Business and Technology

Are elite schools increasing the divide between the rich and the poor?

In the 21st century, the problem of rich and poor has become bigger than ever. And that has brought a lot of discussions into the circles of scientists. This brings the new problems to all the spheres of life. And that has not gone past the education sphere, meaning that we will have to face the division of the poor and rich for once again. In the past, the division was quite big too when the first private schools were created. That was the time when only the richest were able to get into schools. Later on, with the creation of public schools, it all became more or less equal. However, in the last decade, the things started to change, with elite schools being created. Those are usually private schools, but you can also meet many public ones. However, to get there you will need to have enough money, and you will be required to spend a lot of money while studying at school to buy what you need to study at such a type of school.

Elite Schools
GOSSIP GIRL, Chase Crawford (left), ‘The Blair Bitch Project’, (Season 1, ep. 113, aired Apr. 21, 2008), 2007-. photo: Giovanni Rufino / © The CW / Courtesy Everett Collection

Nowadays, the elite school can be called a place where all the rich families want their kids to go to, because usually the quality of the education there is higher, and even though some are going to argue with this, saying that many public schools have great results. The statistics still say that usually, the best students finish the elite schools, and the level of their knowledge is totally higher than the one of the students from the public schools. The fact is also that the studying programs at the elite schools are usually much more up-to-date than such at the normal schools. For example, at the elite schools in the programming class, you will have the top-level hardware to work with, and the languages which you will be studying are going to be much more relevant than the ones which are usually taught at the normal schools. The other thing that you can meet in an elite school is expensive supplies for classes. For example, the normal schools would almost never have the newest graphing calculators at use in the mathematical classes, while at the elite schools that is something which is normal already.

At the public schools, you could easily find the people that would be using the services that are easily going to write you any kind of work, from the Math to the persuasive essay paper for your English or Debates classes. At the elite schools, students know that teachers have an idea about how everybody is usually writing. Moreover, they are going to see that the text is not yours easily. And that will only bring more problems in their case. Therefore, we can see that there is literally no way not to study well at elite schools, so some parents opt to take the debts and still send their kids to study at the expensive elite schools. But now, when we have drawn a big line between the public schools and the elite ones, it is the time to move on to the discussion of whether the elite schools are increasing the divide between the rich and poor even more than it was before. Going forward, we can say that there are many opinions on this topic, meaning that there will be no real answer to this question, as every opinion has something right in it.

So, the first opinion is that the elite schools are bringing back the problem of the division on the poor and the rich. This opinion is usually considered to be a more well-thought one than the other one because people can see that by having the money, one can easily get himself a good education which will teach literally anybody. The next opinion is about the fact that the elite schools are actually a great thing as it gives the kids a chance to study at a place where they will be given all the needed supplies. The great thing that parents notice is the fact that kids who are doing really well at the public schools start getting a chance to study at the better schools for free. Those are all types of the scholarships and various programs that let the talented students study for free at the best schools and after that, they also get a lot of financial help from the colleges, so that the education costs not that much for them.

Therefore, we can say that the divide between the rich and the poor happens to be because of the elite schools, yet there are many chances for those who are good at studying because they can get many chances just for studying really well. However, that does not cross out the fact that something needs to be done about the elite schools, as they are making it harder for the poor students to get the best possible education that they can. Still, we cannot say that the elite schools should be closed, because they are one of the greatest things if we want to progress. The public schools need to look at the elite ones and start to try and add some things that are usually used in elite schools.

To sum it up, we can say that even though the both ideas happen to be, the idea which wants to do something about the elite schools is a little better, as it provides everybody the equal quality of education no matter what. This situation looks just like the one with the kids judging others for the clothes. Just like the uniform, there should be a way of changing the things to make everybody study in an equal way to have the equal conditions in the future when applying for the job.