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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Well, it does seem reasonable to put _some_ cost controls on it. Hopefully there's lots of great school on the list, but I very much doubt Dartmouth will make the cut.

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Don't the elite universities already tend to have generous financial aid programs? For example, Harvard waives tuition for families with <$65k/year income.

Nobody who's working as a front line employee at Amazon will get into Harvard tier schools so this is an irrelevant point anyway.

Wow, such a wildly classist and unfounded assumption. Care to back it up with anything?

You know Harvard admits like 2k students per year right? Of which most are children of professors, upper middle class dream hoarders and maybe a handful of foreign and domestic notables? Plus a handful of people from the sticks, recruited athletes, legacies, and kids from poor urban high schools to round it out. *NORMAL PEOPLE* do not get into Harvard. NORMAL PEOPLE do work at Amazon.

Meanwhile there are 900,000+ front line employees at Amazon. Bringing up elite schools in relation to this group is missing the forest for the trees, and frankly insulting to people that worked hard and went to state schools that you'd consider "failures".

hey buddy, youre the first one to say anything about who’s a failure, conversation upstream was just about costs

Bringing up top schools is implicitly describing people like me, Amazon employees that went to state schools, as failures. It's completely divorced from reality.

I replied to another comment of yours, but what's funny is that you're right about what you're saying in the wrong-est sense of the idea. Statistically speaking, normal people don't go to Harvard. However, being a normal person making that absolutely enormous leap happens a non-trivial amount of times (there are 328 million Americans out there after all.)

It's so funny how the tone of your comment completely changes the meaning. Your tone essentially says "normal people aren't good enough to get into elite schools" which is disgusting and classist. If your tone was slightly different, "normal people aren't often given the opportunity to go to these schools even if they deserve it" you would be saying the same thing (statistically, "normal" people aren't the norm at Harvard).

But, either way, I hate to break it to you... but us peons are just as intelligent, clever, interesting, and motivated as the social elite... we just happened to be born to poor parents by the grace of history and (bad) luck.

> normal people aren't often given the opportunity to go to these schools even if they deserve it"

I personally believe, as a peon, that nobody deserves to go to a top school because they're eugenicist and classist by design. I have nothing because I went to a shitty state school, and the fact that others have happiness and everything handed to them because they're part of the lucky few is why I have a suicide note ready for when I snap and blow my brains out for being an abject, state school-educated failure.

> However, being a normal person making that absolutely enormous leap happens a non-trivial amount of times

Again, it doesn't. 2k admits. Only people that might be normal are the ones that are affirmative action admits from Wyoming or Alaska.

The parent post is probably incorrect by making an absolute statement ("nobody [...] will get into Harvard tier schools"), but the odds are certainly stacked against them.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

I suspect the main barrier for poor families to get into such universities is getting accepted in the first place, not because of the tuition.

This is correct, people from middle and upper middle class families can't get in that did well in high school and college. What sort of bubble is made up of only people that went to top schools?

Stanford offers tuition-free access to families that earn less than $150,000 per year.

> but I very much doubt Dartmouth will make the cut.

Do you really think front line employees at Amazon are going to go to Dartmouth? People that worked hard in high school and college like me can't go to Dartmouth. Bizarre to equate that with quality when this is designed to give people opportunities to pay for University of New Hampshire.

I upvoted you just so that your ignorance can make a good discussion point.

There are an innumerable amount of "hard working" students that have all sorts of jobs in our economy. I'm now a 30-something tenured researcher at a world class instution, but at one point I was a 19 year old working swing shifts in a manufacturing plant while attending a world class university... because although I worked hard in high school just like you... I also desperately needed money. It would have been great if my greedy/zealous manager would have paid for my college, I was repairing the electronics and software for him at near minimum wage anyway.

> while attending a world class university

Most of us can't attend "world class universities", we're inherently inferior. The vast majority, actually. So bringing up elite schools in this conversation is both irrelevant and in many cases just self aggrandizing.

I don't know how you twisted what I said into the idea that people from FCs can't go to top schools, but the reality is almost none (and probably close to none) do.

> I upvoted you just so that your ignorance

I upvoted because he's correct. There's a staggering amount of denial in this thread. Statistically (and recently https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/histor...) the trends remain unchanged for Ivy league schools. The competition is high and the prejudices are baked in.

I worked hard, did well in high school, did everything right. Yet I had no shot at getting into any top schools or achieving anything close to what even the least accomplished top school admit has done in their life. Optimizing for a tiny fraction of elites while leaving the left of us to rot is the what's wrong with this country.

Then the headline should read “Amazon to provide employee training” or something along those lines. As it is this is just corporate clickbait.

No, it's not. An education at Random State College is still rather more than "employee training".

Not to Amazon it's not, but you won't see that in their propoganda. Even Random State Community College is likely a better education (this is not meant as a backhanded compliment to community colleges, which are at least honest and respectable about what they provide and don't).

But if I'm getting the education, for free, why do I care whether it serves as employee training to Amazon?

And, community colleges provide a better education than state colleges? Seriously? Do you have any evidence for that position?

I believe you misinterpreted. State community colleges are likely better than any sort of "training programs" Amazon provides in terms of education. If those "training programs" happen to include a waiver at a full state university, then of course not, but the program waivers aren't entirely composed of 4 year universities and many seem to be Amazon tailored programs, based on the article.

Ah, I see.

I misinterpreted you as saying that Amazon was using a real college as a training program.

If Amazon will pay for "education", and the options are a four year degree or an Amazon training program, I'll take the degree and ignore their training.

Agreed. The title sounds like Amazon will pay any college tuition, provided the student incurs a cost of some sort.

This seems like more of a PR move than anything.

Since when do people think of 4-year degrees when they think of "employee training"?

Of course Dartmouth won't. Why would Amazon pay ridiculous amount of money for the same education you can get much cheaper somewhere else? (e.g., Coursera or many state universities). This program is about people gaining useful skills to advance their careers, not about fancy diplomas and networking. Do you think that Dartmouth or any elite school can better teach someone intro to coding than thousands of other legit places?

Update: this is getting downvoted. I guess many Dartmouth graduates here with ego...

HN generally considers it distasteful to complain about downvotes, especially in uninformed ways. The downvotes are because of your false claims about the cost of study at these universities. Check here https://financialaid.dartmouth.edu/cost-attendance/myintuiti... and put in the typical situation of a frontline amazon worker and see how much they would be expected to actually pay after the financial aid is subtracted (it will be close to zero, I just checked).

Universities, especially prestigious ones are expensive in the US. But the prestigious ones also happen to have incredibly good financial aid options. The problem is the classist system that makes it difficult for a low-income person to have the CV that lets them get admitted. Paying the rest after being admitted is comparatively easy (both for the rich and for the poor). It is the middle class that is in a bit uncomfortable situation as the financial aid can still have aggressive cutoffs.

Financial aid is irrelevant here because Amazon is the one paying. Dartmouth not gonna give Amazon financial aid. If someone else pays your tuition you not gonna apply for financial aid.

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