Schools are not all the same, you know? The only thing you can say without diving into the statistics is that it depends on when and where you went.
Second, how do you define success? If you define success in terms of money, education and intelligence play a very, very small role. The correlation of financial success to who you know and who you are related to is orders of magnitude higher than how smart you are or how much knowledge you have. The vast majority of PHDs are much more intelligent and educated that the vast majority of millionaires.
That is highly unlikely. Even at elite Ivy universities, a majority of students attended public high schools.
Public education is a lot better than people give it credit for. There's wide variation in quality but there are certainly plenty of excellent public schools available.
Old Greenwich, Cos Cob, and Riverside have great public schools because that's where all the IT professionals, quants, and middle managers move to raise their families. Those districts have access to many adults with an interest and ability to participate in the school community, and so the district ends up with a lot of extra resources.
But the hedge fund upper management send their kids to Brunswick School, Sacred Heart, and the like, and the district on the super rich and the poorer, primarily-Hispanic sides of town, has a poorer reputation.
Based on my experience in high school, the opportunities for a good education were there, but not every student took advantage of them (or was able to take advantage of them). While the public school system has its flaws, the problems with education in the US are multi-factorial. We could do better by having more teachers and funding for schools and modifying our system for educating kids, but we'll hit a ceiling unless we also improve the quality of family life for students at home as well as the US' cultural attitudes towards education.
For example: Stuyvesant is a public high school. But is it actually? There's a 3 hour test you take in order to be admitted. 900 or so kids are admitted. How is this "public?"
There is nothing wrong in segregating kids based on their ability. Public universities use tests to take the best kids and this should happen at all levels. A black kid who is smart should not be held back just because he lives in bad neighborhood. He should get into a better school if he can score more.
Yes. That is how it happens in urban India. Even for nursery admissions schools interview both the kid and parents to see if they have potential.
You are right, he should. But he is statistically very much likely not to based on his upbringing and systemic discrimination.
I’d also support free college, but I’d expect all wages to fall accordingly. Or for the loan situation to repeat itself, this time to pay the income taxes on tuition waivers for grad school, as a masters or PhD becomes necessary to set yourself apart in the labor market.
[1] Jon Marcus, "Germany proves tuition-free college is not a silver bullet for America’s education woes" https://qz.com/812200/is-free-college-possible-germany-shows...
Your academic training ends late in life. And therefore you have to charge higher and higher to make up for your investments. And of course, for the student loans too.
A Law degree from a 3rd rate school on the other hand is not so constrained and outside of 'top' schools which again are a limited supply tend to have minimal benefit.
Or are they a product of culture, from their parents and society at large, pushing them to accel independently of public education?
IMO, the standardized testing bugbear is at least partly a red herring. An excessive focus on teaching to the test is bad; I'm sure we can all agree. But it's worth remembering that the increased focus on standardized testing grew out of a system where accountability and metrics of any sort were pretty much a four-letter word.