Point is, his dad probably didn't write to the university president (which would be ironic at this point) asking him to admit his deadbeat son as a favor. The student earned his admission the same way anyone does: essays, grades, luck. I'm sure he was helped by the gift from his parents of good writing skills and some doggedness. "Legacy elite" tends to imply there's someone more deserving of his spot.

Your opinion that the people working at those position are 'legacy elite' is clearly not universal.

I'm not even sure what's 'legacy elite' supposed to mean, other than that it is I suppose negative?

I too cannot believe it. Even the most diehard nonparticipating 20-year-old League-of-Legends-addicted coding-bootcamped hustlebro HN reader could fathom how being a senior journalist in the country's maybe #1 and #3 news institutions is like, a big deal.

Since it sounds like the other commenters are really confused about why it matters whose kid he is: like if you were just a regular person, you might be ejected from Stanford for pursuing something like this against a far lesser faculty member. It has nothing to do with admissions, which is such a hustlebro 20 year old POV anyway: to think that the privileges of nepotism are limited to getting admitted to fancy universities and money in a bank account. If only!

Imagine having first hand evidence of your PI doing fraud, which lots of people do by definition, and that is rightly seen as career suicide. Like even the postdoc in the story, who has the evidence, hasn't come clean! He can't just like, stop living the way this student can.

The students who relayed Marc Hauser's fraud to Harvard never went public with their identities. They don't get to win Polk Awards at all. They're not regarded as investigative journalists. This also prevents us from seeing what happened. I can tell you from my experience at least some of those students joined Hauser's prestigious lab for a medical school recommendation, which obviously didn't happen. In fact they may have only exposed him because, he was such an asshole, he refused to write them recs at all, for whatever reason.

Do you know what all those people at Genentech get for exposing this fraud publicly? Nothing. I mean, they certainly don't become eligible for journalism awards. They could very well have provided the first hand evidence, and maybe posted to a PR newswire that has more circulation than the Stanford Daily or whatever, and cause the Stanford president to resign, and they still will absolutely, positively, never win a Polk award. They will just have a blown up career at the end, either way. They have a 100% chance of exposing the truth, and yet a pretty, pretty low chance of ending up better off than they were before they started.

Nevermind research. Think about all the kids at e.g. private schools, younger kids, directly harmed by teachers molesting them, and you know, the kids are the ones who leave, not the teachers, for many decades and many institutions.

So it definitely mattered to be the son of some big deal journalists in New York. Jerry Yang is beholden to journalists in New York. It made this happen.

That said, of all the things to deploy your nepobabiness on, this is a pretty good one, isn't it? Investigative journalism of the finest degree. I don't personally think that a Polk award determines the merit of the investigation; nor does even the publication, clearly. Anyone, everywhere, can be not only be an investigative journalist, but indeed a great investigative journalist. It is a legitimately great story of bringing this guy, who has clearly dodged bullets for a decade, to task.