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Comment by klunger | Hacker News Reader

This. It is like that old adage, "Behind every great man, there is a great woman." For the modern era, it should perhaps now be, "behind every top-tier university student, there is a helicopter parent".

It takes so much to get into one of these schools now that it seems impossible for any child without extensive support.

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Perhaps, following sentiments of Peter Thiel and others, it's not necessary to get into an elite school today, in order to succeed. If it was, then good education and success would still be scarce in today's world, as most people can't afford to go to Harvard, Stanford, etc.

Now we have MOOCs an schools can become centers for socializing, tutoring and testing. A great teacher can educate more than 300 people a year this way.

It's never been necessary to go to an elite school to be successful; it's simply much easier to get your foot in the door with employers if you have the words "MIT" or "Stanford" on your resume as opposed to "Coursera" or some random college. Moreover, employers COME TO YOU if you are at these institutions, you don't need to go out and beg for face time.

Depends on the major. I would say in many majors it's work experience that matters. I agree that the first job is easier to get when you're from Stanford, but that's it.

Yes, I agree. I should have specified that I meant the first job.

This is nonsense. Getting into elite schools opens up doors that are otherwise completely shut. At law firms, at prestigious graduate schools, in academia, in medical schools and good positions at top corporations. Every year information is collected on the various success rates for students coming out of America's universities and students from elite school make up the highest paying and most successful members of our society. This is as true now as it was twenty years ago.

All areas that are going to be increasingly disrupted by technology and digitalization. So sure for now but this will change.

Signalling and networking and group association and stereotypes are inherently human and have remained the same for the past 6000 years of human history no matter the changes in technology. You can't just throw out contentless buzzword bingo like "disruption" and "technology" and seriously expect anyone to believe it's going to change.

Thats not the point.

I am talking about when technology makes it obsolete to even have most doctors and lawyers.

If that happens, then social status shifts to other fields, and you're back to square one.

Social status will always exist. Life will always be unfair.

You just have to signal the right way to show other people that you're the right type of person. Hard to explain but if you experiment you can find that this will get you a huge amount of the way.

Signaling will become worth more at the very top (top 20 schools) and less below that tier, which ironically will increase competition for the top 20, but probably reduce stress on the majority of kids who were always looking locally or regionally to begin with.

The only problem with MOOCS is you can't be an engineer or a medical doctor by only doing the courses you're "interested in".

IT is one of the few "fields" where people can get away with a half assed academic background and the end product shows it.

What does the end product show? Doctors kill plenty of patients.

If you're a parent then, your decision looks like:

Let your kid be a kid and bank on society having advanced far enough to allow success without a big-brand school on your CV. Barring that, hope your kid will be driven/creative/wily enough to make do without that stamp of approval.

Or, take the "safe" route and go full helicopter-parent, and give your children the best possible guarantee of success in the world as it currently stands.

That's a brutal decision to have to make.

I'm left wondering why the parent would be compulsed to push the child agressively.

Maybe it's a US thing?

We are are engineer parents in northern Europe, we try to raise our kids so they remain curious and emotinally fullfilled, we wish every good thing for them - but it's really hard to imagine to go all helicopter on them. If anything, I imagine we will let them make all the right and wrong decisions about their education when the time comes - but we try to make them understand what options they have and what likely outcomes their decisions entail.

Elite schools in the U.S. are more competitive along arbitrary criteria than in Europe. To get into top schools in Europe, it's enough to do better on exams than everyone else. But since the U.S. public education system is so easy and perfect grades don't provide much of a signal, top schools are looking for proof that you're an "interesting person" in a lot of ways that seem a priori to be unrelated to academia.

So encourage your kids to be interesting people, don't create an artifical construction of interestingness.

Genuinely interesting people are unlikely to tick all the (arbitrary) boxes expected by the universities. They might even have an unapologetic C in a class or two.

It's true that the U.S. has a lot more arbitrary criteria, but purely having great exam scores is also a valid strategy. It's just extremely difficult.

If you have a 2400 on the SAT and a 4.0, but no extracurriculars or other redeeming qualities, you won't get in everywhere but you'll still get plenty of elite acceptances.

There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them. The SAT iant a hard enough test to distinguish elite students -- it is a high school level math and English test.

> There are more people with perfect scores than seats for them.

Citation needed. Only a few thousand students score perfectly each year, and there are far more than a few thousand students accepted into elite universities each year.

If you want a good education then an elite school isn't necessary. If you want access to people and an unparalleled network, then your best option is an elite school.

This is a serious misconception. I did the same mistake and never earned a degree. Now despite being successful and earning well most countries will not allow me to immigrate on my own.

And that's just one loss. Complete system is rigged in favor of credentialism than talent.

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