I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home.
But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with showers; and no keycard access was needed in the evening until 7pm.
So it made sense to me that he or she would've used that building for shelter and comfort. Also it didn't boggle my mind at all that a Brown grad (from the picture, the tipster looked like a artistic Brown student vs. the careerist type) would be homeless - given that I known many of my classmates who have a certain personality, brilliant but also idealistic/uncompromising that made them brittle unfortunately in a society that rewards conformity, settling and stability.
I can't get over the fact that two Brown student whom presumably have fallen on the wayside of society have chosen two different paths, (1) the homeless guy who still perseveres even in the basement of Barrus & Holley for 15 years a la Parasite after 2010 graduation but still has the situational awareness and rises to the occasion to give the biggest tip to the Providence Police, (2) the other guy who harbors so much resentment over a course of 25 years to plan a trip from Florida to gun down innocent kids who are 18 and 19 and his classmate when they were 18 and 19 year old.
There was a homeless guy living in the gym at Rutgers prior to the late 1990s and it's why you had to show ID to get into any of the gyms/dorms.
Very similar story of:
- he was older
- dressed normally
- everyone assumed he was an assistant coach, grad student etc
They mentioned it multiple times in safety briefings and even at "how to be a club officer" meetings to ensure that everyone participating/involved was actually a student.
It's not uncommon. University buildings are pretty open even today. I worked with a homeless guy who was a university employee, so he had a legit staff ID card. He just didn't want to spend money on rent. He knew where the empty rooms were that nobody ever used, where the showers were.
I bet every major university has a few people living/sheltering in campus buildings.
RMS famously lived out of his office at MIT for a while.
RMS = Richard Stallman, responsible for the GNU project and the free software foundation.
He had a page dedicated to his housing situation:
https://stallman.org/seeking-housing.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20190928065654/https://stallman....
RMS could life couch surfing from conference to conference?
My somewhat anecdotal observation is that a lot of access has been tightened down. Some happened during COVID and was just never removed. It definitely varies. The campus I'm most familiar with, you could wander pretty freely and that's less the case today.
I feel really sad about this -- I was amazed as a child to learn that I was allowed to just... GO IN to buildings and lectures as long as I was quiet and respectful. I always took pride in my university's openness.
Then I took my boyfriend for a tour a couple years ago and found all the buildings had signs warning that access was only permitted with a University ID card. Nobody challenged us or kicked us out, but it was a sour demoralizing shock.
Things were very locked down at the peak of COVID and some of us even semi-officially grumbled a bit to people we knew.
The main public buildings are generally open again during the day at least. I don't go in as much as I used to. (And have ID in any case.) But definitely not as open as it used to be.
So if you are a modern homeless guy, you need a skimmer and cardcloner to get in now? Have there been cases of homeless people hacking hotels/motels?
But resentment over what? I haven't seen anything on this.
Graduate student violence is more common that it should be. For example, you hear about suicides every year.
I can't help but suspect that sometimes it may be related to graduate school itself, which can be stressful and unforgiving, with minimal support, and where supervisors often hold both academic power over their students' futures and financial power over their livelihoods. (And switching supervisors, even at the same institution, typically requires restarting research from scratch.) It can't be good when, after a lifetime of top-tier success, you are facing failure for the first time, with no preparation for handling it and no obvious path forward.
Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
>Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
A lot of people also are doing research they think will benefit the world, so it's not just about failing in a personal quest -- you feel you are letting down all of humanity if you do not achieve your goals.
>I can't help but suspect that sometimes it may be related to graduate school itself, which can be stressful and unforgiving, with minimal support, and where supervisors often hold both academic power over their students' futures and financial power over their livelihoods.
I dropped out of a PhD -- took the master's I earned for coursework, did my quals so it would be clear I chose to leave, then took an "academic-ish" job that paid very poorly. I'd hoped to do that a bit then get hired by a big tech company, but I found out that you have less free time in a job than grad school, and my tech skills began to erode, further sending me down a path I did not want.
What caused me immense, IMMENSE distress is that I felt, for lack of a better term "involuntarily destitute" -- my adviser in grad school had told me that she'd ONLY give me a positive reference for "research" jobs, and that trying to leave for industry was evidence I had lied my way into the program, and thus she could not give me a positive reference for any roles without a research component.
I feel that she purposefully tried to "trap" me with her -- she was having trouble recruiting new students as word of her behaviors and convictions spread (she'd racked up a DUI during the liminal period between my acceptance and starting school, among other gems).
I currently work in a job that has nothing to do with my field -- I had many, many years of strife because when I was fresh out of college, I looked around my hometown and found I couldn't even get a helpdesk job because my skillset was that of an open source nerd, and they wanted people who could answer questions about the UI of Windows like "How do I enable this printer" that, having not used it for years, I couldn't answer off the top of my head -- and it's not sustainable to "just Google it" on calls over and over, people will get frustrated with the wait times.
(That was the way people generally broke into infosec back then -- get a help desk job at a bank, hospital or university, study during downtime, maybe do some certs or try to do an interesting project to present at a conference, move up to sysadmin, and eventually security analyst/engineer)
I thought I'd found a third way -- I could do this PhD, and at worst leave with a master's, and sidestep the tedium of the help desk and the uncertainty of if I'd move up. (I knew people who got worked many hours, struggled to study up, and got trapped).
Anyways, academia can be incredibly abusive and downright medieval. That's not an excuse for violence, but it is an explanation.
Graduate school violence == suicide?
Grad school students are often required to work ridiculous amounts of unpaid hours for their supervising faculty (well over 40 hrs/week, sometimes meaning 7 days a week). Their eventual graduation is implicitly or explicitly tied to the approval of these monstrous bosses. Source: some of my fellow, less fortunate grad students.
Perhaps I should have said something like intentional harm leading to death to make it clearer. But the person isn't any more alive even if they were somehow killed by some gentle, peaceful method.
That has a clear definition which I doubt is what is occurring?
Or are you asserting that these folks are getting locked up and tortured until they kill themselves?
Academic success perhaps. The killer and Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he killed, were in the same class at Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal's leading engineering school). Loureiro had a distinguished career at MIT while the killer was homeless.
Maybe he had some idea that his buddy ran away with and he attributed his success to his idea, while he was homeless? There was a whole TV show around a similar idea (Breaking Bad).
Im pretty certain that of plagiate software would include rejected students works whole swaths of the academic successful would be let go.
What were you actually trying to type? I can't figure it out.
Jealousy is really the sickest of sins…
The medieval RC Church (proudly) taught that "Superbia mater malem est", "Pride is the mother of evil".
This article was helpful:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/mit-professor-shooting...
https://archive.is/qypoz
That definitely doesn't explain things. It appears the motive is still unknown
(But I did find this article better than the WaPo one)
I don't know much about the suspect, but I do know that people have been saying for years that they go into deep debt to get degrees, even in things that are supposed to be respected or in demand, and then it turns out there is actually no job market or success path for that degree. I assume the implication is it had something to do with this kind of frustration. (Though the suspect went to school two decades ago and did not receive a degree)
Since this site has a lot of people who have successful tech careers, many of us are isolated from these stresses.
But honestly, this guy's turn to violence makes me suspect he had some serious issues driving him, possibly in the mental health realm. Most people, even economically distressed people, won't turn to murder.
I think there’s a lot of projecting going on in these comments. The truth is we don’t know the motivation. Guessing at student debt seems unlikely given that he didn’t finish the degree, left the country, and made vague posts about deception on physics message boards around the time.
You misread me. I said "with this kind of frustration", meaning a broad category of frustration with the system of academia and education. That is not that 100% of the problem is student debt. It's that aspiring academics and scientists can have a hard time supporting themselves.
No I understood. Your guess that it was related to finances is just a guess.
I haven't heard any clear motives yet. Some people are saying it's simply a case of someone who was a genius that ended up in a mediocre place in life, leading to to killing. Still that story is so common in America I don't see how it leads to killing innocent children at your alma mater? It makes no sense to me.
But as with many of these situations the truth might not make sense-- sometimes it's simply irrational thinking by someone mentally unwell. It reminds me a bit of the Reiner killings as well, considering there too there's no clear motive except maybe a hypothetical mental break. Truthfully, we might just never have a satisfying answer as to why this tragedy happened.
The most obvious motive seems to be a vendetta against higher education.
Not at all obvious. I'm not sure why HN comments are overlooking that the killer was the same age, from the same country, and studied at the same undergrad university as the MIT professor while starting a graduate degree in the same field. We don't know the exact nature, but it is difficult to believe that these points are not highly involved with the motive.
At least when I was in school 15 years ago (math/engineering), a non- or partially-funded (including living stipend) grad school "acceptance" in the US was understood by all of my peers to be a rejection. I saw a post on reddit a few years ago saying that's still true and is in fact also true in the humanities (with an assumed TA role). Is that not accurate? Why are people going into debt for grad school? Did no one tell them you're not supposed to pay for it? Are they just unwilling to accept they were rejected?
"this guy's turn to violence makes me suspect he had some serious issues driving him, possibly in the mental health realm"
You "suspect possible mental health issues"? Amigo, what further evidence could possibly be required?
I actually have tons of experience with people who suffer mental health issues, including psychotic illness. One thing that experience gives me is to be cautious about making armchair diagnosis from afar.
If someone else had posted exactly the same thing you just did, I would have assumed it was supposed to be funny…
When we define criminality as evidence of mental illness, all we’ve done is medicalize criminality — which if anything hinders our ability to recognize abnormalities of the mind which may or may not lead to criminality.
This whole post is filled with a ridiculous amount of unfounded assumptions.
I am not American but there was a good interview on American homelessness in TMR: https://youtu.be/osFQMTJz1w8
there is so much systemic failure and it says a lot about the people who are elevated by society and the people who are demonized.
I agree 100%. The biggest example here is if you read and go back to the threads of HN before the downfalls of SBF and Liz Holmes, you'll see so many people on here worshipping them and apologists for their bad behavior. Most are corporate types are conformists who buy what they are told ('till the narrative are changed). It used to bother me but nowadays I just keep it pushing and aim for the tails and let the mid-curve people be the mid-curve people.
Some day while the dreaded soc* or comm* words have been abandoned, a better description might come along to account for the fact that in fact while the system is positive sum, reality can still seem zero sum to a large portion and there is only so much you can stifle the same human creativity, energy and desire to sustain themselves.
Many people are terrible judges of character. They either undervalue it, see it as weakness, or just aren’t able to discern the potential for malevolence.
> in a society that rewards conformity, settling and stability.
It also rewards value generation, often above the other things
Value defined how and for whom? Single parents without paying work provide an enormous amount of value but often can't get housing.
"...the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building..." Where did you read this?
https://kfanplus.iheart.com/content/2025-12-19-homeless-man-...
It was posted on a Fox News affiliate. He won't get the reward, because he called 911 rather than the tipline.
FWIW, The New York Post video on this said he will get the reward.
That doesn't surprise me at all.
Makes me furious, but it doesn't surprise me.
I assume he will also no longer be able to live in the engineering hall basement. Beyond personal moral satisfaction, coming forward only means sacrifice.
But a number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective. A terrible event all around.
> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective
I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.)
It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent.
The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not a random act of cruelty, but a result of his heroism. And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.
> And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.
I expect monstrous actions from all humankind, though. What sets “us” apart from deviants is the deftness of our self-justification.
To be clear, there’s no actual evidence that he’s being evicted. Talking about “his eviction” is pretty premature. It also seems like he will receive the reward.
Last sentence went a little insane.
> Last sentence went a little insane
I'm drawing a moral analogy to mass murder, so the whole thing is going to tend towards the unhinged. But I'll stand by it. There is something sad in ordinary people bending to banal evil. Monsters being monsters is just horrific.
Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.
The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.
Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
Why not give him cash or a job or something else?
> Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
The characterization of “us” as “assailants” is an acknowledgment of the sorrowful fate that we as a society inflict on nearly every whistleblower despite the fact that we as a society encourage people to be whistleblowers.
This is conflating whistleblowing with the need to pay rent on your residence. This guy is not exactly a Julian Assange.
> Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal
Not what was said.
> Why not give him cash or a job or something else?
Sure. Why not.
He wasn't interfering with the building owners. You're making up a justification to screw this guy over. That's really sad.
Oh if he wasn't interferring, then they must have allowed him to keep living there? Why is that sad, you want him to be kicked out?
(You forgot to use logic or explain a point of view and instead just made a random moral judgement and expressed the emotion it made you feel, so I had to make some assumptions about your intentions and depth of thought)
I think my logic is fine. You pulled reasons to get rid of him out of nowhere, not based on the facts of the case. Not just supporting a possible eviction but preemptively deciding it's the only way to get peaceful use of their building even though they were already getting peaceful use of their building. That's sad, because you're justifying a big punishment as consequence of doing a big good deed, with nobody benefitting.
And your first sentence makes no sense. That's not how people usually work. They get possessive and risk-averse and ban things that are unusual. That "if-then" is a total joke, and without it your criticism of my argument falls apart.
Just try to calm down and make a logical point. I promise I'll reply if you can think of anything.
[flagged]
The fuck are you talking about?
And I'm not just saying that as a reaction, I really want to know how you could have possibly interpreted the above comment to get that reaction. Please explain.
https://news.sky.com/story/how-a-reddit-post-blew-brown-univ...
> How a Reddit post blew Brown University shooting investigation wide open
> Frustration had mounted that the murderer had managed to get away and that a clear image of his face hadn't emerged - until a Reddit post finally put police on his trail.
That says he's a reddit poster, not a Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building.
A lot of reddit posters live in basements, a subset of which are in the engineering building.
Most Reddit posters are children. What of it? How does "he was a Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building" follow?
Those two descriptions are not mutually contradictory.
What I heard is he called the police tip line and left a message but didn't hear back for two days. After two days he left this tip and then was made a person of interest. This is just what I heard, not sure if there's more to this story.
And...?? How does "he was a Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building" follow? Wtf?
Im a bit worried for the homeless guy, he helped solve the case but he likely blew up his cover and will have to find a new shelter.
Lazlo Hollyfield.
Life imitates art.
We'll have to wait to see how the Brown student's life turns out after. We'll see if he drives a way in an RV. Doubtful he'll be living in the basement after this though
I think Christina Paxson should hire him to be a director of patrol or more realistically a community liason for Brown campus police. The RI/FBI circus were all mum on whether the guy will receive the 50K reward - very on-brand. He wants privacy so I don't know even if there will be a GoFundMe but I think they should do the right thing and give the guy his 50 grand at the very least.
Now compare these two divergent "endings": would you rather be gone from this cold and cruel Earth, finally free, or denied reward money for failing to call the correct phone number, still homeless and (probably) hungry? Obviously I am not saying to off a bunch of people prior, but still.
My response is there were many people (primarily engineering students and professors) who might have seen the shooter during the previous weeks - but it is only the former student who given his background of being homeless and being extra vigilante as a homeless person noticed the shooter as suspicious and even followed him to his car that led to the tip.
Many in tech will quote Steve Jobs "you can't connect the dots forward, only backwards" speech, but this guy whom I don't know, I like to believe he lived it. Flip your question on your head, would you be willing be homeless for 10 years and in the process help catch a school shooter?
that's why there will be a day of judgement that God has set
Everyone truly evil believes that they are the good one and God wouldn’t punish them.
My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.
I graduated from an Ivy and, after graduation, I was (and continue to be, to this day) dirt poor.
I have some doubts about this, or at least what your definition of dirt poor is.
The ability required to get into an ivy is so significant I don’t see how someone could fail to make substantial sums if they wanted to.
I grew up in NYC and was lucky enough (or smart enough, I suppose) to get into one of the top public high schools in the city. Because of that (and doing well enough in that school), I was able to squeak into Cornell via its wait list.
But I don’t come from connections: my mother was a receptionist and my father was a sanitation worker. For a while after college, I managed to find work doing backend development for various local businesses, but nothing fancy. But even that has dried up due to various reasons (including a major health issue I developed after graduating).
For some reason, it seems people in authority positions are irked by me due to my humble beginnings & my insistence on continual learning, even after graduating from school. If I had a penny (or I guess now, nickel?) for every time an interviewer asked me, “How did you learn that when you majored in Industrial Engineering,” I’d be a very rich man.
Or at least able to afford all the books I want to read. :(
This generalization is very, very wrong. I can tell you, from my personal college network, many students had monetary constraints coming in, and many certainly had monetary constraints coming out. Some of that was choice of career path; some was not.
I don’t understand how someone coming out of Brown or Yale would have constraints coming out. Their degree is basically free, basically any degree can get them an analyst gig on Wall Street if they so choose, and at worst they can go down the law school path.
You don’t become one of the wealthy just by going to school with them. You’re still an outsider, lesser, just one of the little people, not their sort.
As someone too inferior to get into one it sure doesn’t seem that way
Statistically, you're correct. That said, the thing about statistics is that outliers exist.
Also, imo the "Ivy" advantage is moreso a "family background" advantage - traditionally high social prestige and high entry barrier vocations were gatekept by Ivy and Ivy-adjacent membership.
The rise of competitive salary and low barrier of entry vocations like Software and Accounting helped dampen the value of that "Ivy" premium.
I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia (though exit opportunities for the academic track are pretty lucrative too)
> I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia
What "public school" did you attend?
I can assure you that if you did some form of STEM at a top/mid UC, UIUC, UWash, GT, UT Austin, UMich, UNC Chapel Hill, and other similar caliber public schools in 17-18 you would have had the exact same opportunities and earning potential as a Yalie or Harvard grad. Most CS/ECE departments offer salary data for you to look at, and at least for my HS peers who attended Cal and UCLA their outcomes were the exact same if not better than my HS classmates at Yale.
I understand layoffs can be traumatic, but I've noticed a persistent negative streak in your comments here on HN and this mindset isn't going to help you.
The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC
The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook. That’s 3 people.
> The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC
So is UIUC, but UIUC CS/ECE placements are the same as Yale if not better.
> The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook
Most CS Yalies aren't getting hired at SpaceX, Broadcom, and FAANG. Heck, circa 10 years ago, CS@Yale was dependent on MIT, Harvard, and UConn's CS departments for classes and on-campus recruiting for CS roles.
---------
As such, my question is
1. Are you located in the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC? - if not, you need to find a way to end up working there even if you have to take a hellish commute.
2. How long has your career gap been? - if it's been more than 6 months you need to find a way to spin unemployment and the bad job market into an opportunity (eg. Worked on my own bootstrapped startup, active contributor to OSS projects, attended grad school - highly recommend GT's OMSCS because it's cheap and lets you transfer to on-campus if you so wish)
3. How do you present your career? - Resume and LinkedIn writing/designing is an art
4. Are you picky about salary? - any white collar job is a good job in a bad white collar job market. A bad white collar job is better than being structurally unemployed
For the record, I was never laid off from Amazon despite what my username says. I've always been employed, I just switched jobs. I work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi. We'll see how long that lasts given Google's stock trajectory.
-----
The UIUC comparison feels a bit misleading given that CS at UIUC has a <10% or lower accept rate, no different than getting into Yale or Duke or whatever generally.
If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29. The "average" ones work at Google and Facebook. If you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni, after Yale and Yale SOM. That is _not_ the case at my undergrad.
I know they aren't working at IBM or Amazon or GE or GM or other lower tier companies.
> work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi
You're making on par if not higher than most Ivy League grads.
> you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni
Look at their profiles. The overwhelming majority did the terminal Yale MSCS [0]. Back when Yale CS was in a tailspin a decade ago [1], they were admitting almost anyone with a pulse in the terminal MSCS to help rebuild the alumni network. Penn did something similar with Wharton SF 20 years ago when they missed the biotech train.
> If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29
Not really. They end up doing the same jobs as you. Yale has a similar amount of grads at Amazon.
Also, based on the hiring practices of portfolio companies and my friend's startups - the plum jobs end up going to CS/ECE/EECS alumni from Stanford/MIT/Cal/UCLA/UW/UIUC/UT Austin/CMU or regionally well connected programs like SJSU, CalPoly SLO, and mid-tier UCs.
It's the same way if you did decent in accounting or finance at StevensTech or Baruch, you can end up in high finance in a couple years.
> Broadcom
I am intimately aware of their hiring practices. I can safely tell you that Broadcom is not hiring new grads from Ivies (or the US at all). Broadcom is following a strict "fire-and-move-to-India" strategy and paying $90k-140k TCs in Hyderabad, or bringing talent on L1/2s.
[0] - https://engineering.yale.edu/academic-study/departments/comp...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-jo...
People have such an odd belief that the Ivy League is all trust-fund babies, even though for years and years, these schools have shown that they recruit disadvantaged people and make it affordable for them to attend.
What about what I said made you think I said everyone there had a trust fund? I have a problem with homeless to Harvard as much as I have a problem with billionaires kids at Yale. Do you not understand this? How can I be more clear?
This is definitely incorrect. If you graduate with a low-value degree from an Ivy League, you're still going to be just as unemployable as somebody that graduated from Party U with a low value degree. The only real difference is that at top schools there are less people that are completely directionless in life (since you're less likely to get admitted in such a case) so if somebody is graduating with e.g. a philosophy degree, then they're probably doing it explicitly with the intent of going to e.g. law school or on an academic path, whereas many people at lower ranked universities end up there largely through inertia and may pursue degrees of minimal value with no real thoughts beyond taking the easiest path to achieving a college degree, which is the direction they were pushed onto without ever really thinking about it.
And even for valuable degrees, the advantage yielded is far less than you might think. It's not like the movies where you have dozens of companies begging you to come work with 6 figure starting salaries and fat bonuses up front. You open a few more doors, and people have a better than average initial impression of you, but at the end of the day - it's not a world-shifting advantage. The overall edge in outcomes is not because of the university, but because of the sort of people that the university admits. The sort of guy who graduates class president, valedictorian, wrestled at state, and with a near perfect score on his SAT is going to do disproportionately well in life completely regardless of whether he ends up at MIT, Party U, or just skips university altogether.
There are plenty of directionless people in Ivy League who aren't emotionally invested in the paths their parents sent them, they just go into Finance or Consulting. And in those places, pedigree does matter alot, the actual skills are not as important as the cultural compatability.
BCG consultants and traders at Five Rings are very much not financially constrained after undergrad (about $100-200k difference between them but either way)
Once again this is just playing into silly stereotypes. The sort of positions you're describing, at least in cases where it's remotely desirable, are stupidly competitive - substantially moreso than e.g. FAANG positions. And these positions, particularly in finance are absolutely brutal, and completely unfit for the overwhelming majority of people. It's not like you flash a degree and you're off to a life of luxury.
I don’t think you need to flash a degree you simply need to get in to get a life of luxury. It’s not like I can go to the Yale club in NYC.
No, you need to be (1) absolutely top tier talent and generally be willing to (2) live your job. Finance is not cushy. It's cut-throat, ridiculously competitive, extremely intensive, and very results oriented (to a fault - see: Taleb). Obviously having a nice school and a good network will obviously give you a better than average chance at getting your foot in the door, but nothing beyond that.
The main reason you see a disproportionate number of people with nice sounding names on their resume in high positions is because to get that nice sounding name on your resume, you already needed to be an elite academic outlier before joining them.
Like imagine I started a basketball school - and was able to get a disproportionate share of people 6'6" or taller to enroll. I'm going to be pumping out a disproportionate share of NBA professionals, regardless of what my school does. Not because of my school, not because of some special hook-up with the NBA, but because of my ability to grab a disproportionate share of 6'6" types who, in turn, make up a disproportionate share of world class basketball players.
> Not because of my school, not because of some special hook-up with the NBA, but because of my ability to grab a disproportionate share of 6'6" types who, in turn, make up a disproportionate share of world class basketball players.
But you need to be clear about what that actually means in the context of finance or consulting. Because if it's building relationships and bringing in clients, your major has very little to do with it than a function of your social class as the accumulation of the enviroment you're brought up in. There are millions in China or India who could probably do the grunt work in IB, but it's highly doubtful their cultural differences, especially if they come from working middle/working class will impress clients in the same way as someone with a marginally worse working ethic but speaking the same language and a charismatic personality that can pull in others. That's talent in it's own way, but unrelated to academic achivements.
You're going to need to define what you mean by class. It's an exceptional amorphous term and I don't see your perspective here. You will find people from countless "class" backgrounds at top schools, and even in industry there's a wealth of actual diversity on this front. For instance Tim Cook, the progeny of a shipyard worker, graduated from the prestigious Robertsdale High School [1] whose Wiki leaves me with few nuggets of knowledge about the school other than "During a school football pep rally for the Robertsdale Golden Bears to go against the Spanish Fort Toros, students were seen holding Trump flags and a sign that read 'Put the panic back in Hispanic.'" Even at places like Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein [2] is the former CEO and still the senior chairman at Goldman. He grew up in the projects in NYC. Daddy was a postal worker, mommy a receptionist.
The only common denominator you find in these individuals is being the academic equivalent of our school of 6'6" types.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Blankfein
There are still a lot of jobs that (for maybe debatable reasons) require a college degree. Major is far less important. So if you have that degree, you at least have a larger job pool to work in. Of course, having a degree can overqualify you for some jobs, so it's not a purely better situation in all cases.
And (so I'm told) at least half the value of an Ivy degree is the people you meet while you are there. I guess that assumes you do some network-building, which maybe not everyone does.
Your first point is true, but an entirely different topic than ivy vs no-name schools. And yeah the networking benefits of top schools is absolutely their single biggest strength. See Microsoft or Apple for obvious examples. Highly capable people making a few highly capable friends, dropping out, and profiting.
This is something people just do not understand and is absolutely critical for reforming education. Elite schools do not create elite students, they enroll them. Around the pandemic numerous top schools chose to do away with standardized tests as a requirement for DEI type reasons. They're rapidly bringing them back - I know at least MIT/Dartmouth/Yale already have. And the reason is simple, which I'll quote Yale on:
"Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT." [1]
[1] - https://admissions.yale.edu/test-flexible
Your assumption is ignorant.
Most Ivy League schools have free tuition if your parents household income is below $200-$100k and full ride room and board if below $100-60k.
Rich kids can get cut off from their parents.
I want to improve my communication skills so I’d love pointers on this.
Where exactly did I imply that it was the cost of the degree that is the constraint? Everyone knows poor kids and even middle class kids don’t pay anything to go to elite schools. I simply don’t think that means they face financial constraints exiting undergrad (or during undergrad). Why would they when HRT is paying $500k for new grads?
There’s this weird belief that I should feel sorry for people that didn’t come from means but got into Yale or Brown or Stanford. Sorry, they’re just as alien and inrelatable to me as Jeff Bezos’ kids. These people are in an entirely different plane of existence and ability so I have a lot of trouble thinking they wouldn’t have unlimited opportunities exiting university that I can’t even dream of.
Rich kids do get cut off from their parents but that's usually when they get off the rails, e.g start doing drugs or drinking heavily, drop out of school. When attending university most of them get some form of support from their rich families.