>My takeaway from that was that if you were white, middle class and middle-American suburban, that there was almost nothing you could do distinguish yourself enough to get into the country's top schools.
90% of my graduating class fits that description. Out of a graduating class of 500 I'd say close to 10% of my class got into an Ivy League. Hell we had 9 get into Cornell alone. The 2013 class sent about 5%. It is a public HS but they offered tons of AP/extra curriculars/etc.
That's impressive. But I think we're working with different notions of suburban. For a suburban high school to have a graduating class of 500, you were presumably around a large population center? Where I grew up, that was the size of the high schools in the city (of about 120k).
My school district, an amalgamation of suburban enclaves and small towns, only had about a third of that. I think being close to a larger city means probably a more sophisticated suburban population (I don't think I'd ever met anyone who'd been to an Ivy-ish school prior to college) and larger schools, which allows for more stratified educational tracks.
90% of my graduating class fits that description. Out of a graduating class of 500 I'd say close to 10% of my class got into an Ivy League. Hell we had 9 get into Cornell alone. The 2013 class sent about 5%. It is a public HS but they offered tons of AP/extra curriculars/etc.