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Only if your kids have excellent grades or are star athletes or otherwise exceptional. Most of this ends up as networking, where the rich parents meet other rich parents and eventually someone with connections is involved when it’s time for the kids to go to university, and because rich people like it when other rich people succeed, because they want “the right kind of people” at the universities they send their kids to, (sometimes) they’ll help grease the right palms.
You make it sound like it's rare to get into good universities in the UK from state schools. But most of the students at the UK's top universities come from state schools.
You're right about networking though. Even if you go to Oxford, for example, you can find that there are exclusive cliques and clubs there that are only open to the "right kind" of people. These will be wealthy kids who went to a few expensive public (that is, private) schools. The networking begins long before they even get to university.
That’s true, I didn’t mean getting in a prestigious university was rare from a state school, but rather those are certainly the “exceptional students” considering the stringent acceptance requirements. I only explained why rich parents would spend the money on private schools to give their child an edge. There are certainly cases where admissions are allowed because of family lineage or sizeable donations.
As far as I know you can only apply to Oxford or Cambridge, and furthermore you can’t apply to more than five universities in the UK except for rare occasions.
Honestly, this is why I'm always peeved when I hear parents telling their kids that school isn't a social club. I followed that advice, only to find out that the real world cares more about networking than test scores. Whoops.
In a non-STEM field, sure.
You would be shocked by the homogeneousness of even employers who are hiring STEM. Tribalism is real. They just chalk up the je ne sais qois to "fit"... But you take a step back and suddenly...
Even in STEM. Who gets the Blue Origin job, the person with a 4.0 and zero references, or the person with a 3.5 that partied with Bezos in college?