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Comment by rejectedandsad | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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.

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