Yes, but you can't get into the universities without a good education before that. I work with many people from India from all age ranges, from 22 to their 50s who are all MDs or PhDs, and they all tell me that before a child is even born they have to begin bribing school officials to get them into one of the better schools. This continues every time the child/student goes to a different school until the university level. Without going to a good primary and secondary school, there is no chance of getting into a good university. Even at the university level there is a lot of bribing that takes place.

When you have a society where bribing is the norm (nothing is possible without a bribe basically, and even then its not guaranteed), the people with wealth are obviously going to be the ones to benefit most and stay on top. No matter how intelligent, if you don't have the money for the bribes, you can't get anywhere.

Quite to the contrary, you will find that Gujarat, perhaps the richest state in the country, is least represented in the IITs and the IIMs (including IIM Ahmedabad which is ironically in Gujarat).

Yes K to 12 level education needs money but University admissions do not depend at all on what school you attended, only on your score in the Std 12 exam held by the state or an entrance exam. Further there are 25 - 50% reservations for poor people from lower castes in most Universities. So yes bribing is a big problem and so is casteism but one place where the problem is close to non existent is higher education.

the people you met were simply making excuses and misleading you. (there is always scope for corruption in school admissions everywhere).

It is like saying, if you studied in public school in small town america, you cannot get into Harvard.

Why would they make excuses and mislead me in a way that makes their country look bad? We were simply talking one day comparing the educational systems of India and the United States, and they said they favored the system here and thought it worked much better, despite receiving degrees from prestigious Indian universities such as AIIMS.

Your small town analogy doesn't work. A better analogy is if you went to a poor inner city public school, then you can't get into Harvard. This is basically true, since you don't receive a good enough education to get the scores to get in. Also, if your family is poor, especially in India, you have to work to support your family and self rather than focus on your school work, which leads to lower grades and test scores.

But it's pretty much impossible. I went to a very good public school in a wealthy suburb and the valedictorian didn't get into Duke, let alone Harvard/Yale/Princeton/MIT/Stanford.

Yes except the only metric that Universities in India can use to give you admission is your score on a centralized public examination. No essays, no discretion what soever. They have to publish a huge list of everyone's scores and the top n people get in.

Further, there is actually reservation for poor people from lower castes (25 - 50% of the seats). So it's not the same thing. I don't disagree with ingenium that better socio-economic opportunities help richer people do better, but the discrimination against lower caste people is not systemic in higher education.

I agree with this. I went to a private school because my family could afford it, and as valedictorian I got into every school I applied to and received full scholarships to most. The valedictorian of the public school didn't get any scholarships, not even to the local community college. Anyone who could afford to send their kids to private school did.

It's just a fact that people with more wealth have better socioeconomic opportunity than people with less wealth, not that they're more intelligent. This means better schools and better education.