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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The article stops just short of implying a causal connection between what school you go to and whether you're going to "found a unicorn" but come on! Maybe, just maybe, could it be that this deserves a little deeper look? Perhaps people who have the opportunity to go to one of these top schools have that opportunity because of some other structural advantage that also provides them the opportunity to found a unicorn? Like, maybe, I dunno, existing family wealth and connections? Just a wild guess with no research into it...

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Obviously. I think the biggest benefit this group has is the safety to fail. I worked 40+ hours and was doing 12+ credits for my undergrad. When I graduated, I had massive loans and bills to pay. I wonder what I could have done if I had two years with no bills to work on something and zero debt looming.

The easiest way to take care of this problem is to continue to live like you're in undergrad but take a well-paying job in finance or tech afterwards, work for 4-5 years, pay off your loans, and bank a lot of money. If you're earning $160K/year but living on $20K/year, debt goes down really fast.

You start later than someone who went to Stanford and comes from a wealthy, well-connected family. You're not going to be Mark Zuckerburg or Evan Spiegel and found a billion-dollar company at 22. But realistically, you're looking at late-20s, which is about when your Ph.D and M.D. friends are starting their careers and still gives you plenty of good productive years ahead of you. And the time you spend in industry is invaluable for learning how the world really works, which problems are really important, and all the other stuff they don't teach you in college.

That would definitely work if you can find it, but it is pretty impossible to find a $160K/year coming out of the local state school. At least where I'm from....

You don't do it directly. You find the best-paying job you can, work there, do some open-source work in your nights & weekends, and then start looking for a new job when you're about 6 months in, on the strength of your work experience & open-source portfolio. Repeat 2-3 times at roughly 1-year increments until one of the big firms comes knocking. I started at $8/hour at my first programming job and doubled my income every time I switched.

You may have to move - if there are no jobs in your area, go where the jobs are! Once you're past entry-level positions you can often get a new employer to pay for your move though.

The big secret about "elite" institutions is that they're constantly looking for signs that they fucked up about their judgment of a person, and are usually happy to rectify that if they see concrete information that they were wrong. This goes for universities (I know several people who totally slacked off in high school, got rejected by all the Ivies, went to a state school, did nothing but study in college, and then transferred back into an Ivy), for the big-5 tech companies (where oftentimes people will get in on the second try after a few more years work experience and demonstrable progress launching products for their current employer), and for venture capitalists (who will often pass on a company and then beg to be let back into a later funding round, at a much higher price, if it looks like a startup is taking off). The problem is that most people adjust their performance to the expectations of people around them. If you're not satisfied with where you are in life, act like the people who you want to be. Eventually they'll take notice and decide you're one of them.

I'll second this. 4 companies across three years before landing at Amazon.

The safety to fail is definitely part of it. Whenever I hear someone talk about how they succeeded by 'simply' failing over and over again until they hit it big, I'm reminded of the "Swamp Castle" Monty Python skit: "But the fourth one stayed up!" Well no kidding! If you have the safety net to survive lots of failed endeavors, chances are you'll eventually make it.

Having graduated Harvard myself with substantial student loans and no parental financial support, and knowing many others like myself, I think your generalization is off the mark. I would look at a different advantage, which is social capital rather than financial capital. VCs and other relevant players in the tech ecosystem also come from the same schools. If there is an advantagr, I think it is more likely through that network than that the entrepreneurs were rich enough to have a financial safety net (though that is certainly possible too - there may be a further selection of graduates that,those that were wealthy became entrepreneurs but I would think that effect would be less tied to school than social capital)

More than safety to fail , they have millions of dollars of investment waiting for them before they even start

Exactly. I've heard it said that you can remove all the classes and teachers from a prestigious university. Let the students do whatever they want. And they'd still do just as well.

I doubt it's just wealth. Those schools are fairly selective and difficult to get into beyond just financial reasons. Presumably the selected students are more likely to have higher IQs or higher conscientiousness or whatever.

Existing family wealth and connections? Maybe.

But what about skill, ability, creativity, ambition, determination? Do the people doing this work deserve no credit?

> Do the people doing this work deserve no credit?

Of course they deserve credit. The question is, what about the people with "skill, ability, creativity, ambition, determination" but no family wealth and connections? Do they deserve even more credit if they succeed?

What if a lack of wealth and connections proves too much of a limiting factor (i.e. nothing to show other than a serious attempt)? Do they still deserve credit? Of course, credit for failure is a bit of an oxymoron so maybe those with the necessary wealth and connections will only ever be the ones to get credit. Is that not a problem?

One simple, practical factor that shouldn't be overlooked in the case of Stanford's rank here is that it is literally in the middle of Silicon Valley. The physical and mental inertia to moving to SV from wherever else you are can be very real. I'd bet the distribution of where those unicorns were started location-wise is like 70% SV, 30% spread across Boston, SoCal, and the rest. Similar to how YC makes everybody move to SV to start...

They also likely acquire a lot of amazing connections at those schools.

Furthermore, their qualifications after graduation from these school are more respected regardless of the quality of the education described by the degree.

Top tier schools are almost like a noble title on the East coast. Out West it's less extreme but it still matters. I've lived in both places.

Just the other day, there was a job posting on HN for a new health care startup.

It pissed me off, frankly, because the ad was not framed in terms of actual accomplishments or credentials or skills, but in terms of whether or not you attended an elite school. As in it literally stated that they were looking for people from "top 10 schools" or some such thing.

They made it abundantly clear they did not care about someone's actual abilities or skills, only what their pedigree was.

What makes me so angry is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. This article is a natural extension of that process.

I loathe recent political trends in the US, but I'm not surprised at all to see the populism that's arisen. Society is dripping with nepotism of various forms.

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