Their educational dominance culminates with competition for spaces at the best schools, which has never been stiffer. Of the 1.6 million high school seniors who took the SATs last year, roughly 30,000, or just under 2 percent, will end up in the freshmen classes of the country’s 20 highest-rated universities. Superachievers get the lion’s share of slots in the Ivy League, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other outstanding universities. As a result, they dominate the Rhodes, Marshall and other prestigious scholarships. They get catapulted into the most selective professional and graduate schools. And they land the highest-paying jobs, becoming, if not the next generation’s 1 percent, at least its 5 percent.

Many elite institutions are attempting to redress the economic imbalance with generous financial aid — Harvard, for example, gives students with family income below $65,000 a free ride, and the number of freshmen receiving low-income Pell grants has climbed to 18 percent this academic year compared to 12 percent five years ago. But that’s still well below the nearly 27 percent of American households with poverty-level incomes of less than $25,500.

Even with economic outreach, the vast majority of students at the best schools are likely to be wealthy, well-appointed young people groomed and professionalized at an early age precisely so they would impress admissions officers. Most low-income and even middle-income students cannot meet the academic and experiential benchmarks that elite schools set.

Indeed, there are very few poor superachievers.

The emphasis on personal achievement has done more than turn the admissions process into a race to rack up résumé points; more important, to the extent that elite colleges set the pace, it is turning the educational culture into one that stresses individual perfection instead of one that stresses social improvement. Because graduate schools and the best jobs often require extraordinary credentials, students must pour their energies into their own ambitions and accomplishments. And schools encourage it.