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Comment by iancmceachern | Hacker News Reader

Exactly my point, folks with privilege like yourself don't even understand what privilege they have and have taken advantage of their whole life.

I did (apply myself). I did work my ass off to get into, and out of, (good) engineering school and pay for it also.

It simply wasn't an option for me to go to an expensive private or out of state school with a price tag of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege.

Edit - I also want to acknowledge that compared to many folks in the world I am very privileged. It only serves to highlight my point even further. These statements are less about me personally and more about me recognizing that I, and many others in our HN world are very privileged in one way or another as compared to he average American, or Human.

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Please stop using that word. It sucks the life from you because you think it excuses you from self analyzing why you aren't happy where you are. Life is not fair if you are a human, cat, squirrel or mouse. We are born into a specific set of conditions...look around and move but please stop using the word privilege. Everyone and everything is different.

I am very happy where I am. Within myself, I am not blaming anything for lack of anything but rather celebrate my successes and what has come from my hard work.

That doesn't mean I can't recognize that folks are different, and that where we start out most definitely has an impact on how far we go.

Just what is it with extra privileged people and being allergic to admitting it.

You seriously, honestly, from the bottom of your heart, think that 90% of the 70k people living in the Complexo do Alemão are just lazy and don't fix their lives due to sloth?

Before you start, I'm happy with my life and my circumstances.

As I have gotten older I regret the opportunities I didn't take or passed up because I was focused on others. Don't let my regrets be yours.

What does that have to do with the discussion?

I actually agree with this, if only because of the political connotations the term “privilege” has acquired.

I think a better term would be “advantages”. It adequately describes the meaning that’s being conveyed without carrying the implication that it’s necessarily completely outside of the individual’s control.

Yeah, I agree.

I went to a public in-state school with poor parents. Full need-based financial aid in school. I made 6 figures out of school and currently make the big numbers you claim are impossibly rare.

You claim that not everyone is intelligent enough to make it into these schools in another post but we know from science that even just changing the way you study can improve performance by half a standard deviation [1]. So maybe you just didn't work as hard as the competition? Maybe you didn't look at all the aspects of _how_ you work and do some self-reflection about working more efficiently?

Don't blame intelligence when your own decisions have much more impact on overall performance than 10-20 points of IQ do. Why do you think Asians comprise 50% of school populations where affirmative action is banned? Hint: it's not because of superior intelligence, but work ethic.

[1]: https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

My family was so poor, I got into college for free. Talk about unprivileged.

But you had the privilege if uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.

Too bad. Life isn’t fair. Evolution got us to where we were, and I’m glad that we have consciousness due to relentless natural selection.

I'm not complaining about it. Just recognizing it.

You're going to have to pick one between

>>> So I went to the best school I could afford. Many folks are in this boat. It's not for a lack of trying or intelligence - it's for a lack of privilege.

and

> But you had the privilege [o]f uncommon intelligence and test taking ability. Not all privilege is money.

Not really. It's not so black and white. My point is that above a certain threshold of GPA/test scores/"intelligence" college is free. If you are below that threshold college is not. For those of us that were below that threshold, for whatever reason, we had to figure out how to pay for it. Within that bucket there are people who's family can just pay for it, no matter how expensive (these are the people going to Harvard and Wharton out of pocket), and there are those who simply can't afford to pay 200k for an education because they don't have it. Those folks then choose state Schools (which I went to and are wonderful). My point is that the average graduate of Wharton has a much higher average starting salary than the average state school. Therefore tying a family's ability to pay more tuition with a graduates average salary being higher.

It's simply the way the world works. The rich get richer.

So just to be clear, you're repudiating your statement that when people can't afford to attend college, that's not for lack of intelligence on their part?

I never made such a statement. This is reductio ad absurdum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

Sorry, where did the "reduction" occur in rephrasing "above a certain intelligence, college is free" to "if you can't afford college, you're missing some intelligence"?

The one is just the logical contrapositive of the other.

Those aren't the same thing, that's where the reduction occurred.

My statement, which is the simple reality of the world, was that top performing students who are able to prove so via grades, test scores and other admissions requirements and scholarship requirements, are able to have top tier educations paid for via scholarships and similar aid. For folks, like me, who weren't in that bucket, have a different set of opportunities and tradeoffs. Those include paying for a 200k "top tier" education if our situation affords it, or the choice I and many others make which is to go to the best state school (or other "affordable") option.

I'm not complaining, it's just how the world works. If you were to create a flow chart for college that covers any input (student), this is what it would look like.

Reducing the above to "college is free above a certain intelligence" is missing the point and focusing on a needless obsurd detail.

Nonsense, you were privileged to be the right kind of "poor", the kind of poor that the system caters to. Just because the system gave you a big hand up does not imply that it does for everyone in equal conditions. You were privileged and you don't even realize it.

There are many poor people that are never given that opportunity regardless of ability. To those people, you had an easy path.

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