[leereeves]

Only 4% of Stanford students come from the bottom 20% of family incomes, while 66% come from the top 20%. That's 15 times as many students from wealthy families as poor families.[1]

The numbers are similar at other top schools, and feed into everything beyond, including startups.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

[tth3uoku]

I'm not sure how Stanford's economic disparity supports that there are no programs to assist people who are economically disadvantaged. Harvard, Stanford, and Yale offer free tuition for students with family income below 65,000 a year, Princeton for below 54,000, and Cornell, Brown, Columbia and Duke for families with income below 60,000.

There's no data in the article about the income level of the students applying. Are there 15 times as many wealthy applicants? Disparity is often contextualized in terms of systems of oppression and discrimination. Individual behavior, influenced by the effect being poor has psychologically, is likely to contribute to the difference in economic diversity.

[leereeves]

I didn't make that claim. I explained what I was talking about here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19469850

[wsy]

I also see balancing out the disadvantages of children, teenagers, and young adults from poor families as way more important than balancing out the disadvantages of well-off women. I totally agree that we have a long road ahead of us in this respect, as the Stanford numbers clearly show.

Still, your claim that nobody cares about the poor is not justified. Also, there are many just causes, and we can work on all of them in parallel.

[leereeves]

I didn't make the claim that nobody cares about the poor, that was a response to my comment and I added some relevant information.

The groups I was talking about, the ones that "nobody cares about" might not come to mind immediately, precisely because one rarely hears about them, but there are so many examples of disadvantaged people who are never the beneficiaries of such efforts.

For example: numerous physical traits other than sex or skin color. Invisible minorities like eastern Europeans or middle eastern Christians. People who grew up in rural areas.

It's probably absurd to expect to define categories and provide special help to every group that could be defined. Instead, people should be judged as individuals, each of whom has faced a variety of obstacles and benefited from a variety of privileges, and whose potential can only be evaluated by considering the whole person, not a few checkboxes.