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Margin of error: go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires while mak

by seiji 11y ago

Margin of error: go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires while making 1/5000th to 1/150000th as much as they do, yet you're doing all the work that makes them richer.

TelmoMenezes 11y ago
> go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years In my scenario I was implicitly alluding to the real planet Earth.
- seiji 11y ago
  We're talking hopes and dreams and aspirations and delusions here. How many billionaires has Stanford generated versus the entire state of Ohio in the past 20 years?
forgetsusername 11y ago
>become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires If the only thing that matters in life is how much money you make, this might be relevant. Otherwise, working for those billionaires as a college grad isn't that bad.
- seiji 11y ago
  Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Nothing wrong with having no ambition, but step to the right so better people can pass you by.
  - peoplelovelines 11y ago
    Gross. What a shallow and pathetic way of viewing the world and the people around you.
cthalupa 11y ago
Stanford has 27 billionaire alumni. At any given time, there are ~15,000 students studying at Stanford. Getting the top 10 schools for creating billionaires, it accounts for 206 total. (Though this number also includes Cambridge, and I'm not sure if the 11 billionaire alumni from there are part of the same 500ish US billionaires) Out of the 500ish billionaires in the US, nearly 100 of them have no degree at all. So, these top schools produce about double the amount of billionaires that zero degrees do, and roughly the same number as the rest of the schools combined. This is such a relatively small sample size and there are so many factors in play here that it would be silly to draw any sort of strong conclusion from this, but even going with shoddy science on this and playing fast and loose, we can see that while, yes, you do gain an advantage in the 'become a billionaire' game, it's still a ridiculously insignificant chance, and the population of billionaires without a degree or with a degree from a school not known for producing billionaires is still higher. All of this to say: There ain't no easy path to billionairehood besides being born one, and getting in to Stanford or any other school does not increase your chances of becoming one to a statistically significant number.
- seiji 11y ago
  nearly 100 of them have no degree at all. Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted. You can ask the same of NYC. How many supreme court justices are from NYC versus Idaho? Location matters. Location changes you. Peers change you. relatively small sample size Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    >Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted. Really? There's obviously a few well known cases of this, but I doubt you're looking at any hard data when you make this claim. >Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople. Sure you can. When you're comparing 500 billionaires, they're no longer the outliers in the data set. They're the norm for the data set.

by seiji 11y ago

TelmoMenezes 11y ago

> go to Stanford, make the right connections, become a billionaire in 8 years In my scenario I was implicitly alluding to the real planet Earth.

seiji 11y ago
We're talking hopes and dreams and aspirations and delusions here. How many billionaires has Stanford generated versus the entire state of Ohio in the past 20 years?

forgetsusername 11y ago

>become a billionaire in 8 years versus go to a state school and work for the billionaires If the only thing that matters in life is how much money you make, this might be relevant. Otherwise, working for those billionaires as a college grad isn't that bad.

seiji 11y ago
Lead, follow, or get out of the way. Nothing wrong with having no ambition, but step to the right so better people can pass you by.
- peoplelovelines 11y ago
  Gross. What a shallow and pathetic way of viewing the world and the people around you.

cthalupa 11y ago

Stanford has 27 billionaire alumni. At any given time, there are ~15,000 students studying at Stanford. Getting the top 10 schools for creating billionaires, it accounts for 206 total. (Though this number also includes Cambridge, and I'm not sure if the 11 billionaire alumni from there are part of the same 500ish US billionaires) Out of the 500ish billionaires in the US, nearly 100 of them have no degree at all. So, these top schools produce about double the amount of billionaires that zero degrees do, and roughly the same number as the rest of the schools combined. This is such a relatively small sample size and there are so many factors in play here that it would be silly to draw any sort of strong conclusion from this, but even going with shoddy science on this and playing fast and loose, we can see that while, yes, you do gain an advantage in the 'become a billionaire' game, it's still a ridiculously insignificant chance, and the population of billionaires without a degree or with a degree from a school not known for producing billionaires is still higher. All of this to say: There ain't no easy path to billionairehood besides being born one, and getting in to Stanford or any other school does not increase your chances of becoming one to a statistically significant number.

seiji 11y ago
nearly 100 of them have no degree at all. Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted. You can ask the same of NYC. How many supreme court justices are from NYC versus Idaho? Location matters. Location changes you. Peers change you. relatively small sample size Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople.
- cthalupa 11y ago
  >Because many of them dropped/stopped out of Stanford after being accepted. Really? There's obviously a few well known cases of this, but I doubt you're looking at any hard data when you make this claim. >Outliers can't be analyzed using aggregate methods. Powerlawpeople. Sure you can. When you're comparing 500 billionaires, they're no longer the outliers in the data set. They're the norm for the data set.