Comment by bsanr2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsanr2 | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin attended my high school. I found out through Wikipedia, in college, in 2009. To my knowledge, he has never mentioned, visited, or donated to it, personally or through Google/Alphabet. We were not a rich private prep or anything like that, just a majority-minority community school that benefited from a school-within-a-school-type magnet program and proximity to several research institutions (particularly NASA Goddard); outside support would have been more than welcome. Brin was certainly phenomenally intelligent from the get-go (as related by the teachers who remembered him), so it's questionable how great or negligible Roosevelt's influence on him was.

Still, I take a lot away, inasmuch as his character is concerned, from his regard for us. One would think that singular and eminent success such as his would consider the role of every community he passed through in the shaping of his fortunes.

For comparison, Martin Lawrence at least got his teacher a car (RIP Froggie).

Larry Page is the same wrt his high school here in East Lansing, MI. Very few people in the community are even aware one of the Google founders is from here. It’s odd, I don’t get it.

Why should anyone be obligated to donate to--any school they went to?

To give back to the institution that helped shape them? To enable that institution to be more successful at what it does? Because funding for education has fallen precipitously in the last few decades?

There are arguments against big endowments to famous institutions. But for more modest schools, seems like a no brainer.

Nobody is obligated to donate anything. But giving back is one of those things that every successful society promotes a lot of.

I also can’t resist pointing out that even a million dollar grant which would hardly even register to Brin would go a long long way in funding a school that’s not doing all that well.

So you promote furthering social inequality? Also donations from rich guys to their schools creates so many bad incentives even if you don't consider the direct effects. It means that rich kids will be valued more since they are tied to donations, it means that schools will seek out people who might become rich in the fuuture etc.

ERHS is in Prince George's County, which, while well-off as far as majority-black counties go, is far from the wealthiest in the area (due in part to the structural difficulties of building and maintaining black/brown wealth in America). To be frank, it is in one of the wealthier and whiter parts of PG, but it remains a diverse public school that largely draws students from the surrounding community. If Google or Brin were to donate to either the school or the county, it would decrease inequality in comparison to competing jurisdictions (e.g., Montgomery, Fairfax, Anne Arundel, and Loudon Counties, let alone DC itself).

This might not hold for other cases, but it really does in this one.

> So you promote furthering social inequality?

No. I promote creating a culture of contributing back to educational institutions if you have the means to do so.

> Also donations from rich guys to their schools creates so many bad incentives even if you don't consider the direct effects. It means that rich kids will be valued more since they are tied to donations, it means that schools will seek out people who might become rich in the fuuture etc.

Schools have no way of knowing which of their kids will become rich and therefore there is 0 substance to your assertion that donating to schools will change their structure in perverse ways. Public Schools by definition don't select their students anyways.

There are the kids who are already rich--or, rather, whose parents are already rich.

More to the point, kids with affluent backgrounds are far more likely to develop means of their own

I see your point. Systemically, most wealthy people will be the children of wealthy parents and their giving back will mostly propagate the inequality. That does make sense to me.

Interestingly, this also means that, even in public school, affluent children are likely to get a better education than less affluent children.

I hated my high school but loved my university. If I ever have cash, I will happily donate to the uni. Maybe his experience was the same.

Not to worry, he also doesn't donate to his university.

My sense is that this may be the case, but I have trouble understanding it if the school's culture during his time was anything like it was during mine (that is, accepting of diversity not only in backgrounds, but also in aptitudes, with niches for high intellectual and physical achievers, normal kids, and even, perhaps especially, those who would have been marginalized elsewhere.)

That said, I think what I'm advocating for approaches a sort of noblesse oblige, in that Brin has been SO successful that any deviation from his existing path might have lead to much less success, obliging consideration of every step along the way; and in that even a marginal actor in his life would be worth giving back to, from the point of view of the actor, commensurate to their involvement. ERHS is a school that could benefit hugely from a modest grant, or periodic appearance (if not personal, perhaps from a Google rep), which would presumably be a incredibly small sacrifice on his part. But most who went their didn't even know he had.

It just seems weird.

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