Santa Marta, Columbia          It turns out that it’s not easy, according to some claims, even in this time of great inequity to manufacture elites, even in super selective universities and the vaunted Ivy League colleges based in the United States.

There’s no question that the glide path to the elite, if you’re rich or lucky, gifted, and do the work, you might have a shot at getting into an elite college.  Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, a little Ivy school, is clear that these elite schools are just shining the gold, rather than finding and mining it in the mountains, like they should be doing.

Today, that system has attracted a great deal of criticism for accomplishing the opposite outcome. It’s still true that when poor people attend a highly selective university, they are likely to greatly improve their economic prospects, but a majority of those attending such schools are from wealthy families. It’s those families that can enroll their children in the best public or private schools and afford tutors, coaches and fancy résumé-boosting summer programs.

So while some universities have eliminated tuition for those with few resources, students from the bottom 20 percent of the nation’s income distribution still make up only about 5 percent of the student bodies at selective institutions. This hasn’t changed much in 100 years.

A reporter for the Wall Street Journal also tries to get us to take another look at, seeing if he can get all of us to grab a crying towel for the Ivy League schools, like Harvard and the rest.  He notes that some of them lost a bundle by investing with private equity, while the rest of us might argue, they should have known better.  Trump’s tax giveaway to the rich in 2017 was partially financed with a small tax on the huge endowments for schools with over 500 students, which many of us would call a silver lining on a dark cloud, and the reporter warns the schools, it could increase, which would be wonderful.  He also cautions that new visa requirements could kill the cash cow many collect by enrolling foreign students, which is to say the rich and super elites from other countries, where these schools are exporting the inequity that the Wesleyan president bemoans.  Most of the Journal’s warning seems to be crying wolf, when there isn’t one anywhere to be seen.

All of this is probably going to fall on deaf ears anyway, since the way things work now rewards the way things are, and the way elites and the rich want things to be, not the way things should be for the greater good.  They can take the results to the bank.

Graduates from Ivy League universities in the U.S. earn an annual income of approximately US$93,000–111,000 a decade after graduation, nearly double the national average.  The data, published by College Scorecard under the U.S. Department of Education, reveals that among the eight Ivy League schools, graduates from Brown University have the lowest average annual income—around US$93,500. However, this figure is still nearly 1.75 times the average income for U.S. university graduates, which is just over US$53,700.  Slightly higher are Dartmouth College graduates, earning an average of $97,430 annually. Graduates from the other six Ivy League schools earn average incomes exceeding $100,000, with University of Pennsylvania alumni topping the list at over $111,370.

If any of them are crying, believe me, it’s crocodile tears.