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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew very fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.)

For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.

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> For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.

No. It's really not. As someone who has been involved in the system that admits you to top ranked universities and whose summer hustle also paid well in highschool. This is not a slam dunk. It's one small piece. And it could easily backfire and be a negative depending on how you write it. For example by writing it as if it's a slam dunk.

These sort of overt economic arguments tend to go over very poorly.

Yes, point - there is no candidate good enough to get admitted, if he is stupid enough in making his case. That friend's son didn't build a people-oriented business by being stupid.

(OTOH, I wouldn't call it a "summer hustle" when you've paid your CPA more for routine tax prep than any of your peers have earned before graduating. Hopefully yours was similarly lucrative.)

An example of your point - another old friend had a nephew who was an "obvious" candidate for an Ivy / Stanford / etc. on academics, etc., etc. The nephew was also an out-of-the-closet white supremacist, both online and in his application essays. Zero offers, even from third-tier schools.

It's not just an argument that they should let you in, it's a BATNA – it's an opportunity for them to argue that they are worth your time.

If they don't even try to convince you, you should probably stick with your business.

> If they don't even try to convince you, you should probably stick with your business.

For someone invoking BATNA, I would hope you understood the concept of distributive bargaining.

Top universities get lots of good candidates. The lawn care business guy - he's just one of them. The school doesn't lose much if he doesn't go there, and thus he is not worth that much of the school's time.

Right after getting his master's degree my friend's father stood before a choice: accept a desk job paying X a month, or make X per job installing and repairing A/C units.

That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.

A family member just paid $500 for someone to come replace a $35 capacitor on their central AC compressor, after I explained how they could do it themselves in 5 minutes.

And this is the kind of stuff that made my friend an owner of two apartments before the age of 40.

I think the vast majority of people go their entire lives without doing any kind of circuit level repair work. It's just not a skill most folks acquire. I can't think of anyone in my extended family who could replace a capacitor, half of them wouldn't even know what that means.

A central AC compressor capacitor is plug and play.

https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-du...

Turn off circuit breaker, unscrew ~4 screws on the cover of the compressor unit, take a picture of how old one is connected, unplug it, connect new one matching up the symbols or letters, confirm with the picture you took, screw the cover back on, and switch the circuit breaker back on.

Watch any of the available 5,000 YouTube videos if unsure.

Ah okay, this is admittedly not what I had in mind. When I read replacing a capacitor, I was imagining a soldering job, not a plug and play consumer part. You're right - this seems pretty doable for your average homeowner.

It's also kind of dangerous though, there's a reason these people need to be certified. Dealing with a 5V breadboard? Yeah I'm game. Disassembling the housing of something to figure out which part needs to be greased or came loose? Yeah sure. My computer science training has prepared me to think outside the box and solve novel problems.

But if it's got 240V mains going through it, I'm not going to touch it. I like how my EKG currently looks and want it to stay that way. Why are humans made out of such a conductive material again? My CS degree didn't do anything to help me here beyond my biology class giving me an appreciation for how much meat-circuitry my body has that relies on fractions of a single volt to operate my vital organs.

This specific repair scenario is not dangerous. It is such a common failure with a cheap fix that it’s simply worth killing the circuit, unplugging the old one, plugging in a new one, turning the power back on, and seeing if it works.

Worst case scenario, you have a new capacitor. Best case scenario, you save hundreds of dollars.

Here’s a video. You can even skip all the diagnostic tests, as all you care about is replacing the capacitor. If that doesn’t work, call an expert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWH38Rg1iMI&pp=ygUeUmVwbGFja...

https://www.homedepot.com/c/ah/ac-capacitor-replacement/9ba6...

> This specific repair scenario is not dangerous

I believe you, but I also know I'm not qualified to examine whether or not the repair in question is the non-dangerous one you're describing or the lethal one that looks pretty similar. I have all kinds of respect for you for being able to fix your own stuff, but even if I think I know what I'm doing, I'm still going to pay somebody who definitely knows what he's doing to do it for me.

Well, the hard part is finding that capacitor. I try to repair almost everything and very rarely it is possible to find the damaged component without extremely specialized skills. The best you can hope for is that someone else has done the work for you and posted it in a forum. Even then it is often the power supply that goes first and those parts are dangerous to work with.

It is not hard to find, and requires no special skills. Every residential AC compressor has a removable cover where the capacitor is mounted. No soldering required either, just connecting and disconnecting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWH38Rg1iMI&pp=ygUeUmVwbGFja...

Home Depot has a tutorial too:

https://www.homedepot.com/c/ah/ac-capacitor-replacement/9ba6...

I'm talking about consumer electronics like TVs, washing machines, kitchen appliances, laptops and graphics cards. The latter need specialized soldering equipment even if you know exactly what's wrong. Those are the devices that break most often. Normal people don't have a compressor that they need to repair (and even compressors have digital control circuitry).

I disagree. I think that what college offers is more than an increase in salary. For hyperbole’s sake, you could use the argument of ‘my trust fund is already paying me more than your median graduate’s full-time job’ and most would roll their eyes at such a statement.

Try talking to someone who's worked a few decades as a Development Officer at a major university. Would they want their institution to be associated with Mr. "I will never need to actually work" Trust Fundee? Or with a real-world proven entrepreneur & business management prodigy?

FWIW, with a 42% admission rate, donor-related applicants are 7 times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than other applicants. Based on this, I would say they tend to want to be associated with people who already have money, regardless of what they may say.

Yes-ish.

If the wealth "in play" is merely a trust fund large enough so that the applicant can live modestly without ever working, they won't care. (And any "I don't need to work" argument would be a huge red flag.) Similarly - I cannot give my grand-niece a 7X boost on getting into Harvard by donating $1,000 to Harvard.

Vs...if I was a billionaire, and ask a Harvard Development Officer about my grand-niece getting admitted to Harvard, then I could get her far more than a 7X boost.

You've either never spoken to people in development or didn't understand what they do.

For one, they aren't involved in admissions at all.

Their goal is to make long term relationships so that both sides, the donors and the university get something out of it. Not to judge people based on where their money or connections come from.

"Involvement" need not be official.

Development people have influence, and definitely want future financial success stories moving smoothly through their university's admissions pipeline.

Is that the choice though? It's more likely that you have to choose 100 people among 30 trust funders, 2 business prodigies, and 200 ordinary people.

The perspective changes if one is choosing to go to a school that costs $100k+, especially in debt. At that point, it becomes a business decision.

Getting money that way isn't impressive, though. But surely there's some value to someone who's, presumably, intrinsically motivated to attend for some reason. That thing everyone born on the treadmill fakes being.

> Getting money that way isn't impressive, though.

Depending on how big the trust fund is, I think you'll find it will open more doors than a summer lawncare initiative.

> ‘my trust fund is already paying me more than your median graduate’s full-time job’

that'd be a good argument too. why go to college if you have income security? go do something infinitely more interesting and fulfilling

This seems to be another strong argument for social class being a huge player in determining your success - as you say it was a well-to-do suburb. Good on them for taking advantage of the opportunity, but just as vitally the opportunity was there to take.

You don't need "an argument" that social class is the biggest player in determining success when the statistics have told us this plain as day for decades.

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