When those tech worker families have a stay at home parent (by choice or because only one parent has an H1B/is a citizen), the kids are afterschooled and enriched to weapons grade levels.
That is a memorable way of putting it.
Your gifted kid(s) will find an outsized cohort of gifted kids there, but they will also have a much more difficult time standing out when it comes time to apply to college. Just don't expect your PG kid to be able to compete on his own when all of the gifted kids are getting heroic amounts of assistance, advocacy, and prodding from their parents.
The difficulty of getting into selective colleges from high-performing high schools has been termed the "Frog Pond" effect. I wonder if the arguably better education one gets at a good high school outweighs the lower chance of selective college admission in predicting success, however defined.
https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/Frog%20Pond%20Revisited%20Espenshade%20Hale%20Chung%20Oct%202005.pdf
The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class
Rank, and Elite College Admission (2005)
Thomas J. Espenshade
Princeton University
Lauren E. Hale
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Chang Y. Chung
Princeton University
In this article, the authors test a "frog-pond" model of elite college admission proposed by
Attewell, operationalizing high school academic context as the secondary school-average SAT
score and number of Advanced Placement tests per high school senior. Data on more than
45,000 applications to three elite universitieshow that a high school's academic environment
has a negative effect on college admission, controlling for individual students' scholastic ability.
A given applicant's chances of being accepted are reduced if he or she comes from a high
school with relatively more highly talented students, that is, if the applicant is a small frog in
a big pond. Direct evidence on high school class rank produces similar findings. A school's
reputation or prestige has a counterbalancing positive effect on college admission.
Institutional gatekeepers are susceptible to context effects, but the influence of school variables
is small relative to the characteristics of individual students. The authors tie the findings
to prior work on meritocracy in college admission and to the role played by elite education in
promoting opportunity or reproducing inequality, and they speculate on the applicability of
frog-pond models in areas beyond elite college admission.
