You are describing the French elitist educational system until maybe 15y ago. This counterintuitively resulted in very little diversity. There might be natural

You are describing the French elitist educational system until maybe 15y ago. This counterintuitively resulted in very little diversity. There might be natural reasons for that but there were also clearly some perverse effects: because those exams became effectively competitive exams (fixed number of seats available), they require intense preparation in preparatory schools which became the educational equivalent of a 2-3y navy seal bootcamp (it's not enough to have good grades, you need the best grades). Teachers in poor area high schools were often unfamiliar and intimidated by this system (they didn't go through it themselves), and were actively discouraging good students from taking that path. Students not having educated parents who knew the system were not pushed to work really hard to get into, and survive that system either. And you ended up with 80%-90% of the kids in those colleges coming from families from similar colleges. Money wouldn't be a major factor, the top colleges and preparatory schools are free. Now the natural ratio shouldn't be 3-5% (elite college educated parent as % of general population), probably around 50-60%, certainly not 80-90%. For the past 15y, France has opted to break the thermometer instead, ie to bypass those exams for the majority of the recruitment, and to select students on file which grants them full latitude for subjectivity. I suspect they also nationalised the selection process of those preparatory schools (not super familiar with the latest developments). I think the main consequence is that those elite colleges will quickly lose their prestige, and it might actually be the unstated intention, i.e. converge to a german like education system where the name and prestige of the university matters little vs the profile of the student. It might be a good thing or perhaps it will just ruin the french educational system, it's hard to tell.