Eliot Schrefer Quotes

Our admissions system should be a vehicle for justice, but it is failing working-class students, especially those who are the first in their family to go to university.

Like my father, I used to believe that hard work and mastery of a standardized exam was the fairest way for students like me to compete with those who had far more resources.

A university education is a privilege, but we should be proud that in Britain it is also a right, no matter what your income or class or ethnic background.

Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation.

We should get rid of the SAT as fast as we can. Look, there are bigger problems in society. This is not the biggest problem we have. But it's so easy to get rid of it. Right? Just pull the plug.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

I went to school and made good grades and went to college. So I was afforded an opportunity through my parents' hard work that most people don't have.

When I took the SAT, I didn't get accepted into a single white school that I applied to. Now I've got honorary degrees from a lot of those schools that rejected me. Things are different now, but not that much different.

A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility.

I had no need to apologize that the look-wider, search-more affirmative action that Princeton and Yale practiced had opened doors for me. That was its purpose: to create the conditions whereby students from disadvantaged backgrounds could be brought to the starting line of a race many were unaware was even being run.

I believe education is the great equalizer.

Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.

A student who has excelled in the classroom should have the opportunity to attend college and become a productive, taxpaying member of society.

I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it.

My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity.

The difficulty is, Pell Grants are an attempt to do the right thing, and that is to give the low-income student an opportunity to access higher education, and that's a good thing. And welfare was an attempt to help those most in need. The difficulty is, often times a program is so successful that it grows and grows and grows and grows.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.

I'm not saying everyone must go to college. What I'm saying is that every student in Texas, no matter how poor, deserves options. They must be taught to believe they can and will graduate from high school with grades good enough to succeed in trade school, in community college, or in any university in America, including Harvard, Yale, UT or A&M.

For me, education has never been simply a policy issue - it's personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.

The discovery I made was that, really, in America, if you went to high school in our country, it doesn't really matter where you went to high school. In a funny way, all high schools are the same.

We must ensure that every single child can go as far as their ability and their aspirations will take them.

I don't have the privilege of choice to say, 'I want to work with you,' and the person will say, 'Yes, come on, I will write a film for you.' It doesn't happen for people like me who come from the outside.

I ended up going to Harvard College, which was about as likely in my neighborhood as going to the moon.

The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.

There's a lot of amazing people that don't get into college.