from Hacker News

35% of the wealthiest people in the US attended one of just 8 elite universities

by frontman1988 on 2/22/23, 10:29 PM with 29 comments

  • by paxys on 2/23/23, 12:06 AM

    Not really unexpected or surprising. What I'd really like to see though is a similar list that differentiates between universities that help people create wealth vs those that just admit wealthy people to begin with.

    The conclusion the article seems to be drawing is – regular people can't become centimillionaires because they can't get into Harvard. But is that really what this data shows? If someone pulled up the demographic of top country clubs, for example, they could similarly conclude that everyone who is a member of these clubs is rich, so if we just forced them to let in poor people we'd solve poverty.

    The boring answer instead is – forget about Harvard and MIT and the rest of the top 10-20 "elite" schools and instead fund the state university system (funding still hasn't been restored since it went away nation-wide during the 2008 financial crisis), community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeship programs. All of these are a way more effective solution to getting a large number of people educated than constantly crying about Harvard's admission policies, but the latter is what drives online outrage and gets clicks.

  • by lapcat on 2/22/23, 11:44 PM

    I was accepted to one of those elite universities as an undergrad, but my family couldn't afford to send me there.

    You need money to make money.

  • by FrontierPsych on 2/27/23, 1:17 AM

    Eye reed all the tyme about how those skools are eleetist and racist and all that, butt what is never said is that those skools are "smart-ist."

    Eye'm not vary smart, butts why knot me admitted to Harvard? Eye only gots a C- avrage in hi skool, butts if we going to bee equal, then us knot smart peeple must bee admitted at them universities, two.

    Eye hate the discrimination against us. Maybee they need to take the same ratio of GPAs - only 5% A students, 25% B students and 60% C students and 10% hi skool dropouts so that Harvard and all of thems eleet skools "look like America."

  • by mska on 2/22/23, 10:42 PM

    There is JS code at the end of the article for some reason:

       !function(){"use 
   strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e) 
   {if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var 
   t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in 
   e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

  • by perfecthjrjth on 2/22/23, 10:43 PM

    It is good for the US to distribute power centers across at least 50 universities, not just tier-1 Ivies and Stanford.

  • by up2isomorphism on 2/23/23, 6:59 AM

    It might just mean these universities are willing to take wealthy kids.

  • by theRealMe on 2/22/23, 11:25 PM

    So? Is this supposed to make me angry or something? That the top 8 universities ordered by wealth creation produced 35% of the wealthiest individuals? Aka, on average each of those universities produced <5% of the wealthiest 9600 people? Tbh that’s actually lower than I would have expected when trying to cherry pick anger-fuel numbers for wealth inequality.

  • by polski-g on 2/23/23, 1:17 PM

    A shame that they didn't even think of the genetic confounding! The universities only let in elite people. They don't make them elite.

  • by cafard on 2/23/23, 11:14 AM

    How exactly does yahoo.com let its certificates lapse?