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Comment by yedava | Hacker News Reader

As Indian-American parents, we are leaning towards letting our kid have a relatively normal childhood instead of enrolling them in the grueling rat race of chasing "success". We know that this might mean the kid will have a lower or no chance of getting into an Ivy and so lose some lucrative career opportunities. Having seen successful people have no more luck in being happy and content with their lives than the losers, we just don't see the point in wasting our kids life the way we wasted ours.

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I went to a a top tier US public high school, was top 20% in my class and ended up going to a state university.

Over 15 years in finance, including working at multiple top 10 hedge funds, I've gotten to work with a lot of top Ivy and non-Ivy graduates.

I've come to a couple conclusions:

- There doesn't seem to be a difference in the smartest people from an Ivy and the smartest people from state schools

- Going to a Ivy or top university definitely gives you an advantage at some firms and there is something to be said for the network these schools have both from an alumni perspective but also from people you went to school with.

- I would argue that state schools are a better preparation for "life in general" b/c you learn how to deal with a larger variety of people, organizations, social backgrounds etc than you do at an Ivy

- There are a LOT of senior people at firms that prioritize Ivy league graduates who did NOT go to an Ivy league school. That would lead me to believe that there are many paths to success outside of getting an Ivy league degree.

I think this resonates with a lot of HN, but would love to see stats. One big change I’ve seen in Ivy Leaguers over 20 years is the rates of people coming in from enlisted service. It hit a minimum about 10 years ago, and after they began accepting transfers is now at a local max.

> There are a LOT of senior people at firms that prioritize Ivy league graduates who did NOT go to an Ivy league school.

95% of college graduates didn't go to an Ivy league school, so that would be expected. But how easy is it to get into a hedge fund from Harvard compared to say UVA? In my profession, having an Ivy league degree confers a tremendous advantage. Out of the sitting Supreme Court Justices, all but one went to either Harvard or Yale.

I don't know if I would recommend forcing your kids to try to get in. Whether people are willing to admit it or not the degrees are closer to a Rolex watch than they are 'success'. Framing it as if you need a Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Stanford degree to succeed is a false dichotomy. The students at these places commit a lot of academic fraud, my school is changing the honors code to adjust to this new reality. The parents of the students hire consultants to help them create fake credentials to help them get in, they play obscure sports, they join academic clubs like the math team they don't even like. It's not a pretty site. Although objectively, students from these schools have more opportunities, the opportunities are at the kind of places that are themselves kind of fake like top financial firms and it's much easier to create a fake startup when you have a nice degree. I'm put off by how toxic this all is. Goodhart's Law is playing out.

I am in favor of having good STEM schools, which is what the schools should do, but I don't think we can do that and simultaneously overvalue prestige rankings. The schools have contributed to tribalism across the country. They are really becoming a net negative I think.

I don't know that there is any real opting out of this. The kids do ultimately have to go on to careers and that can be very grim without at least some sort of bachelor's. I think getting the best possible bachelor's (whatever that actually means; certainly the ivy's have very good branding at a minimum) is then the next logical extension of that. But I feel the same way about my upbringing/education - I have no interest in putting a child through any of it.

This is me as well, having attended MIT and seeing the stress level of the undergraduate population, it seems a focus on balance could be great for the next gen.

https://medical.mit.edu/services/mental-health-counseling MIT offers counseling services for students.

>MIT offers counseling services for students.

As if counseling is anywhere close to being reliable at protecting a client from situations that would be mentally unhealthy in the absence of the counseling.

Isn’t that a white-centric definition of what’s “normal?” Certainly, the high-stakes educational grind is normal among Asians in America, and middle class and up Asians in Asia too.

Also, these days, it’s not just about “going to an Ivy.” I went to Georgia Tech and I’ve never felt it’s held me back. But getting into a good flagship state school is quite difficult these days.

No, my experience is that across the world, childhood is packed with household chores and playtime. It’s abnormal to treat childhood development as a progression toward an institutional goal. The parent post is talking about not giving their child a complex that leads to an abnormal life.

We are talking about adolescents. And at least in Asia, intense competition toward educational goals is a normal part of adolescence: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2010/03/30/high-st...

Respectfully, this is an opinion piece. It’s very agreeable, but doesn’t carry the same authority as Wikipedia, which claims less than half of India goes through secondary school. What you’re saying is true and intense and routine, but not universal nor accepted as the norm.

Less than half of Americans graduate college, but there’s a widely accepted set of norms around the “college experience.” Villagers in India aren’t taking high stakes tests to get into college, because college isn’t open to them. But if it were they would be doing the same thing.

Put differently, in the social class of people for whom college is attainable, it’s not like there’s a huge fraction telling their kids “oh, don’t worry, just do what makes you happy.”

While that sounds perfectly reasonable given the realities, are you not frustrated that your kid's success is being limited by racism?

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