<p>Its funny that Kreuger concludes that people from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum now supposedly benefit the most from attending top elite schools. In the mid-70s, this certainly was not the case. </p>
<p>My mom, a black woman who grew up in a lower-middle class family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, got great grades in high school and ended up applying and being accepted to Princeton, Yale and Vassar, of which she chose Princeton. Since my grandparents were both working and really didnt have time to help my mom with the application process, she was pretty much on her own, except for the fact that she was granted the opportunity to participate in a program called PREP to help good minority students get into colleges in the Northeast. However, once she and her peers from PREP began college, PREP didn’t carry through to help with acclimating to the social differences of going to an Ivy League university, and many of the kids from PREP became so stressed and uncomfortable that they dropped out. She graduated in 1979, but it took her most of her college career to get fully adjusted to the level of academic rigor at Princeton, and thus really did not get the kind of education she hoped to have. In retrospect, she says she would have been better off at Vassar, which had a more liberal student body and did not have as much of a prominent social stigma. </p>
<p>Obviously PREP didnt seem to consider that students may have needed the extra guidance once they have entered college, and their failure to recognize that and incorporate it into the program resulted in a class of minority students that, in a way, were given wings of wax and told to fly.</p>