<p>“Also, aren’t colleges looking for students who are going to be able to donate a lot to the college? If an applicant already has connections to certain jobs/places, wouldn’t that already put him/her a step closer into achieving success and donating?”</p>
<p>All colleges want big donors. For places like HPYS, that means students who are offspring of people who are at least multimillionaires.</p>
<p>Having had a Fortune 500 internship as a h.s. student doesn’t mean a student is in the multimillionaire category. Someone who enters college who is dirt poor, but has lots of guts and smarts could be a self made multimillionaire before they are 30. I remember meeting a man who was about 32 who had donated an endowed chair to Harvard. He’d entered Harvard as low income, first generation college, but made a lot of money as a stock broker.</p>
<p>Consquently, a person who’s such a go-getter that they track down the owner of a store in their inner city neighborhood, and take a city bus 15 miles to go to that person’s home and successfully argue that they be given a job as a cashier could end up being a better bet than an affluent student with connections for a college that was hoping to attract students who’d eventually be able to donate big bucks.</p>
<p>Incidentally, one of my mentees got her first job exactly as I described. Now in her early 30s, she has headed a museum, sat next to Al Gore at a small conference that was open to a small group of influential people, and she’s now headed off to Harvard for a very select all expenses paid fellowship. She has outstripped peers who came from well off backgrounds and had connections.</p>