9 ms·

Most unicorn founders are graduates of Stanford, Harvard, and the IITs

80 points by elmar 9y ago

chronic6a5 9y ago
This article will be downvoted because it goes against many peoples mental model that, if you work hard, you can be successful. Well, statistically, Stanford/Harvard/IIT graduates are more likely to be successful. If you go to Berkely or Georgia Tech, good for you, but the Stanford et al. grads are probably better.
- corporateslave2 9y ago
  Better? It is just much easier for them to get funding. More funding -> More successes. Source: I know a ton of people who went to Stanford and who had zero trouble getting near unlimited funding. Also the purpose of this article is to appeal to the Indian reader base that is qz.com. They are writing articles to appease their demographics.
  - cylinder 9y ago
    Amazes me that a low/no capital business model (software) combined with the hacker ethos was so readily and quickly hijacked by The Money People. You don't need this much money and a true entrepreneur dies inside everytime they give away a piece of their company.
    - corporateslave2 9y ago
      I think most solutions are capital intensive. The general business model is: Build software that provides a service that loses a little bit of money on every transaction. Use VC capital to fund this. Continue the model until volume is very high or some critical velocity is reached, creating a barrier to entry. Slightly pivot the business model to profitability. Profitable monopoly created.
    - bsder 9y ago
      > You don't need this much money and a true entrepreneur dies inside everytime they give away a piece of their company. Often, you do need that much money. Elon Musk went begging among his rich friends because he was less than 30 days from not making payroll. Mere mortals would have to shut down. This is what makes unicorns.
  - helloindia 9y ago
    From what I see from QZ fb feed, they also post articles that portrays India in a negative light. Definitely their focus is their India, but assumption that they want to appease the Indian demographic may not be enitirely true.
    - corporateslave2 9y ago
      Regardless, their articles are targeted at India...
- elefanten 9y ago
  Your example is funny because 2 paragraphs in they show their data: Stanford(51), Harvard(37), UC (18), IIT (12) One could say "UC is a system, not one school" but then you have to say the same of IIT. Same issue with the headline too.
  - SCAQTony 9y ago
    Perhaps what would be more interesting is the zip codes where these unicorn founders originated rather than placing the credit entirely on which colleges and universities they got into.
- sdiq 9y ago
  Funny that while the IITs, as per the article, is said to be a collection of autonomous institutes, and that the University of California, which is an another collection of colleges, and still rated higher than the IITs, you would want to dismiss Berkeley? Any reason for your contempt?
- mindcrime 9y ago
  This article will be downvoted because it goes against many peoples mental model that, if you work hard, you can be successful. Only if your mental model includes the idea that the only definition of "success" is "being the founder of a unicorn startup".
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  What about us that don't go to top public schools?
  - mjevans 9y ago
    Not independently wealthy / well off enough and not a 1 in million over-achiever who's able to overcome that.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  No, they are more likely to be founders of Unicorn startups. That's a very narrow definition of success. It's says more about the the funnel for VC money than anything else. I went to a state school and my friends and I all have good careers that would be characterized as successful by most measures. One of the big differences between going to a "random" college and a Stanford/Harvard/IIT is that you don't have that network of connected professors and alumni guiding you into big tech companies. My school had that type of ecosystem with big banks, government and other areas.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >Well, statistically, Stanford/Harvard/IIT graduates are more likely to be successful. If you go to Berkely or Georgia Tech, good for you, but the Stanford et al. grads are probably better. A lot of the value in going to Stanford seems simply in being associated with the name Stanford. If you're the kind of person who values form over substance, go there. You'll do really well in life. I've watched student clubs there get sponsored by Intel and nVidia at the drop of a hat for absolutely nothing more than the opportunity to put their name next to the Stanford logo. The students know this, and take advantage of it too. It's a really weird dynamic. The whole thing just feels fake and gross.
tristanj 9y ago
This ordering is bunk because the author makes no attempt to normalize for student population. Larger schools have a massive advantage compared to smaller ones. Compare the University of California and MIT. University of California has 250,000 students and MIT has 11,000. After normalizing the data, MIT produces 1 unicorn per 1,200 yearly enrolled student, while UoC produces 1 unicorn per 13,900 yearly enrolled student. By this list, MIT students are 10x more likely to found a unicorn compared to UoC students but are ranked lower in this list. The authors shouldn't even be combining all ten UC schools in the first place as each runs as a separate university with their own faculty, admissions, etc. A similar argument applies to the IITs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- itsdrewmiller 9y ago
  IITs collectively have only 33k undergrads, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technolog... That would make the entire system comparable to a large state school in the US. They do have proportionally more grad students, so total student body is right around the biggest state schools - Florida, Texas, Ohio, etc. Definitely not on the same level as Stanford or Harvard, but still very impressive.
  - ssivark 9y ago
    That's after accounting for the recent increases in student intake. All but the oldest seven have started in the last decade, and the older seven have also increased their intake by 50-100% in the meanwhile. So, as of a decade ago, the IITs would have been graduating ~2000 undergrads per year, all seven institutions combined. (The counting is a little complicated, but I expect that number to be less than ~3000 nonetheless) That's the relevant number, since those who've founded unicorns can probably be assumed to have started their undergraduate education at least a decade ago. (4-5 years in college and then at least a few years working).
    - 9y ago
onetokeoverthe 9y ago
Class and wealth pretending to be worthy of merit.
- nnfy 9y ago
  It is so frustrating to see this inane sour grapes mentality. The idea that there is nothing exceptional about attendees at ivy league schools is wholly absurd and betrays a personal ignorance. The schools are extremely selective and offer lucrative scholarships to minorities (and, let's not forget, poor whites as well) such that you do not need to be wealthy or connected to get into something like MIT, but you do need to be technically brilliant. This is gradually normalizing viewpoint is toxic to society, because our obsession with rich white people is nothing but anti-intellectualism and scapegoating disguised as a seemingly justified class welfare. Does it make it easier to be wealthy? Yes. Does it give imply that no one born into wealth is capable of being meritful? Absolutely not. And bear in mind that these are the people that build society, and the kind of people I would guess frequent other intellectual bastions like hackernews, where you can experience their brilliance daily and first hand.
  - respiratory 9y ago
    I can't quite tell if this is a satirical comment. It's almost too peak HN to be taken seriously.
    - 18nleung 9y ago
      I think there's merit to both arguments - but I agree with the grandparent comment in that too often nowadays we tend to dismiss people in Ivy League colleges as simply products of a wealthy background. As a current public high school student, I can assure you that the ivies are more selective than ever and kids who are being accepted nowadays are truly exceptional.
      - 34090doood9 9y ago
        I've worked with lots of people from different backgrounds, including individuals from elite schools (hell, I guess I'm married to one), and what frustrates me isn't the wealth (although there is always that story lurking in the background among those I know--they're never wealthy themselves, but they tell stories of legacy students everywhere). What frustrates me is the assumption that because an elite school is so selective, the inherent abilities of someone admitted there are that much greater than someone who was not. In my experience, as the admission selectivity is raised, the signals being paid attention to are that much more random, for lack of a way of putting it. It's kind of like Japanese fruit. Is it good? Sure, but is it best? Does that perfectly round melon mean that it's better than, say, that wonderful rare heirloom melon you bought from a farmer at that farmer's market, that was a little blemished on one side? You have to have the stars align in just the right way to have the right application, plus a bit of luck. Does that mean that person isn't talented? Definitely not--they almost certainly are. The thing that's much more pernicious, to me, is the assumption that that person is necessarily any different from someone who, say, went to a state school and graduated with top honors. The most talented people I've worked with were not necessarily from elite private schools; the latter were talented, but not any more so than many of the other people I've met and respected. But I do think that they were often given the benefit of the doubt, or kind of revered or something, based on their degree, rather than what they had accomplished. It's as if the person from the state school had to work harder to gain the same respect, even though their actual accomplishments said otherwise.
ryandrake 9y ago
The article stops just short of implying a causal connection between what school you go to and whether you're going to "found a unicorn" but come on! Maybe, just maybe, could it be that this deserves a little deeper look? Perhaps people who have the opportunity to go to one of these top schools have that opportunity because of some other structural advantage that also provides them the opportunity to found a unicorn? Like, maybe, I dunno, existing family wealth and connections? Just a wild guess with no research into it...
- api 9y ago
  They also likely acquire a lot of amazing connections at those schools.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    Furthermore, their qualifications after graduation from these school are more respected regardless of the quality of the education described by the degree.
    - api 9y ago
      Top tier schools are almost like a noble title on the East coast. Out West it's less extreme but it still matters. I've lived in both places.
      - 34090doood9 9y ago
        Just the other day, there was a job posting on HN for a new health care startup. It pissed me off, frankly, because the ad was not framed in terms of actual accomplishments or credentials or skills, but in terms of whether or not you attended an elite school. As in it literally stated that they were looking for people from "top 10 schools" or some such thing. They made it abundantly clear they did not care about someone's actual abilities or skills, only what their pedigree was. What makes me so angry is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. This article is a natural extension of that process. I loathe recent political trends in the US, but I'm not surprised at all to see the populism that's arisen. Society is dripping with nepotism of various forms.
throw2bit 9y ago
IIT grads get funded to study using taxpayers money in India and they migrate to the US. There is no use for the country funding them with high quality education. We should stop funding IITs with tax payers money which is of no benefit to the people or the country. India's brain drain.
- dimmuborgir 9y ago
  The proportion of IIT graduates leaving India has significantly decreased over the years. Last year just 200 went abroad. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain-gain-fewer-than-200-iit-grads-went-abroad-last-year/articleshow/56578855.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain-...
  - screye 9y ago
    The article is highly misleading. Only 200 students got job offers from international companies in on campus placements. The majority that head out go for graduate education. The statistic doesn't take them into consideration. The 200 is absolutely bogus.
- pm90 9y ago
  While it is indeed a problem that most graduates of IIT leave India, the solution is most certainly not to terminate its funding. There can be other mechanisms put in place, like owing the govt. sponsored fees if the worker decides to leave the country and such.
- ryandamm 9y ago
  Unfortunately for the US, proposed revisions to immigration policy may be sending more of that brain drain back. Also, in general, more public funding for education does pay for itself in the long run, though I'm not sure how that's adjusted for net emigration. (Edit: corrected fat fingered typo.)
  - paapi__gudiya 9y ago
    So true. I got my CS degree at a top school in US, I work at a good startup and get paid very well. But I am so disillusioned with the United States, I feel like going back to India is much better than being an H1B slave.
seizethecheese 9y ago
This is almost tautological. I'd like to see this weighted by the pedigrees of teams that get funding.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
The definition in the article is that a unicorn is privately held startup with $1billion or more valuation. I understand that it might be difficult to get the data, but I can't avoid being skeptical about the value of such companies, when there's no mention of profitability...
olegkikin 9y ago
This could also be a variant of a self-fulfilling prophecy. VCs tend to fund Standford/Harvard/MIT teams more and more often, because other teams from those universities produced great results previously.
tzs 9y ago
Unicorn startups seem to tend to be things with mass public appeal, and also often tend to be losing money and fail to ever turn into a sustainable profitable business. If you broaden this to look at startups in general, then the list of top schools is a bit different. UCLA is at the top [1]. They have a lot of startups that most of the public, and probably most of HN, would never have heard of. These are companies doing things like cancer therapy or treating industrial wastewater. They come out of the biology or chemistry or civil engineering departments, not the computer science department. Caltech has a similar startup profile [2]. That link gives a big list of Caltech startups and what they do. Most of them are working in areas I don't think I've ever seen mentioned on HN. I read somewhere that when size is taken into account, Caltech is at or near the top in startup creation rate. I think MIT is similar. [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-startups-20170707-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-startups-20170707... [2] http://innovation.caltech.edu/startups/ http://innovation.caltech.edu/startups/
babesh 9y ago
1. Why are they interested in unicorns? 2. Are these just US companies? I would assume that there are a bunch of Chinese unicorns? 3. The study looked at only a few factors and correlation does not imply causation and the past is not a predictor of the future. The factors were school, gender, and previous attempts. Therefore without more measures, we seem to be doing a whole lot of speculating on cause and effect with a very, very narrow lenses. Seems like we are mostly exposing our own narrow views rather than how the world actually is.

80 points by elmar 9y ago

This article will be downvoted because it goes against many peoples mental model that, if you work hard, you can be successful. Well, statistically, Stanford/Harvard/IIT graduates are more likely to be successful. If you go to Berkely or Georgia Tech, good for you, but the Stanford et al. grads are probably better.

corporateslave2 9y ago
Better? It is just much easier for them to get funding. More funding -> More successes. Source: I know a ton of people who went to Stanford and who had zero trouble getting near unlimited funding. Also the purpose of this article is to appeal to the Indian reader base that is qz.com. They are writing articles to appease their demographics.
- cylinder 9y ago
  Amazes me that a low/no capital business model (software) combined with the hacker ethos was so readily and quickly hijacked by The Money People. You don't need this much money and a true entrepreneur dies inside everytime they give away a piece of their company.
  - corporateslave2 9y ago
    I think most solutions are capital intensive. The general business model is: Build software that provides a service that loses a little bit of money on every transaction. Use VC capital to fund this. Continue the model until volume is very high or some critical velocity is reached, creating a barrier to entry. Slightly pivot the business model to profitability. Profitable monopoly created.
  - bsder 9y ago
    > You don't need this much money and a true entrepreneur dies inside everytime they give away a piece of their company. Often, you do need that much money. Elon Musk went begging among his rich friends because he was less than 30 days from not making payroll. Mere mortals would have to shut down. This is what makes unicorns.
- helloindia 9y ago
  From what I see from QZ fb feed, they also post articles that portrays India in a negative light. Definitely their focus is their India, but assumption that they want to appease the Indian demographic may not be enitirely true.
  - corporateslave2 9y ago
    Regardless, their articles are targeted at India...
elefanten 9y ago
Your example is funny because 2 paragraphs in they show their data: Stanford(51), Harvard(37), UC (18), IIT (12) One could say "UC is a system, not one school" but then you have to say the same of IIT. Same issue with the headline too.
- SCAQTony 9y ago
  Perhaps what would be more interesting is the zip codes where these unicorn founders originated rather than placing the credit entirely on which colleges and universities they got into.
sdiq 9y ago
Funny that while the IITs, as per the article, is said to be a collection of autonomous institutes, and that the University of California, which is an another collection of colleges, and still rated higher than the IITs, you would want to dismiss Berkeley? Any reason for your contempt?
mindcrime 9y ago
This article will be downvoted because it goes against many peoples mental model that, if you work hard, you can be successful. Only if your mental model includes the idea that the only definition of "success" is "being the founder of a unicorn startup".
akhilcacharya 9y ago
What about us that don't go to top public schools?
- mjevans 9y ago
  Not independently wealthy / well off enough and not a 1 in million over-achiever who's able to overcome that.
Spooky23 9y ago
No, they are more likely to be founders of Unicorn startups. That's a very narrow definition of success. It's says more about the the funnel for VC money than anything else. I went to a state school and my friends and I all have good careers that would be characterized as successful by most measures. One of the big differences between going to a "random" college and a Stanford/Harvard/IIT is that you don't have that network of connected professors and alumni guiding you into big tech companies. My school had that type of ecosystem with big banks, government and other areas.
aphextron 9y ago
>Well, statistically, Stanford/Harvard/IIT graduates are more likely to be successful. If you go to Berkely or Georgia Tech, good for you, but the Stanford et al. grads are probably better. A lot of the value in going to Stanford seems simply in being associated with the name Stanford. If you're the kind of person who values form over substance, go there. You'll do really well in life. I've watched student clubs there get sponsored by Intel and nVidia at the drop of a hat for absolutely nothing more than the opportunity to put their name next to the Stanford logo. The students know this, and take advantage of it too. It's a really weird dynamic. The whole thing just feels fake and gross.

tristanj 9y ago

This ordering is bunk because the author makes no attempt to normalize for student population. Larger schools have a massive advantage compared to smaller ones. Compare the University of California and MIT. University of California has 250,000 students and MIT has 11,000. After normalizing the data, MIT produces 1 unicorn per 1,200 yearly enrolled student, while UoC produces 1 unicorn per 13,900 yearly enrolled student. By this list, MIT students are 10x more likely to found a unicorn compared to UoC students but are ranked lower in this list. The authors shouldn't even be combining all ten UC schools in the first place as each runs as a separate university with their own faculty, admissions, etc. A similar argument applies to the IITs.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
itsdrewmiller 9y ago
IITs collectively have only 33k undergrads, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technolog... That would make the entire system comparable to a large state school in the US. They do have proportionally more grad students, so total student body is right around the biggest state schools - Florida, Texas, Ohio, etc. Definitely not on the same level as Stanford or Harvard, but still very impressive.
- ssivark 9y ago
  That's after accounting for the recent increases in student intake. All but the oldest seven have started in the last decade, and the older seven have also increased their intake by 50-100% in the meanwhile. So, as of a decade ago, the IITs would have been graduating ~2000 undergrads per year, all seven institutions combined. (The counting is a little complicated, but I expect that number to be less than ~3000 nonetheless) That's the relevant number, since those who've founded unicorns can probably be assumed to have started their undergraduate education at least a decade ago. (4-5 years in college and then at least a few years working).
  - 9y ago

onetokeoverthe 9y ago

Class and wealth pretending to be worthy of merit.

nnfy 9y ago
It is so frustrating to see this inane sour grapes mentality. The idea that there is nothing exceptional about attendees at ivy league schools is wholly absurd and betrays a personal ignorance. The schools are extremely selective and offer lucrative scholarships to minorities (and, let's not forget, poor whites as well) such that you do not need to be wealthy or connected to get into something like MIT, but you do need to be technically brilliant. This is gradually normalizing viewpoint is toxic to society, because our obsession with rich white people is nothing but anti-intellectualism and scapegoating disguised as a seemingly justified class welfare. Does it make it easier to be wealthy? Yes. Does it give imply that no one born into wealth is capable of being meritful? Absolutely not. And bear in mind that these are the people that build society, and the kind of people I would guess frequent other intellectual bastions like hackernews, where you can experience their brilliance daily and first hand.
- respiratory 9y ago
  I can't quite tell if this is a satirical comment. It's almost too peak HN to be taken seriously.
  - 18nleung 9y ago
    I think there's merit to both arguments - but I agree with the grandparent comment in that too often nowadays we tend to dismiss people in Ivy League colleges as simply products of a wealthy background. As a current public high school student, I can assure you that the ivies are more selective than ever and kids who are being accepted nowadays are truly exceptional.
    - 34090doood9 9y ago
      I've worked with lots of people from different backgrounds, including individuals from elite schools (hell, I guess I'm married to one), and what frustrates me isn't the wealth (although there is always that story lurking in the background among those I know--they're never wealthy themselves, but they tell stories of legacy students everywhere). What frustrates me is the assumption that because an elite school is so selective, the inherent abilities of someone admitted there are that much greater than someone who was not. In my experience, as the admission selectivity is raised, the signals being paid attention to are that much more random, for lack of a way of putting it. It's kind of like Japanese fruit. Is it good? Sure, but is it best? Does that perfectly round melon mean that it's better than, say, that wonderful rare heirloom melon you bought from a farmer at that farmer's market, that was a little blemished on one side? You have to have the stars align in just the right way to have the right application, plus a bit of luck. Does that mean that person isn't talented? Definitely not--they almost certainly are. The thing that's much more pernicious, to me, is the assumption that that person is necessarily any different from someone who, say, went to a state school and graduated with top honors. The most talented people I've worked with were not necessarily from elite private schools; the latter were talented, but not any more so than many of the other people I've met and respected. But I do think that they were often given the benefit of the doubt, or kind of revered or something, based on their degree, rather than what they had accomplished. It's as if the person from the state school had to work harder to gain the same respect, even though their actual accomplishments said otherwise.

ryandrake 9y ago

The article stops just short of implying a causal connection between what school you go to and whether you're going to "found a unicorn" but come on! Maybe, just maybe, could it be that this deserves a little deeper look? Perhaps people who have the opportunity to go to one of these top schools have that opportunity because of some other structural advantage that also provides them the opportunity to found a unicorn? Like, maybe, I dunno, existing family wealth and connections? Just a wild guess with no research into it...

api 9y ago
They also likely acquire a lot of amazing connections at those schools.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Furthermore, their qualifications after graduation from these school are more respected regardless of the quality of the education described by the degree.
  - api 9y ago
    Top tier schools are almost like a noble title on the East coast. Out West it's less extreme but it still matters. I've lived in both places.
    - 34090doood9 9y ago
      Just the other day, there was a job posting on HN for a new health care startup. It pissed me off, frankly, because the ad was not framed in terms of actual accomplishments or credentials or skills, but in terms of whether or not you attended an elite school. As in it literally stated that they were looking for people from "top 10 schools" or some such thing. They made it abundantly clear they did not care about someone's actual abilities or skills, only what their pedigree was. What makes me so angry is that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. This article is a natural extension of that process. I loathe recent political trends in the US, but I'm not surprised at all to see the populism that's arisen. Society is dripping with nepotism of various forms.

throw2bit 9y ago

IIT grads get funded to study using taxpayers money in India and they migrate to the US. There is no use for the country funding them with high quality education. We should stop funding IITs with tax payers money which is of no benefit to the people or the country. India's brain drain.

dimmuborgir 9y ago
The proportion of IIT graduates leaving India has significantly decreased over the years. Last year just 200 went abroad. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain-gain-fewer-than-200-iit-grads-went-abroad-last-year/articleshow/56578855.cms http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/indias-brain-...
- screye 9y ago
  The article is highly misleading. Only 200 students got job offers from international companies in on campus placements. The majority that head out go for graduate education. The statistic doesn't take them into consideration. The 200 is absolutely bogus.
pm90 9y ago
While it is indeed a problem that most graduates of IIT leave India, the solution is most certainly not to terminate its funding. There can be other mechanisms put in place, like owing the govt. sponsored fees if the worker decides to leave the country and such.
ryandamm 9y ago
Unfortunately for the US, proposed revisions to immigration policy may be sending more of that brain drain back. Also, in general, more public funding for education does pay for itself in the long run, though I'm not sure how that's adjusted for net emigration. (Edit: corrected fat fingered typo.)
- paapi__gudiya 9y ago
  So true. I got my CS degree at a top school in US, I work at a good startup and get paid very well. But I am so disillusioned with the United States, I feel like going back to India is much better than being an H1B slave.

seizethecheese 9y ago

This is almost tautological. I'd like to see this weighted by the pedigrees of teams that get funding.

patrickg_zill 9y ago

The definition in the article is that a unicorn is privately held startup with $1billion or more valuation. I understand that it might be difficult to get the data, but I can't avoid being skeptical about the value of such companies, when there's no mention of profitability...

olegkikin 9y ago

This could also be a variant of a self-fulfilling prophecy. VCs tend to fund Standford/Harvard/MIT teams more and more often, because other teams from those universities produced great results previously.

tzs 9y ago

Unicorn startups seem to tend to be things with mass public appeal, and also often tend to be losing money and fail to ever turn into a sustainable profitable business. If you broaden this to look at startups in general, then the list of top schools is a bit different. UCLA is at the top [1]. They have a lot of startups that most of the public, and probably most of HN, would never have heard of. These are companies doing things like cancer therapy or treating industrial wastewater. They come out of the biology or chemistry or civil engineering departments, not the computer science department. Caltech has a similar startup profile [2]. That link gives a big list of Caltech startups and what they do. Most of them are working in areas I don't think I've ever seen mentioned on HN. I read somewhere that when size is taken into account, Caltech is at or near the top in startup creation rate. I think MIT is similar. [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-startups-20170707-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-startups-20170707... [2] http://innovation.caltech.edu/startups/ http://innovation.caltech.edu/startups/

babesh 9y ago

1. Why are they interested in unicorns? 2. Are these just US companies? I would assume that there are a bunch of Chinese unicorns? 3. The study looked at only a few factors and correlation does not imply causation and the past is not a predictor of the future. The factors were school, gender, and previous attempts. Therefore without more measures, we seem to be doing a whole lot of speculating on cause and effect with a very, very narrow lenses. Seems like we are mostly exposing our own narrow views rather than how the world actually is.