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Comment by naturalauction | Hacker News Reader

The oped touches on one thing I noticed during my time at the University of Cambridge. Almost everyone I talked to there had parents who invested heavily in them either monetarily (hiring nannies, intensive pre-school/after-school care/private school) or time wise from a young age. Increasing access to early child education as argued for by the author seems like no-brainer to bridge some of the gap between children of parents who invest more in their kids’ future and children of parents who either can’t or don’t want to.

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Improving access to education is not enough.

You have to improve opportunity.

For example, I grew up extremely poor, and went to a small school. The most my parents knew about college was that I was going to go to one. Now I had the intelligence to get into just about any school I wanted, but I had no idea what/where those schools were. I also was unaware of how scholarships worked, or that I could have afforded most schools because we were poor. So I didn't apply to the few dream schools I knew of (MIT, Harvard, and Yale were the only big schools I knew about).

I applied and was accepted to two state schools in my region and went to one of those. My partner is appalled at the lack of opportunities I had growing up. No amount of money at the time would have fixed the situation, only moving to an area with better opportunities for me would have.

I think you slightly misunderstood my point. I'm not talking about kids who are considering college, or even know about college. I'm talking about children who are in elementary school or even younger, before they can take care of themselves at all. Studies linked in the article show that availability of free preschool likely had a casual impact on high school graduation rates and college attendance at all. IMO improving those rates are more important than the tail-end of the distribution (MIT vs other colleges) as it would lead to markedly less inequality. Elite schools admit such a small number of students that I don't think educating kids about them would make much of an impact on aggregate (it obviously would for specific kids).

I don't know if I'd characterize this as a systemic lack of opportunity because it's a problem that would have been addressed by a simple college counselor. These days the internet would clue you in. (I'm sure someone doesn't have access even to that, and that should be fixed, but that doesn't seem sufficient to end all disparity.)

If you don't have access to a college counselor or someone doing a similar job, that is still an opportunity you don't have.

The internet helps as long as you have something to look for. If you don't know you are lacking knowledge/information, the the internet isn't going to help you find it.

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