In the upper-middle-class California suburban family of my youth, we applied to the universities we could afford, and went to the best one that sent an acceptance letter. It would never have occurred to me to apply to an Ivy League school. Not through failure of imagination or intelligence (necessarily). We were pragmatic. From our vantage point, we didn’t have the economic means to go there; only the well-connected would go to a school like Harvard. In other words, no one in my family.
This is not to suggest that we were poor. I have always longed anyway to be part of a different family, one that seemed more welcoming and whose members all shared the same name. Getting an acceptance letter from the University of California Berkeley, close to my home, was lauded as a great achievement, like winning the academic Olympics. In my family, striving to go to Cal was a most noble aspiration. The system, I was told, was the best in the world. And students didn’t need a gold key or a prep school diploma to get through the gate, because it swung open for anyone who made the grade. This gave Cal intrinsic value. Plebian red. You had to be smart, tough and scrappy, because getting into Cal means competing in an Olympic-sized pool of hoi polo. Getting into a private school means bobbing in a tiny pond of privilege.
At Cal, you could come from anything and decide to be anything. Cal and I have always been a fit.