Despite this the French system has a very low rate of social mobility, and the overwhelming majority of students in top colleges come from parents within the system.
Now there are good reasons for social background to be sticky (not the least because I don’t buy the tabula rasa theory that your genes account for nothing in your intellectual capacity, and for the part they don’t, well how your parent raised you should matter), but it is implausible that such concentration is a natural outcome (the respective size of elite vs non elites in the country is such that even with a high natural stickiness, you should still see half or at least a third of a top college generation coming from non elite families, I think France is in the <5% territory).
Having graduated decades ago and not living in France, I follow it from afar, but it looks like the government is actively trying to eliminate the meritocracy part of the system. By preventing elite high school from selecting their own students, by creating as many parallel admissions to colleges that were purely competitive exams based.
I have mixed feelings about it. One one side I like the idea of a cursus to be purely merit based. On the other side the obsession of the French with education is unhealthy, where your career at 50 is still determined by an exam you sit 30 years before, and this tendency of having clubs within clubs for the elite to run the country with little competence or accountability (again an exam you did when you were 20 doesn’t qualify you for everything) has lead to fuck ups after abuses after frauds. I would prefer a decentralised german style system where (from what I understand) what matters is the student, not the name of the college.
I think you nailed it.
There's a strong cultural component to doing well in school. Just the parent's perception of schooling matters a lot (is reading for fun something they do or encourage?). And of course there's a lot of implicit knowledge about test taking and what really matters at school. Someone who navigated these exams before will be a much better guide for sure.
> By preventing elite high school from selecting their own students, by creating as many parallel admissions to colleges that were purely competitive exams based.
How much of that is to increase racial diversity?
> On the other side the obsession of the French with education is unhealthy, where your career at 50 is still determined by an exam you sit 30 years before, and this tendency of having clubs within clubs for the elite to run the country with little competence or accountability
Maybe that's why there are so many French expats here in the Valley!
If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect and the school from political hostilities. The legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?
It's not like the tests for admission can %100 accurately test the talents of the candidates anyway. Maybe diversity in admission is an actual strength that rest of the world lacks?
What makes an institution elite anyways? I would say its legacy(the alumni) and its future(the candidates). There might be a healthy balance of giving up some resources from the future to keep the connections with the past strong.
There's a long discussion to be had here, but... let me try to give the short version. Sure, the US does some things right. Mostly, though, it's momentum. The US made some very good decisions between 1940 and 1990 and academia evolves slowly, so it's only been in the past decade that we've started to see the loss of relevancy.
> If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them reasons to protect the school, and the legacy admission students give access to their successful parents connections. It should be nice to have the kids of Google founders as classmates, for example. Don't you think?
This is a pretty naive view, and I say this as someone whose peer group is at least 50% elite college grads.
Smart poors and legacy kids don't really mix. When the mixing does occur, it's predatory. The truth is that, by age 18, people who know they are and where they fit into society, and the rich kids have already been socialized to see us as the enemy, the teeming masses, the poors who exist to be exploited then discarded.
If you want to "make connections", you have to do it in the first two years of prep school. Beyond that, it's too late. Those fuckers will never let you in. You have a better chance (still low, but nonzero) at violent overthrow with a large enough rabble armed with AK-47s.
That said, you're not wrong that it benefits smart poors that rich brats also attend the same schools. It's a fog-of-war effect. At the individual level, you don't know if a person got in because they were smart or because they were rich. Thus, the rich brats look like they might be smart, and the smart poors end up with enough of a rich brat veneer to make it, at least, into middle--possibly lower-upper, if they don't make mistakes--management.
Britain had quite a lot of innovation during the 1800s when it coïncidentally also had one of the larger/est economies. As the economy of the US got larger and larger in the late-1800s / early-1900s all of a sudden it also coïncidentally started inventing a whole bunch more things.
How much of the innovation and technology from having the largest economy in the world and the most money/capital to throw around?
Certainly there needs to be a certain culture present, especially individualism and capitalism, but how much is 'brute size' a part of the equation?
And even before the 20th century, American scientific acumen was fairly well-regarded. Benjamin Franklin's reputation in Europe was partially based on his scientific achievements.
Europe's disdain for the Americas was almost always rooted in a belief of cultural superiority, not a belief that American science or engineering was weak.
Polytechnique has 32 university admissions compared to ~300 from the entrance exams.
Harvard is 1/3rd legacies!