A relative of mine who is about 29 now went to a tippy-top boarding school, where he was in the top third of his class, but not the top 10% or 20%. He had something of an unusual background – an American kid who had spent the first 12 years of his life in a European country, and went to public schools there through 5th grade. Then he went to boarding school in Ireland, a couple of years in a private school in NYC when his parents moved there, and then the elite boarding school. Even after moving to the U.S., he spent most of his summers in his country of birth (or in one case one of its former colonies). He had some cool opportunities that came out of his father’s position as a top executive at a well-known European company.
Anyway, he would have been a third generation legacy at a super-selective university where his grandfather got at BA and PhD and his father a BA and JD. And his boarding school GC told him directly that it would not support him in applying to that university. They didn’t say he couldn’t apply, but made it clear that his recommendations would not support the application. To say three generations of that family were hopping mad is an understatement, but that’s the way it was.
Things worked out fine for him. He had a very disappointing college application season, but got in off the wait list at what was probably his 5th choice college. He finished there in three years with a BA/MA in International Relations, then used family connections and his own intelligence and social skills to get a series of increasingly sexy jobs with international human rights organizations. He’s now attending a top-whatever U.S. law school.