His dad was a Cuban immigrant who worked as an engineer at Exxon.
Yes, if you're accepted, you really don't have to worry about the price tag because of their financial aid. But poorer families are more likely to go to lower quality schools that may not even offer AP courses and do very little test prep. Families are also unable to afford top-tier test prep services either. On average, if you come from a poor family you've probably had to work harder, or be smarter, to get into Princeton.
I'm not saying this is a problem for Princeton to solve. I'm just saying that it's really not an institution highly accessible to middle/lower class. Just take for example the fact that they favor children of past alumni heavily: something like 30% of the class comes from "legacy" students whose parents(s) attended as well.
Creating a mega-successful company is extremely difficult. Most people who do so are incredibly smart, incredibly hard working, got very lucky with the idea they chose to pursue (right place, right time), AND come from a wealthy family that can invest in their idea and make it feel like much less of a risk to found a company. Bezos fits all of these criteria, as do most successful tech founders.
The most successful people on average have upper middle class/rich but not titan of industries parents. Rich enough that they have time to spend with their kids, pay for tutoring, that sort of stuff, but not rich enough to have the nanny raise the kid.
“Good at business” is a better description. But people aren’t normally satisfied with calling billionaires “good at business” so they add this glittering “smart”, as if he is somehow a better person then you or I, which is a ridiculous statement.
> He was high school valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight Award winner in 1982.
> ... In 1986, he graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a 4.2 GPA and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree (B.S.E.) in electrical engineering and computer science
> ... After Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986, he was offered jobs at Intel, Bell Labs, and Andersen Consulting, among others. He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at the age of 30.
Yes, he’s very good at business, but he’s clearly very “book smart” too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
Also it's really not proper to take the highest cost of living areas in this situation and say "it's okay they're kind of close to $180,000!"
Taking the outliers as examples to support the idea that the average family meets it is close to the median is really a bad comparison. Most of the country doesn't live in those areas. It would only be an appropriate comparison if Princeton received most if their students from those areas, and they don't.
Princeton definitely does (unintentionally) bias admissions towards major metro areas. It's just way easier to have a good application in these places.
I went to a big state school that was respectable but not Princeton. I still wouldn't say most students there were from the "working class" by the common definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class
> The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in waged or salaried labour, especially in manual-labour occupations and industrial work.
How many Princeton kids had parents who worked construction? Plumbing, drywalling, tar roofing? I'll guess: very few.
> HARVARD COLLEGE has almost as many students from the nation’s top 0.1 percent highest-income families as from the bottom 20 percent. More than half of Harvard students come from the top 10 percent of the income distribution, and the vast majority—more than two-thirds—come from families in the top 20 percent.
https://harvardmagazine.com/2017/01/low-income-students-harv...
(They do have great financial aid for low-income families)
HN does so much moderation, with dang slapping people for being nasty. Why is obvious, egregious misinformation like this not subject to moderation?