[bovitclan]

> A lot of the value of Harvard or Stanford is that they only pick the top n% of the country.

The difference between the people who go to Harvard and those that don't has much more to do with money. Hire people with this assumption at your own peril.

[brooklyn_ashey]

I'm glad someone said it. Merit= very short bootstraps. This is a much denied truth here in the US, where everyone is so desperate to believe in our national mythology of anyone who works hard can do anything and be anything they want to. This myth can't even carry an aroma of truth these days. No one who has "achieved" anything ever wants to get real and admit how they really got it--- they'd rather tell you and themselves a great American tall tale. Becase if it isn't earned, if it isn't "merit" in any real sense, then what? Then does everyone have a right to opportunity? Yeikes. We don't have enough opportunity for that. Instead, we avoid facing these issues by focusing on "diversity" now... but only a certain very narrow definition of diversity, and only when we want to raise ourselves above others of merit for being so meritorious as to think of diversity. Then, we wonder if "diversity" has made us less competitive. The only answer here is money. Money. That's it.

[Clubber]

I absolutely agree with what you are saying, but I also believe most hugely successful people who work, work (or worked early in their careers) just as hard as anyone else, they just happen to be working at the right thing with the right people. Of course once you are successful, you can hire people to do most of the work for you while you just monitor.

Finding the right thing with the right people is where the socioeconomic status comes in, particularly having a well connected family.

On my graduation year, my university created a slogan, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Having just spend 5 years getting a degree from said university, I thought that wasn't a very good slogan for such an institution. It was absolutely correct though.

[scottLobster]

Bill Fernandez (Apple Employee #4) did a nice interview last year where he talked about (among other things) the origins of Apple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca-LXxMpveE

In it he talks about how Steve Jobs and company were just immersed in a technological community from a young age. They had after-school tech clubs (that the kids actually wanted to go to) as early as elementary school, virtually every Dad on the street was an engineer... yeah, no shit they created Apple. Not discounting the skills of Jobs and Woz, but they had about the most fertile soil possible in which to grow a tech company and a network of contacts from childhood. Listening to that piece made me insanely jealous. Would have killed for that kind of community as a kid.

[briandear]

You are wrong, at least in some sense.

I was teaching English in China making about $800 per month. I wanted to build an application and had no experience and certainly no money. I went to school for Journalism and have zero family money or connections.

I bought Agile Web Development with Rails. I spent the next year or so trying to learn while working an ultra low pay job with almost a dial up connection.

I applied for an accelerator with my terrible app, got accepted, ultimately didn’t raise any money but I did end up with a junior engineer job. Which led to another, then another until finally here I am, I still work contract jobs but finally that terrible app is actually good and generating real money.

I own a house now. I get paid more in a month than I would make in 18 months teaching in China.

I didn’t go to a bootcamp, I didn’t go to Stanford and I have never raised investment money.

How I really got it? I worked very hard. Studied cheap books, reached out to experienced developers I tracked town through sheer force of will.

By most definitions, I am successful however that success might not have yet resulted in a million dollar pay day but life is pretty food.

Another story, the founder of the Gringos restaurant chain in Houston, literally started as a dishwasher and now he flies in a private jet and gives millions to charity. And before someone declares “white privilege” or some other nonsense – he’s brown.

Another kid I knew was a minimum wage bar-back at a nice Houston bar. 5 years later, he owned the place.

Look at Asian immigrants to the US, plenty of stories of first generation immigrants that speak not a word of English and arrived in the US with $500 and now they’re sending their kids to Harvard.

How many Algerian immigrant kids are in France’s elite schools? Probably close to zero.

There are tens of thousands of stories like that.

You rarely hear about rags to riches in Europe.

While the US doesn’t have a monopoly on success stories, the American dream os far from a myth. It is literally there for the taking. Look at the Apple story, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet. How many self-made billionaires are there in Europe? How many self-made millionaires even?

Nothing is stopping a poor guy with a squeegee and a bottle of Windex from creating a window washing empire – if he’s willing to dream that big. Good luck doing that in most other countries – they’d crush him with taxes and regulations before he could even afford to buy his first truck or hire his first employee.

In Europe, starting or growing a business is only for the rich or privileged generally. In America, anyone can do it; but not everyone wants to put in the sweat and hours to actually execute.

[seanmcdirmid]

Born Stanford and Harvard provide very generous financial aid packages to those that "get in" but aren't rich. The problem is getting in requires a lot of prep and achievement long before the college application is submitted, and that's where the rich get their leg up. And at the end of the day, that is still worth something to employers.

[bovitclan]

The claim is not that colleges provide no value, but that going to college is not a reliable indicator of anything but privilege. Using it as an indicator of intelligence or work ethic, especially as being more intelligent and hard working than someone who got their degree from University of Phoenix, doesn't work. It's just buying into the narrative that rich people must be rich because they're smart.

[twobuy]

I think the parent comment was referring to Harvard/Stanford's need-blind admissions & full financial aid packages.

[morgante]

Not really. Money helps to get in, but elite universities provide the most generous financial aid of any schools in the country. If you come from a anything below the middle class and get in, you likely won't pay a cent.

[brooklyn_ashey]

yes, money helps in so many ways. it sure does help you get in. It starts helping you when you are an infant. It helps the whole way. I know this because I worked in the tutoring idustry that helps people get in in exchange for money.

[morgante]

It helps, but it's certainly not the dominant effect. I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence. I've seen so many students who still didn't do that well even after extensive, expensive tutoring.

For example, SAT coaching only increases scores by around 50 points. [0]

[0] https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size

[xiaoma]

>" I don't know anyone who went to an elite university without significant baseline intelligence"

Oh, I sure do. The strongest positive correlations I've noticed with elite schooling are conscientiousness, acquiescence to authority and then wealth, in that order. Intelligence is a relatively distant 4th place, thought it still correlates positively, IMO.

PG actually wrote a whole essay on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

"...what we've found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's negligible by comparison. We can learn more about someone in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to school."

[morgante]

For what it's worth, I agree with pg and don't think your college is the best predictor of anything (after all, I actually decided not to go to an Ivy myself). That being said, I reject the notion that it's trivial to buy your way into an elite university. There's a whole class of second-tier private colleges that exist primarily because it's not that easy for rich kids to buy their way into the truly top schools.

[bovitclan]

I really hope that you see this, because this seems like a teachable moment.

We aren't talking about making a million dollar donation to get your son into school. That happens, sure, but it's an extreme example.

Here are things that richer people can do easily & poorer people struggle with.

* Not working or working part time for four or more years

* Moving across the country

* Living in places with high cost of living (think Stanford, Berkely, NYU)

* Getting tutoring for the SAT, taking the SAT multiple times

* Going to a high school where the teachers give a shit

* Having people in your life who went to college & can help you apply

* Having extracurricular activities that show you'd contribute to campus life

* Already being comfortable with being interviewed at age 18

These are just what I could think of in a few minutes. Scholarships _do not_ level the playing field (though they certainly help).

[_r_o_y_]

I don't think they're saying that money buys your way in a Ivy school, but in that it gives you a legs up with stuff like better and earlier education for example

[autokad]

I haven't taken the SAT in a long time, but I can speak on the GRE

For the GRE Verbal, you just have to memorize about a thousand words to basically get everything right except for the reading comprehension. that puts someone's score somewhere around ~158/170. I dont think memorizing 1k words is a very hard thing to do, though i am baffled that people dont do it.

For math, a person should memorize special right triangle ratios, prime numbers under 100, and some geometry rules. the rest is just practicing a finite set of question types.

Its all very coach-able

[daliwali]

For what it's worth, I boosted my SAT score by 400 points (2100 out of 2400) just by being more aware of the tricks used on those tests. My weakest subject was writing, but not because I am a bad writer, my handwriting is garbage.

It's just like taking IQ tests over again, once you know what to expect, you can game the system a bit by memorizing patterns. Scores on any standardized testing should be taken with a grain of salt.

[s73ver]

I would disagree. Having money helps in a lot of things. For one, if you've got money, your family probably isn't struggling to eat. If you've got money, you're likely living in a better area of town.

[dexterdog]

It is the dominant factor if it is enough money. I'm not talking about a meeting 1 million dollar 'donation'

[smm2000]

Works well for most companies that hire exclusively from top tier universities. They definitely miss out on some talent but unless they need thousands of engineers, they can find all talent they need from just a few top universities. Probably overpay 10k-40k/year for that privilege compared to equally skilled/smart people from other unis but it's chump change in overall employee cost. Also makes interviewing easier - rejecting 90-95% of applicants from lower tier state schools who could not fizzbuzz is not fun.