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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I'm experiencing this first hand. My family immigrated here from Bangladesh. Unlike much of my family, my dad had a college-degree required job lined up, and we ended up pretty comfortable with him on a GS-scale job and my mom selling furniture. Thanks to the SATs, my brother and I both ended up breaking into industries (banking, law) that until relatively recently were good old boy's clubs.

Now that I have kids at in private school, I have a totally different perception of the cultural capital these families have that we didn't. We have a second winter break for ski holiday. My daughter asked me why we don't ever go to Aspen. When we were kids, we didn't know anyone, we didn't know what to write in admissions essays. We had enough money to do test prep, but that's incredibly cheap in comparison. I'm not concerned about my kids if we move to a subjective admissions system. We'll send my daughter to Bangladesh to do some gold-star project and hire an admissions coach to wring my dad's story of growing up in a third world village for all its worth. But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.

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Lower middle class (and even uneducated pedigree upper middle class) is where the brutalism is for competitive schools, but lower middle class has state schools (if in California, Cal State schools) or community college- and almost always finishes high school with a middle-of-the-pack education, thanks both to average public scholar and average home lives. So, generally they are fine.

I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away. It’s not hard to get into a public research university, where there always an opportunity to shine, even if the average student is, well, average.

The real tragedy here though is costs have gone up quite a bit for state educations and the true top-tier educations have so many scholarships available that an average education costs more than a premium one.

I went to a state school but have spent far more of my life working at and with people from Princeton, Caltech, Stanford, etc…

When I attended Caltech, there was no evidence that it was a rich kids school. For example, very few students had a car. The ones that did had a Bug or an old Ford pickup. I don't recall anyone wearing tailored clothes, the students mostly wore completely unremarkable stuff. When I'd meet their parents, they were perfectly ordinary people.

I don't think the data supports this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...

I do think it's true that Caltech students are all very passionate about STEM, so the average family wealth is less apparent.

> the data

Keep in mind that I attended in the 70s. Nothing stays the same. I have little idea if Caltech is the same today as then, and rather doubt it. One obvious change is their mission statement has changed drastically. In the 1978 "Caltech Information for Students" pg 105 it says simply:

> The primary purpose of the undergraduate school of the California Institute of Technology, as stated by the Trustees, is "to provide a collegiate education which will best train the creative type of scientist or engineer so urgently needed in our educational, governmental, and industrial development."

>Keep in mind that I attended in the 70s. Nothing stays the same. I have little idea if Caltech is the same today as then, and rather doubt it.

Late 60s, Page, for me. I was lower middle class, which seemed to be the great majority. I recall only one House contemporary who was from serious wealth. Would never have known but for developing a friendship. As you say, I doubt things are similar today.

Caltech is very different today than it was 50 years ago. Modern Caltech recently cancelled Robert Millikan (the founder)

Millikan as in the oil drop experiment, foundational to quantum physics?

Looks like he was a rabid racist and eugenecist. Glad to see that modern Caltech has progressed.

Don’t you worry, they’ll come for you eventually.

One would hope so.

Ideally, the people of the future will have progressed beyond the relative savagery of me and my peers and look upon us with disdain. Perhaps for how much I enjoy a good steak, or for the genital mutilation of our boys.

Or you could like... understand that people behave in the context of their time in history, be glad we've moved past that, and celebrate the contributions of the people that got us to where we are.

I can celebrate George Washington as a founder of the country and also understand he was a slave owner.

I think the problem is that we're really bad at any amount of nuance: people we celebrate are treated as flawless saints beyond reproach rather than humans who achieved something great in one area.

It turns out even Gandi, Mother Theresa, etc had a pretty sketchy side, because shocker no human actually meets that bar. But since we're categorically unable to say someone did a great thing while actually being pretty immoral by that's standards, the only options that the university seem to have available to it are entirely condoning their unacceptable side or else disowning them.

Pet ownership is my favourite example of what will be seen as immoral in the future.

What part of pet ownership is bad? Seems to me like my dog enjoys life, and his presence has certainly saved me from suicide a few times.

I mean the obvious parallel to slavery, they are property owned by somebody who are not truly free to leave and have been bred to the point of dependence, are regularly neutered, are leashed regardless of need, they are commonly fed kibble produced from waste not fit for human consumption at rendering plants, and so on.

I'm not saying there couldn't be I don't know, a pet owner who took them in off the street or from a shelter, nursed them back to health, and are lifetime companions in a consensual idealised relationship, with the ownership mostly being a legal technicality. Yet there is an ethically dubious side to pet ownership which I could imagine getting the entire institution framed in a negative light in the distant future.

I imagine in the year 3000 there might be a future where schoolchildren will be shown holograms of rendering plants and told by the teacher "And this is what they fed the animals" and then a Labrador Retriever will have an AI write an essay which states that "the ownership or consumption of any animals, is fundamentally a crime against animal rights".

We have a dog and had cats. I have pet friends. They are free to leave as they wish. The cat left and then came back with kids. Then they left but some will come back and go. The dog is still there, doesn't seem so enthusiastic about going too far from the house.

And yes. I think slaving/caging an animal is brutal. But many animals will happily have your company.

I have an anecdote that I personally witnessed a few years ago, which makes your claim way more probable than some here would suspect.

I was visiting Bay Area a year before COVID and stopped by in Berkeley for something, iirc was getting brunch with friends. The first thing I see after parking is a full street closure and a large crowd that looked like it was marching down the street, with people holding banners, drumming, chanting slogans, etc.

Out of curiosity, I decided to check what it was about. As you have probably guessed by now, "pet ownership is slavery" was the theme (one of the banners in the front was saying exactly that).

So your idea of societal progress is one that believes all history is worth looking down on, that there's nothing in the past worth celebrating because every figure acted distasteful or had views distasteful to modern eyes?

I guess all of human civilization has just been a giant failure. The only chance we have is for us poor wretches to retroactively flagellate our ancestors and beg forgiveness from the gods of modern enlightenment, complete with the knowledge that we too will be flagellated in our own due time, and rightfully abhorred in the judgement of future generations, no matter our worldly achievements.

For all its supposed enlightenment, modern political correctness is really more akin to medieval Catholicism

I read Cato, but I have never respected him. I admire Churchill for his contribution to victory in WWII and his excellent playing of a weak hand, but he was a hideous human being for a lot to answer for. I have nothing but contempt for Jefferson Davis.

Yes, I even consider the Nazis terrible people no matter how widespread antisemitism was at the time and no matter how much public support they had. I have that view simultaneously with the understanding that there is no German my age who engaged in any of that.

There is nothing wrong with understanding and making moral judgements about people. I can look at a painting in a museum that has someone enslaved in the picture and both understand the context and be repulsed by the depiction.

It's proper for people to make moral judgements, and to understand both past injustices and contemporary injustices that one implicitly (one hopes not explicitly!) supports.

There is a great deal wrong with making moral judgments about people. People are complicated and you don’t have the full information to make an unbiased judgement.

The real issue here is it’s hard to revise such emotionally charged views in light of new information. Condemn people for murder and it will be harder for you to notice the innocent person on death row.

Worse, many people will try and influence your opinion via misinformation. Condemnation short circuits peoples ability for rational though and that’s exactly how normal people end up committing atrocities.

I guess you shouldn't go too far back in history then. If that's how you judge the average Nazi party member (as in the regular Nazi on the street at the time), I imagine you think every Swede during the time of the Vikings was correspondingly a terrible person. And every Frank, Mongol, Arab, Indian, Slav, and... yeah pretty much everyone back in the day. Cato included. With the whole world being so fundamentally morally terrible it's a wonder any good people managed to come into existence in the last 20 years to be the woke arbiters of morality for all past and future action.

The uncomfortable truth is that any of us, genetically unchanged but raised in post WWI Germany would most likely be Nazis during WWII.

> The uncomfortable truth is that any of us, genetically unchanged but raised in post WWI Germany would most likely be Nazis during WWII.

But of course: isn't that the important lesson? Most, but not all were; so is this knowledge an excuse to do nothing or is it a spur to look for the injustices one accepts today, and change one's position?

The Nazis party grew because so many Germans were looking for people to blame for the "injustice" of Germany's loss in WWI. You think your motivations are different than millions of people? It's the reduction of complex events and people that results in and excuses people doing horrendous things, because it permits them to see what they want to see and ignore the rest.

Beware anybody or anyone who seeks to erase the messiness and complexity of life. The pursuit of purity is the root of so much evilness. If you uncover the sordid past of a public figure, the right thing to do is exhibit that history alongside the better things they're known for, so that people learn and remember what real people look like; that nobody is a caricature; and that to avoid repeating the sins of history we must appreciate what we share with those who have committed those sins previously.

He should have been canceled for all the experimental fraud he committed.

explain

If college is the only way to make a good living, then rational actors will game and lobby their way to getting in.

Even in the 1990s, a CS program was easy to get into and a local 4 year degree was sufficient for most lines of work.

At least in the 70s, if you gamed your way into admission at Caltech by doing test prep, coaching, having someone else do your application essays, etc., you were going to be sorry. Because you would find it impossible to do the work required. Caltech did a good job of screening because the ones they admitted could do the work (though a lot dropped out simply because they didn't want to work). But there were a few that couldn't, no matter how hard they worked at it, and just wound up leaving.

A friend of mine dropped out of Caltech after a couple years, and disappeared. I ran into him many years later, and we did some catching up. 10 years after dropping out, he asked Caltech if he could come back and try again. They said sure (one of the nice things about Caltech's philosophy). He got straight A's. I asked him if he had gotten any smarter, he said no, he was just willing to work the second time around.

Of course, there were some students who just effortlessly aced everything. Hal Finney (yes, that Hal) was one of them. Being around people like that was just amazing.

> Being around people like that was just amazing

RIP. He probably say the same about you

I doubt it. I was just the annoying freshman next door. He was nice to me (and to everybody) but I wasn't in his circle of confidants.

For as far as I can remember, this is the same philosophy held at my alma mater: NJIT. I was admitted into the CS program in 07 and got put on probation my first semester. I transfered to community college and messed around with bad grades for a while until I got my act together. I was readmitted and from what I could tell, they essentially have guaranteed admission If you have at least like a ~2.6 GPA in a science related degree. Quite a low bar. However you are expected to work hard once in the program. That didn't change once I went back, although the school as a whole was a lot less scary and intimidating the second time around.

I think this is true for a lot of engineering schools. Maybe there just isn't as much of a demand to go to the pure STEM schools as there is the schools that have everything. Like I remember looking at requirements for Rutgers at the same time and essentially they had like a 3.2 (or maybe 3.4 GPA) minimum and you'd have to re-take all the core CS classes as they would not accept those classes from community college.

I observed the same admission principles at Georgia Tech (where I studied), and I am glad it was this way. GT was willing to give quite a lot of people a chance (especially if you were in-state), but it would not hold back punches once you were in.

For someone like me, who believed they could do it, but didn't have the "perfect" admissions packet (moving to the US midway through high school with very poor english and zero knowledge of how the US education/admission systems work will do that), it was the chance I needed, and I am immensely grateful for it.

> At least in the 70s, if you gamed your way into admission at Caltech by doing test prep, coaching, having someone else do your application essays, etc., you were going to be sorry.

I’m sure it’s still true today. Still, the incentive to game and coach through admissions is intense because of the potential rewards.

I went to my local 4 year which was nearly free, and I coasted through the CS program making it possible to do other things.

Still, my earnings were halved because of the lower quality of the CS program and I do wonder about the road not taken.

I think it’s even more intense for students today; but it’s also true that the quality of student hasn’t gone up.

How could they keep that in mind if you never said it ..

What house were you in? When I was there, there were huge income disparities between the houses. You may have had that experience in one of the less-well-off houses if you didn't socialize outside of that environment much. There are a lot of rich kids at the school, but it's less pretentious than Harvard or others.

Page, in the 1970s. I did not notice any disparity among the houses. Freshmen were initially assigned to houses at random, and then they'd go through "rotation" where they'd have dinner at each house in turn. After that, the houses would each make a rank of who they wanted, and the freshmen would say yes or no to the selection. I don't recall anyone, ever, talking about their social/wealth background in this process.

> There are a lot of rich kids at the school

They must have hid it well, because I didn't notice any. I never heard anyone mention skiing in Aspen. Nobody had even an upper class car. Nobody had an expensively outfitted dorm room.

As for me, I come from a lower middle class family, and managed to get a modest loan in aid, which I paid off after graduation.

P.S. It's possible I was simply blind to the upper class signalling. Things like word choice, manner, etc.

If you are an outsider you are usually completely oblivious to all the subtle shibboleths.

But the insiders can clearly tell you're not one of them.

I was one of the richer kids in what was one of the more "bohemian" houses, as another commenter referred to them. Page was actually toward the top of the wealth spectrum when I was there (recently). There was also a lot of wealth disparity within each house, too, by the way.

However, the signals are more subtle than you think. Things like being happy to go out to eat on weekends, having a big wardrobe, having technical toys, and having a car (at all) were all signs of wealth. A few particular sports were also indicators. "Rich people cars" are usually not given to kids in their 20's, even by wealthy parents.

More subtly, there are a lot of social things, like asking what your parents do and asking about your last vacation. Most rich kids know how to read the room enough not to brag about expensive vacations directly, but will ask assuming you recently had one. Having parents who fly in for things and flying out for short vacations is a dead giveaway.

Also, at Caltech in particular, being well-read was a sign of wealth, but I assume that doesn't translate to non-science schools.

And it would never come up in rotation, but certain house cultures just are more attractive to certain types of people. I think that's the source of the disparity, not any sort of rotation-related thing.

At the University of Washington, there are kids with Lambos and Ferraris.

I was well-read, at least in the field of scifi books!

I don't recall anyone's parents flying in or them flying out for vacations. You might see them dropping their kid off at the beginning of the year, or picking them up at the end.

I eventually got a car for my senior year, but it was my beater Mustang from high school I'd rescued from oblivion.

But, just because I didn't notice these things, doesn't mean they weren't there.

At least for the two houses I was in, there were income disparities _within_ each house. It was never much talked about; I only realized it after a couple of years of getting to know individuals better. But I was in two (of the three?) houses with a very bohemian attitude I guess, and very little of our activities involved spending much.

> I wish the obsession with top-tier colleges would go away.

Until the ceiling of utility goes away the obsession wont go away.

If your goal is to climb the corporate ladder, all schools have nearly the same utility. Maybe industry specific, but I contend that its not different enough.

If your goal is to skip the corporate ladder, only top tier schools get you in the room. And only if the pedigree is used in very specific ways. Still not a silver bullet by any means.

But not being there is basically the same as having no ammunition.

I mostly agree, it's a fleetingly small amount of the population for which entering these elite colleges is even a possibility to begin with, what matters to the average Joe is their access to things like community college, tech schools, state schools, and so on.

Sure the elite schools matter because they control access to the levers of mass societal power but it seems to be a MAJORITY of what is talked about which seems disproportionate.

> But if I was a recent immigrant, or a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.

It may be worth mentioning that one of the, if not the, most powerful IP lawyers in the Bay Area is “only” a University of Iowa Law School grad.

https://www.quinnemanuel.com/attorneys/verhoeven-charles-k/#...

It isn't that anyone things that folks from Iowa, going to the nearest in-state State college, can't make it. It happens. It just probably won't, but you might be more comfortable than someone that didn't go. Just don't, say, be a public defense lawyer or be a teacher.

It is that we know that going to places like Harvard, you are much, much more likely to have a well-paying job, comparatively. Bonus points if you are rich and can do things more often with your peers. I'm not under the impression that the education is that much better (it might be, I can't assess that). The networking you definitely seems better. You are getting a foot in the door, a thing that poor families can't always get without a good dose of luck.

In the case of Iowa specifically, the trick (if you can handle the coursework) is to go to Iowa State and major in engineering. They're reasonably affordable and surprisingly high-tier. Quite a few other flyover states that you wouldn't intuitively expect to have really good engineering schools actually do.

(The trouble, of course, is with career paths in which networking and prestige matter a lot more.)

There's tons of people from fairly modest backgrounds in the legal profession, including ones who went to elite law schools. (E.g. Lawrence, Kansas, of all places, is the hometown of not one but two prominent south asian lawyers, Kannon Shanmugam and Judge Sri Srinivasan.) That's the direct result of the LSAT democratizing the legal profession over the last couple of generations.

I suspect you're correct, though, that if Harvard closes those doors, talented people will go to the University of Iowa (my wife's alma mater) and do fine.

There is really nothing inherently bad about sitting at the back of the bus. It is more so about the discrimination. It's a matter of principle.

> But if I was ... a lower middle class kid in Iowa, I'd be pretty outraged about this.

Of course, no one cares about these kids (least of all the elites and their cadre), and any outrage from lower middle class Iowans is already explained away as racism (never mind that Iowa, like much of the rest of middle America, went to Obama in 2008 and 2012).

...and anyone mentioning this is voted down by the chattering class of HN.

Predictable yet still disappointing.

What's happening to lower middle class kids in Iowa? I'm honestly just confused here. To my knowledge, they're getting decent lower middle class jobs and doing fine. Maybe going off to college and moving to the coast, probably not unless they want to leave. I don't think of that particular group of individuals as disadvantaged, at least not in the context of getting into a good college.

Yeah Iowa is getting totally jacked in this thread.

People on the coasts and even in the big cities in the Midwest just can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that a lot of us wouldn't be willing to live in New York City or California for all the money in the world. It's not that one lifestyle is inherently better. People have different preferences and it's pretty condescending to think that folks who live in the great plains and don't go to the big name schools are only in that situation for lack of opportunity.

We’re not talking about settling in NYC or Cali, we’re talking about the opportunity to compete with rich coastal kids for positions in top schools.

My position is that it’s an injustice if an Ivy-caliber student from a lower-middle class background is denied top educational opportunities because they don’t have the family pedigree of wealthier, more middling students. We would expect upward mobility here, we shouldn’t content ourselves with “at least they’re not getting poorer than their parents”.

> We have a second winter break for ski holiday.

We've got this at my kid's public school. Neighboring school districts don't, but they have two weeks for spring break (Easter) and we have only one. So that works out for me, although I don't much want to go on a vacation that needs two weeks when everyone else is on vacation; it's no fun to go to fun places that are overcrowded.

An amusing contrast, the public high school where my mom taught, had a week off for deer hunting. It was that, or teach to an empty classroom.

Pennsylvania? First day of buck season was always a holiday for us.

Michigan. It was just an unofficial holiday. But I'm still in the upper midwest, and there things you don't try to get done during rifle season.

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