Hacker News Reader

Comment by Futurebot | Hacker News Reader

The takeaway from this is that those who do best are those with:

- the wealthiest/most financially supportive parents/relatives

- upbringings that are conducive to academic success

- the most free time

as those are the ones who, by a large margin, attend top schools, work at top companies, and have time to spend on self-learning. Another data point of confirmation of a well-studied idea.

Assortative mating: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

Few poor at rich schools even all these years later: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/education/despite-promise...

Why people care about elite schools: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-about-e...

View on HN

I did not see in the data set where the interviewee's family wealth or upbringing were mentioned. Would you mind providing a link?

"Having attended an elite school" is a proxy for that. Info available at 2nd link.

It's not that good of a proxy though. There are still tons of poor students at elite universities.

From the article >In 2006, at the 82 schools rated “most competitive” by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, 14 percent of American undergraduates came from the poorer half of the nation

That doesn't sound like 'tons'.

14 percent is still thousands of students. Equating elite universities with privileged upbringings is stereotyping. Like most stereotypes, it's grounded in truth but also unfair

I worked really hard to be able to get into an elite university and to get the scholarships to pay for it. When people automatically assume that my education means my family is wealthy, it discounts the enormous amount of work which I (and other low-income students) did to get there.

You are confirming the point that was made!! It is harder for "poor folks" to get in. It is easier for wealthy kids to get in.

You should state ".. and I had to work my way in there - my folks aren't wealthy!" as a bi-sentence every time you mention your education. I bet most people immediately would understand what it implied: This is an achiever!

No I'm not.

Even if fewer poor students get in, that definitely does not mean you can make the reverse assumption: that everyone who attended an elite university is wealthy. For all we know, these results are dominated by poor students who worked hard enough to get into an elite university (which, by the way, wouldn't be a crazy assumption: my CS classes had a lot more income diversity than, for example, political science ones).

I see. It doesn't seem like the data used by the linked article provides any evidence for or against your hypothesis.

The data here is perfectly compatible with a contradictory hypothesis: upbringing does not matter and top schools/employers are good at selecting future high performers.

I'm not endorsing either hypothesis, but the data here supports the above just as much as your hypothesis (which is to say, not much).

Great post. If you have a worse background, you have to fight your way up, whereas those with more family resources just have to not screw up badly and they'll probably end up alright.

Hypothetical question: If I could show that people who complete Coursera/Udacity courses tend to be poorer than average, would that be a "data point of disconfirmation of a well-studied idea"?

"The student population tends to be young, [already] well educated, and employed"

"The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?"

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2350964

Reply on news.ycombinator.com