other more affluent children take for granted: silence, support, discipline.

I tried to get her accepted to a local prep school but she never even showed up for the meeting. The whole thing collapsed into a mess of my liberal fantasies and her family’s clear lack of interest in, maybe even opposition to, her escaping the situation holding her back. I was deeply disheartened by it all, knowing she had intelligence and drive and a sense of humor but a lot of internal and external issues to resolve.

I moved from my native Canada to the U.S. in 1989 to live in small town New Hampshire, adjacent to the Ivy college Dartmouth, with no idea how divided the world is here between the affluent and the rest of us. Whew.

I also read two deeply formative books I recommend:

There Are No Children Here, a 1992 book about life in a Chicago housing project and Savage Inequalities, also published in 1992, which compared the educations available in two American schools — one in a wealthy suburb and one in a low-income Manhattan neighborhood.

The way education here is funded is so different than many other places determined to create a smart, well-educated population and a more level playing field.

I am also so fed up of “legacies” — students who gain admission because their family members went to the same school or donated a lot of money. Canada simply doesn’t have this.

I was fortunate to attend high school in Toronto and a university whose first year’s tuition was — yes, really — $660. It’s now around $10,000 a year for undergraduates…not $60,000 to $70,000 and beyond.

This country faces so many complex challenges: climate change, religious fundamentalism, attacks on women’s reproductive rights, racism, income inequality, gun violence…

I despair now at the lack of civic participation, of educated debate, of serious conversation among millions of Americans.

Without affordable, accessible quality education it’s not going to happen.