How elitist families and employers drive people to spend more

[sanantone]

This is a 1989 article about upper-middle-class families are willing to spend an arm and a leg to send their kids to expensive Ivy Plus schools to give them a head start in life. Supply and demand comes into play. Since these schools know that they will receive plenty of applicants, and wealthy families are willing to pay almost anything, the schools continue to raise tuition. Some of those tuition increases are justified because, if you want to attract and keep the best professors in the world, and your students expect to have the best professors in the world, then you need to pay more. Getting kids into prestigious universities is not just about networking and marketability when applying for jobs; it's a cultural expectation. It's keeping up with the Joneses. Well-to-do parents don't want to go to a social event and talk about how Johnny is attending a mid-tier or bottom tier university when their associates' kids are attending Harvard and MIT. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/p...90ce8bf04/

When it comes to tech employers making announcements that they are not going to require degrees, I knew it was bull. These announcements are for good publicity. You can tell by looking at their job ads that they still prefer degrees for their high-paying tech positions. The demographics of their workforces show that they still prefer degrees. Not only do they prefer degrees, but they prefer degrees from prestigious schools. It was revealed that Google would not seriously recruit computer science graduates of HBCUs because they did not believe the education at those schools was good enough. Google has a tier system based on the rankings of engineering schools. This doesn't only hurt HBCU graduates; it hurts everyone who doesn't graduate from a top CS or engineering program. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolog...ecruiting/

https://thegrio.com/2021/03/05/google-hb...cruitment/