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Comment by Bretts89 | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on an edtech startup and with it I've been spending a lot of time at Princeton University. From my experience with Princeton, Ivy League school are VERY overt about promoting elitism within their communities. I understand the thought behind it but a lot of these students are in for a rude awakening when they go work for an investment bank and find out that their Ivy League elitism means nothing if they can't produce in the workplace.

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Eh, investment banking is arduous cause of the hours, and does require you to be pretty smart, but its not as meritocratic as your claiming. It's stacked with Ivy League kids exactly because elitism at big banks works in their favor during the hiring process.

Well, I think what's more likely is these people will be fine since most jobs are obtained primarily based on prestige and connections, and keeping an elite job once you have it just requires minimal competence. The more elite your job, the less you are punished when you fail (CEOs, for example, get bonuses when they fail). The people who are in for a rude awakening are those that think working hard and being very smart at a decent school will get them anything close to what C students from ivies waltz into without trying once they hit the working world. Remember, the C business students are the boss, A engineering students are the employees is the general rule of thumb.

I agree with you to an extent. It's my experience in engineering that you can start a company alone based on your specialized skills. I'm not sure you can do that on business skills alone. I suppose it depends on what path you want to take.

Agreed -- though for many businesses you need capital. Engineering students by and large are far less likely to have it, students rarely go to engineering school and work that hard if they know they will inherit wealth or a business. Software is something of an exception to that rule, though not completely.

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