Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakiol | Hacker News Reader

> If your parents have never set foot in an university and worked manual labor all their live, you are less likely to even consider higher education.

That’s not what I have perceived in developing countries. Usually those kind of parents work very hard precisely to allow their children to go to university and have the life they didn’t have. They don’t want their children to work like their parents.

View on HN

Developing countries are quite different from the USA (which I understand isn't everyone's frame of reference, but is mine). My family is from a developing nation, I was told explicitly as a child to focus on education to try to manifest the best possible (white-collar) life for myself. That's one school of thought. Having a degree in almost anything is probably far more transformative in Africa than the USA, presently.

But, in many pockets of the USA, most people generally do not even consider going to college outside of athletic scholarships because the only people they know who did are teachers, who might end up being some of the lower-paid people they have encountered. Or they've seen people work "by the hand" and end up in a better position than people they know who went to college.

This was my anecdotal evidence as a person from a developing nation as well. Parents around these parts give utmost priority to children's education because its the only way they can get out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Add free education to the mix and, you have a lot of people with a less privileged background getting university degrees. A Lot of people moved out of poverty within past couple decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com