Not quite sure what you’re suggesting, @cptofthehouse . That there are few if any bright ambitious kids out there in the hinterlands? Or if there are any at all, they are likely from a family of drop outs? Or that such a background would make going to UChicago unthinkable for every single one of them? --You might as well throw in depleted gene pools and drug addiction, and then you’d have all the bases covered.
Look, only the tiniest number of kids in such places and from such backgrounds will have the smarts and self-confidence to want to go off to the big city and attend its terrifyingly rigorous university. They will be rare birds. There were some of them in my class at the University of Chicago a long time ago. I was sort of that bird myself. The University must have had the idea that a Chicago education could serve us as well as the city kids. They might even have had the crazy democratic idea that our urban classmates could learn from us as we from them.
It’s a big country and a big world from which the College chooses its small entering class of very special kids. At these magnitudes the stereotypes, to the extent that they’re true at all, don’t have much meaning. Every kid chosen will be singular and suitable for a Chicago education.