We’re Canadian and high SE (though not 0.1% wealthy) and while our kids did not attend private school for K-12, we were fortunate to live in a catchment area with excellent top ranked public schools. They also attended Gifted & Talented programs from middle school on. In addition I was a stay at home mom and was able to provide supplementary enrichment at home and through after school activities.
Would I have preferred a private school experience for them? Maybe from an academic standpoint but I chafe at the elitism of them and appreciate the diversity they experienced in their public schools. As I said we are high SE but we live a very comfortable suburban life and their peers came from similar SE backgrounds. Dh and I grew up in solid lower-middle class income families. We don’t mix in the kind of wealthy stratosphere that many attending the elite private boarding and day schools do, and I’m not sure I would have been comfortable with that kind of environment for my kids.
As to university in the US I looked into it for our older ds at the time, primarily MIT and some of the more selective LACs. Apart from the fact that he didn’t want to go that far away from home for school and that he also wasn’t willing to jump through the hoops necessary for holistic admissions including writing the SAT or the ACT, I just couldn’t justify the price. Yes he no doubt would have gotten a superior education at a top private university, but with holistic admissions there’s no guarantee he would have gotten in and it would have been difficult to pay for as we would not have qualified for aid. When it comes to public universities in the US I don’t perceive any of them being superior to what he has access to here at home. With top marks and his choice of major he could have gotten into any university here that he wanted including UofT/UBC/McGill and I can’t think of any American public university that would be better. There would be no reason to pay US prices for a comparable or less rigorous education.
It made far more sense for him to apply to universities in Canada for undergrad and then to the US or UK for grad school (which he’s so far resisted doing only having applied in Canada for master’s programs. We’ll see what he ends up doing if he decides to continue on to a PhD).
Also anecdotally I participated on a K-12 forum for gifted kids when the boys were younger and there was 1 mother there who had been grooming her daughter, a dual US/Canadian citizen, for admission to Harvard since almost the moment of her birth. The father was American and an Harvard alumnus and they had lived in NYC for a while until his passing at which time she and her daughter returned to Canada. She was the most elitist snob I have ever come across. She micromanaged everything in that girl’s life with the end goal of getting into Harvard. For middle and high school she ended up going to UTS but in the end despite all her mother’s planning and machinations she didn’t get into Harvard, not even waitlisted.