I think this article might be relevant:
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html#page=1
This article actually came up on my Facebook feed because that's my high school, and all the things the article talks about hit very close to home (at home, even) for me. I was average or low/middle on the upper echelon, I guess, but since I wasn't a stellar standout, I am a failure according to these standards.
But that isn't the takeaway, really.
Having gone through all of this, and as a product of this kind of hyper-competition, I think the article and the people it references are a little short-sighted, to be honest. As I said, the article was on my Facebook feed, posted by an old classmate of mine--a lawyer. In fact, almost all of my friends from high school have higher-end professional jobs: doctors, engineers, pharmacists, lawyers, etc. Almost all of them. It's not just the very top students, but all of us "failures" ended up okay or better--going to good universities--and I absolutely attribute that to how competitive the school was, due to the culture of the city.