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Comment by dunpeal | Hacker News Reader

While "gaining admission to NYU medical school" is likely correlated with good socio-economic background (as do all accomplishment), the correlation is not 100%.

You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence.

And while all students will appreciate this discount, it will make more of a difference to those who are not "fine without it", i.e. those below the top richest and most privileged (for whom spending $200-300k on education is easily affordable).

Finally, this isn't exactly pure charity out of the kindness of NYU's heart. It's a response to medical candidates choosing other fields due to cost and debt issues:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-search-of-more-doctors-new-t...

These are the exact candidates this subsidy seeks to relieve.

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Per your first argument, even granting that admissions is meritocratic / fair for the sake of argument, the education you receive, networks provided, and simple prestige of the school all provide advantages that you will not find to such a degree at a lower tier school. Tuition subsidies adds an additional major advantage of not having the drag of loans slowing your future economic growth. Again, I understand that society is full of these self reinforcing advantages and that I benefit from many (including a public academic scholarship); the critique is merely incremental.

Per "it will make more of a difference to those who are not "fine without it"". Sure, but it would make more of a difference if needs based and scaled broadly (not sure what restrictions exist on the funds for this aim). Although this line of argument admittedly unravels into base utilitarianism when followed.

This argument is fascinating, because you are in effect arguing that people should be rewarded according to their lack of privilege: "we should give these subsidies to students from 'lower-tier schools' rather than students from 'top-tier schools' who are already well on their way to success".

This is the "social justice" argument.

Now let me ask you this:

If you get sick and require surgery, would you rather be treated by the smart, skilled, hard-working doctor who succeeded in everything he tried, including being accepted into a top school?

Or maybe you'd prefer the under-privileged doctor, who never did well academically, and only got into a lower-tier school, but managed to graduate thanks to your social justice subsidy?

Your argument seems to make society more just and equal, but you support it because it is convenient to appear as just person, and you are isolated from the repercussions of your proposal. In reality, your policy will prefer and encourage mediocre doctors over excellent ones, you just hope it won't affect you.

Thankfully, American society is structured in such a way that a top school like NYU can muster the funds required for the subsidy, and thus we will have more excellent doctors, instead of more poor ones.

That is the least generous take of my argument and not conducive to a productive discussion. Never did I make an argument about social justice or the removal of merit from the system. In fact, I was making an elitist argument, that those with great merit will do fine without a subsidy of their tuition and that the market will award them with or without this fund.

I did not mean to offend you, and apologize if I misread your comment.

Either way, I disagree that the better people will always prevail, no matter the circumstances. By definition, a stronger candidate will succeed where a weaker will fail, but that will only apply up to a particular challenge differential. If you keep shifting resources to the weaker candidate, the stronger will fail or give up, eventually.

On a personal level, I came from an underprivileged background myself, and succeeded due to stronger drive and working harder than most people I grew up with. But there were many points when I wanted to give up, and I know how close I was to ending up in the same failure mode as they did.

Finally, even if your argument was correct, and these medical school candidates would succeed "regardless", the point of these scholarships is to make sure they choose medicine as the field to apply themselves and succeed in. Sure, they'll be successful regardless: they'll just make a great career in investment banking, and leave medicine for those who have less options.

Society wants great doctors, so it pays the most qualified individuals to undertake a course of training and application in medicine. Makes sense, I think.

>>You can get into NYU from a poor socio-economic background, if you work hard and attain academic excellence.

Very true. Unfortunately many times the schools where a kid from a lower socio-economic background will attend will not prepare them for a school like NYU. In fact, sometimes it will probably be a net negative.

Not necessarily the school itself, but the whole environment. Other students will be so disruptive to an entire class or school that they will drag down their piers down with them. And by this I'm talking about gangs, drugs, bullying. And if it is not their piers it may be their family themselves who will drag down the kids (alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence).

And it is not like you can just say they should know better, because at that age they don't really know any better. Kids from crappy neighborhoods don't even start in the home base, many times they are not even allowed to play.

Why does a socio-economic background disqualify someone from having drive? How about dreams? Should poor kids flush those for the good of the class? Because they MIGHT have bad apples in their social circle? For circumstances they don't control- we ought to prevent them from being able to change those circumstances via opportunity and hard work?

How common do you think this is? I would bet it is no more common than other shitty circumstances regardless of socio-economic status.

This entire sentiment is nonsenical IMO.

I've been in many different socio-economic backgrounds.

First school I went to was the lowest performing school in Georgia, in which I was the only white child. By high school I had moved to the highest performing high school in the state, where the senators sent their kids, etc. "Real Housewives of Atlanta" was from my school district then.

Drugs, alcoholism, bullying, and domestic violence happen in every environment, and in my experience they trend towards those with the means to sustain those habits. The rich kids had been doing coke and molly since they were 13 and have been buying it from their classmates. In the richer burbs, the cops are present to keep out people who "shouldn't be there", and less to keep the citizens who "should be there" from breaking the law. The huge emphasis on "upstanding members of the community" having a "traditional household" hides high levels of domestic violence.

I agree that kids from the poorer backgrounds don't even start on first base, but it's not because of any life choices they've made in a lot of cases.

Out of curiosity, if it wasn't the environmental or family differences, and if the cops aren't preventing crime in the higher-income neighborhoods, what do you think caused the first school to be low-performing and the other to be high-performing?

I don't think it was negative environmental differences, but the positive ones.

The kids in the burbs had been taught to read before they entered school. The teachers are just better, as they're paid better there (school funding comes from property taxes). The kids are pushed to succeed, internalize that, and push eachother to succeed, whereas school in the city felt more like daycare going into prison.

Also, your teenage screwups are far more likely to be swept under the rug or not be noticed in the burbs. Saw more guns in school there. Saw kids get busted for literal pounds of drugs, but because their dad knew the DA or something they got a sealed misdemeanor possession, and had it expunged as quickly as possible.

You know the saying "you're fine as long as you aren't breaking more than one law at a time"? Like don't speed if you have a joint in your car, etc.? That comes from a huge position of privilege that isn't afforded to a lot of the population.

EDIT: Also I was told (but haven't confirmed) that apparently colleges were weighting grades from the higher background school in such a way that you could be a B or C student, and after weighting it was the equivalent of off the charts in the other district. Like literally unattainable, straight As with AP classes (if they were even offered) would still be weighted as less.

This is a problem we have in Europe as well (at least southern EU where I'm from): colleges are almost free (1000€/yr here, so affordable), even the best ones.

But who can get to the best ones? People from poorer environments unfortunately get a poorer education as well (middle and high schools are of less quality), and it makes it way harder for them.

Equal opportunity is really tricky to get right.

I've never had the displeasure of being around so many drugs as when I went to prep school-- not some random private school, but a legitimately prestigious one to which future U.S. presidents and or their spawn are sent. Kids there were smuggling large quantities of narcotics in and out of the country, sometimes at the risk of death.(No, I am not exaggerating.) They were also robbing each other of said drugs. The difference is that because of the institution(s), players involved, etc., more discretion is involved in how disputes were handled. All of this scales down the further removed one gets from such environs until you reach the disproportionately poor groups, who make up the bulk of the stories that people hear, but not necessarily the bulk of "crime" were they to be policed at the same levels of the former mentioned groups.

Alcoholism, drug addiction, bullying, domestic violence are issues that affect people of 'noble birth', too. In fact, a number of kids I knew in school were acutely aware of the fact that their parents saw them as a burden or impediment to their own lives and as such, sent shipped them off to boarding school. And so, the kids drank and drugged... Fast forward to college, I know of one kid whose parents shipped off on a study abroad trip to "cure his drug addiction." Yeah, he ODed while we were on a ship in the middle of the Pacific-- though he'd scored coke, but surprise, surprise, the nice dealer he'd met while were in a SE Asian port gave him something else.

tldr: Yep, kids from poor neighborhoods often don't start out w/the same advantages as those from higher socio-economic backgrounds, but kids from the latter backgrounds often work vary hard to even the playing field by engaging in self-destructive behaviors that for some reason people like to mostly associate w/being poor. Really the only difference is that certain members of society are more willing to forgive even the worst behavior for one group while penalizing mercilessly those of the other for the most innocuous behaviors.

Ps. A pier is something one might take a walk on. A peer is a member of a cohort, class, etc., ostensibly.

>>Ps. A pier is something one might take a walk on. A peer is a member of a cohort, class, etc., ostensibly.

Thanks for pointing it out. Didn't notice the error until you mentioned it. Too late to change it now.

Cool. It happens.

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