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.
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.
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.
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.
For example, SAT coaching only increases scores by around 50 points. [0]
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."
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).
I'm well aware of the different kinds of privilege which money affords students. I grew up lower middle class but went to boarding school and university with some incredibly privileged people.
Money helps, but it's still not the dominant factor. If it were, I never would have gotten the education I received. Insinuating that those who went to elite universities just had enough money to get in and go is insulting to those of us who worked very hard to get there.
I'm not going to engage further with you, since you seem more interested in "teaching" me than engaging in a discussion of equals.
I read your comments and perceived that you were misunderstanding, and that I could present it in a way that would clarify things. I'm sorry that you felt patronized, but there is no shame in ignorance. I think you should be more open to people telling you that they have something to teach you; maybe I was wrong, and maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but when I try to teach someone something it's because I respect them enough to think it's worth the effort.
You see all of our points, but you keep coming back to this idea of buying your way into school, which is not a point anyone is arguing. Why is that?
Happy trails.
Edit: And yes, I do believe that, regardless of how difficult it was to get into school, people work very hard in school. I never said they didn't, though I can see how it would be easy to come away with that impression. What I am saying is that it doesn't show them to be harder working than someone who did not attend school.
I stand by views and the substance of what I've said, but I can see that the way I interacted with you was counterproductive to the conversation. I apologize.
In my experience, there is never a benefit to assuming ignorance. Your original comment would have been much better without mentioning a "teachable moment." If you avoid assuming ignorance, then there are two outcomes:
1. The other person can actually not know what you're talking about and ask clarifying questions.
2. They do know what you're talking about, and can confirm your statements and extend it.
If you assume ignorance, you automatically put anyone who already knows what you're saying on edge. (This is also part of why "mansplaining" is such a grating phenomenon.) It's a conversational strategy with no upside and many downsides.
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Having made that point, I'll say that I agree with everything you've said of there being lots of advantages that wealthy students have for getting into elite universities. That doesn't mean companies are necessarily wrong to concentrate on elite universities. Even though I think there are much better signals out there, if I had to choose a random Ivy league student vs. a random state college students I'd still choose the former.
Best of luck, stranger.
Correction: you observed that I did not mention certain facts. From that observation, you have no way of knowing whether I am ignorant of said facts or simply don't agree with you on their importance ot the issue at hand.
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.
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