Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
it certainly does bright/almost-MG kids no good for their parents to push them so that they APPEAR to be HG/HG+.
Investment banks and other high-paying employers hire preferentially at top-ranked colleges. Some mildly gifted kids could have lucrative careers there *if they are recruited and hired to begin with*. Therefore it may be individually rational for parents to push their kids to get into the most selective schools, and studies find that high school seniors tend to choose the most prestigious college they were accepted to.

Ross Douthat has explained another function of the most selective schools

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-secrets-of-princeton.html
The Secrets of Princeton
New York Times
April 6, 2013

Quote
Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”?
Fewer people articulate my views than act on them in their personal lives smile.