Of course MIT has a bunch of 700+ math kids. Heck, both my kids had 700+ math scores and didn’t
go to MIT
and are still doing well.
Times have certainly changed in the last 40 years. I was a first generation college student from a working class family decades ago that actually ended up in social work as an LCSW . Many of my female classmates ended up in teaching, nursing, or didn’t go to college at all. Some of the guys ended up in science, engineering type jobs but many of them also didn’t graduate from a four year college. From what I remember, there was little test prep, little emphasis on elite schools in my high school, little emphasis on worrying about diversity and little emphasis on first generation issues. The landscape in college admissions seems to have changed dramatically for students since my days in high school. I was always in the advanced type classes with math and science but there was not the frenzy about classes, excessive prep that seems to exist today . There have always been families that gravitated toward “elite” schools of course , but that seems to have intensified in more recent years . There seems to be no end in sight with all this application angst.