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> Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. The Valley is so disconnected from the "real" America. I hate using that term, but to anyone that's lived in more r

• toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  I don’t think anyone really disagrees that the core problem is socioeconomic, it’s just that there seems to be a connection between only getting basic civil rights within living memory, and economic segregation. It’s hard to blame people who want to draw the connection between them. It’s bad enough that redlining maps from years ago still mostly describes current situations. It’s bad enough that zip code is a useful indicator of race for an insurance company.
  • gammateam 8y ago
    Are you implying that US ethnic groups that were prohibited from participating in the capital markets, the civil court systems, insurance coverage, housing markets, mortgage lending markets and higher education and the specialized workforce until the late 1960s before then being allowed to start from $0 have a difficult time being uncorrelated from lower socioeconomic classes?
• 40acres 8y ago
  Economic stratification is not simply a natural phenomenon. Especially at the current global levels of inequality. Policies and institutions had to be built to create and sustain this level of inequality. I'm not surprised that California in your opinion has done a better job of providing opportunities for it's high schoolers to get a better education compared to Georgia. For all of California's flaws I think if you look at the data you can see that it's clear that they invest more in providing equal opportunity for their residents than Georgia does.
  • dvt 8y ago
    > For all of California's flaws I think if you look at the data you can see that it's clear that they invest more in providing equal opportunity for their residents than Georgia does. I'm not sure I'd blame the state. It's pretty obvious that admissions committees don't take socioeconomic factors in mind. Some states are always going to be wealthier than others -- that's just a fact of life -- but why are universities punishing (poor) students by culling opportunity? After all, a poor black kid has more in common with a poor white kid than a black one-per-center.
    • pm90 8y ago
      The parent is praising California not because of their superior admissions policies, but due to the sheer number of Universities and opportunities available to students in California because of the State investing in education/Universities.
      • rhizome 8y ago
        I would assume a lot of that is due to California's initiative process allowing its residents to put more school bonds on ballots, both locally and statewide. Georgia's initiative process only allows amendments and repeals for existing laws, and only for cities and counties.
  • skybrian 8y ago
    It wouldn't look the same, but I suspect economic stratification would still happen even without the institutions that reinforce it, because small advantages compound and power laws are a thing. I'm reminded of how scientists have elaborate protocols for eliminating bias in experiments, because just wanting to do it right isn't enough. Fairness (however you define it) doesn't happen by default.
• sulam 8y ago
  I'm from the bottom of the barrel, socio-economically speaking. But I'm white and male, and I can point to multiple moments in my life where people gave me the benefit of the doubt and I honestly do not believe they would have done so if I didn't pattern match for them to "nerdy white boy, probably really smart." Of course I had to take advantage of those opportunities, but I'm fairly sure they wouldn't have even been on offer to people who didn't have my racial/gender advantages.
  • nilkn 8y ago
    How much of this is just selection bias? I’m a white male who probably pattern matches the same way. A few months ago I was traveling and as a completely innocent mistake forgot to pay rent by a day. I was not given the benefit of the doubt at all — I was blocked from online payments and was given three days to vacate before a formal eviction suit would be filed against me, as if I were a criminal who couldn’t have just had a momentary lapse. The notice was unconditional, meaning the landlord could choose to continue eviction proceedings even if I paid — the most extreme option available to them, usually reserved for someone they want out no matter what. In this case, I went in the next morning with a cashier’s check and they dropped it. But moments like this have led me to wonder if the common narrative of privilege actually applies to me in practice as much as is assumed.
    • sulam 8y ago
      I am a sample of one. And I've had a few bad experiences too, sometimes involving things like late payment (in my case because I was genuinely unable to pay). I've noticed a bit of a pattern: your landlord could be sued for discrimination if someone could show a pattern of enforcing the rules on protected individuals and not on others. If a paper trail is being created, it's not surprising to find that rules are rules. But as an example, I was homeless at one point and should have been arrested for shop-lifting (food) and the cop gave me a break. If I'd been black in that part of the city, I guarantee I would have been in jail. In other cases, I've had multiple examples of people listening to me and not listening to more-qualified women in the same meeting, often if I simply repeat what they said 30s later.
• neeleshs 8y ago
  Err.. gatech college of computing is a top 10 institute, afaik.
  • dvt 8y ago
    GA Tech is ranked 35th nationally for undergraduate institutions[1]. Compare that with Stanford (#7), CalTech (#12), UCLA (#19), or Berkeley (#22). [1] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/georgia-institute-of-technology-1569 https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/georgia-institute-of-te...
    • jaredsohn 8y ago
      It looks like it is a top 10 public university, right after ucsb and uc-irvine on https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/top-public https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive.... 35th overall
      • neeleshs 8y ago
        Right, I was looking at engineering only - https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/georgia-institute-of-technology-1569/overall-rankings https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/georgia-institute-of-te... . Top 10 in many undergrad engineering programs. 4th overall in undergrad engineering. But yes, being an engineer, everything is about engineering for me. :)
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • burfog 8y ago
      That ranking is terrible. It was biased from the start, and has since been severely gamed by schools. I'd put the order more like: CalTech (best), GA Tech, Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley.
• acjohnson55 8y ago
  That situation exists on the coasts too, where most of our cities are. The thing about race and gender is that you see the phenomenon play out in wealthy communities too.
  • Avshalom 8y ago
    (Georgia is a coastal state)
• sct202 8y ago
  Some of that may be just from people preferring to go to a school that isn't that far from home, or to attend the school of their favorite college football team. UGA and GA Tech are solidly ranked schools and a lot of graduates from there have very good outcomes.
  • Xcelerate 8y ago
    > Some of that may be just from people preferring to go to a school that isn't that far from home I would argue this is the reason for most people. My cousin and my wife's sister were both accepted to Harvard for undergrad, but they turned it down because they thought it was too far away. Personally, I don't understand this at all (I would happily move wherever for a good opportunity), but it wouldn't surprise me if most people refused a 2-3x salary increase if it required moving from a rural area to a big city a few hours away by plane.
    • wincy 8y ago
      Well there’s all sorts of issues with a big move. For example I live in the Midwest and live in a 2100 square foot house that I bought for $250,000. Average developer salary around here is 80-100k or so, but even if I got an offer for $300k from Google I doubt me and my stay at home wife with our two kids could move there and replicate our lives at all. Quick Zillow search says it’d be 10x as much for a house the size of where I am now, for 3x the salary? No thanks.
• ip26 8y ago
  Is that not a difference in Opportunity? Californians are spoiled for choice, with 250-some in-state four year colleges to choose from. Georgia has 85. And, as you describe, Georgia does not have a lot of world-famous institutions. Out-of-state students pay much higher fees, so where you live can be a real influence on where you can afford to go to college. I mean, I'd call it opportunity. Maybe economic opportunity, if you want.
  • dvt 8y ago
    > Is that not a difference in Opportunity? Definitely. I'm agreeing with the article, although I believe that race and gender are red herrings. The real problem is socioeconomic in nature (fwiw, I say this as a staunch capitalist).
    • muzz 8y ago
      The data seem to indicate the opposite. An example: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/economic-mobility-study-race-black-white-women-men-incarceration-income-chetty-hendren-jones-porter https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/e...
• Francute 8y ago
  Now start thinking on people living on rural areas outside first world countries... Lot of wasted talents...
  • thatoneuser 8y ago
    I always wonder how much there actually is out there. It’s hard to say there’s such a thing as “raw potential” considering how much being successful depends on having parents who groom you for society. I grew up around a lot of kids I personally believe were very smart or driven. But when your parents don’t instill a sense of working in a certain way or creating a career path with certain abstract goals - you just aren’t going to get optimal use for your potential.
• otikik 8y ago
  Well, that's what extreme capitalism brings you. I'm not holding a hammer and a sickle here, but I'm convinced that the right to access a good education is more important than the right to sell it. Same goes for health services. My personal experience: I went to a public University in my country. My parents paid around $800 per year (I had a 50% discount, because I have 3 younger siblings). I don't know how high it's ranked. It is honestly not something people ask. Most public schools are simply good enough. We have some private schools, but a lot of students end up there because they don't want to put a lot of effort so their daddies pay them a title. And since the schools don't want to lose them they give them a pass, or dumb subjects down. So a lot of private schools are worse (in the sense that they require less effort) than public ones. To the point where some job offers started including the clause: "Any Student with the so-and-so degree, except those from this Particular Private School".
  • barry-cotter 8y ago
    Not having a hierarchy of good and bad universities is a deliberate policy decision. Before ~1968 Germany had elite universities, like Göttingen, Tübingen and Heidelberg among others, equivalent to the position of HYPS or Oxbridge, with other excellent universities in the rank below, like Columbia and Cal Tech or LSE and Imperial. After 1968 there was a deliberate effort to make that irrelevant. Now there are good departments and there are better and worse universities but the range is so small that which university you went to isn’t worth mentioning. Germany is still a research powerhouse but it’s all about different branches of the Max Planck Institute, not universities. You think the US can deliberately reduce the funding and prestige of universities like that? They don’t even have a federal education system.
    • otikik 8y ago
      I think they must change something. I think "the Magic Hand will fix it" is not working.
• xhskdh 8y ago
  Same story. I’m from a rural area in the South. Attended a terrible high school. No one in my small graduating class attended an elite university. Most attended universities ranked outside the top 100. I only know of a few graduates from my high school that attended the flagship state school ranked in the top 30-40, but they were exceptions. No one in the history of my high school attended an Ivy League school. Those in the more well-funded areas of the state send a large percentage of their graduates to Ivy League institutions on a yearly basis. The smartest people from my high school weren’t that different intelligence wise from those more well-funded high school graduates. The difference is our school offered a limited number of upper division college ready classes and had terrible teachers. I think the assumption in my high school were students would graduate and go into a trade. Not many were expected to do anything big in college.
  • muzz 8y ago
    Did those students simply not have any initiative? It's sad to see such a reliance on others. I'm also from the rural South from a high school where most of my classmates stayed within the same small town, but I took initiative and got accepted to MIT and other top universities.
    • dvt 8y ago
      This is a cute argument, but I don't think you can successfully counter "No one in the history of my high school attended an Ivy League school" where California (and Massachusetts, and Connecticut) high schools routinely send 10%+ of their graduating classes to Ivy League institutions.
      • muzz 8y ago
        Your claim is cute that high schools "send" their graduates to Ivy League schools. It denigrates their efforts. They applied, and they earned admission.
        • dvt 8y ago
          If you seriously don't think elite high schools make concerted efforts to send their students to good universities, you're naïve.
• eli_gottlieb 8y ago
  I wouldn't call Georgia realer than California, but people do seem to have some severe blinders to regional inequalities that don't map neatly onto a strictly demographic category.
  • muzz 8y ago
    OP seems to be using "real" as code for "white"
    • dvt 8y ago
      Dude, you are way off, not to mention offensive. Georgia (particularly the Metro Atlanta area where I grew up in) is so much more diverse than Santa Monica (where I live now) or the lily-white Bay Area, or my classes at UCLA, it's actually not even close.
      • muzz 8y ago
        You still haven't explained what your usage of "real" means.
        • Avshalom 8y ago
          More representative of the opportunity space (or lack of) in the USA that the majority face. Keep in mind Georgia isn't any whiter than California (the prototypical 'not really America's Boogeyman)
          • muzz 8y ago
            "Real" usually means "genuine" or "authentic", rather than "representative of the average". (I realize you are someone other than the OP) Also, America is the land of _lack_ of opportunity? I certainly hope that's not the case.
            • Avshalom 8y ago
• throwawayjava 8y ago
  Similar. I want to suggest that perhaps those students in CA really were that much better. Not in terms of raw talent, but in terms of the previous 10+ years of their life. I learned a lot in PhD school, but the most important thing I learned was that others' high school experiences really did prepare them for academic rigor and business success in ways that mine decidedly didn't.
• lngnmn1 8y ago
  Now consider how many people from other countries have believed in this high-teach fairy tale only to realize that they will never land a "data-scientist" or "ML-researcher" job even if they have no slightest difficulties with understanding and practices. I myself have completed the very first Andrew Ng's ML MOOC, given that English is not my native language and that I never went to a high school, or even studied English with a teacher (I am self-taught). What opportunities do I have, being a self-educated form a third-world - zero. And, of course, the ivy league students are not that smart. I doubt most of them could bootstrap themselves in a foreign language media, even in such simple one like English. Supply and demand is what really matters. There is oversupply of tech workers, and everything is full.
• trjordan 8y ago
  This is true, but one of the important inputs to socioeconomic asymmetry is race and gender. It's hard for your parents to escape poverty if the police profile and arrest them. Or if your mom could have been promoted faster than your dad, but wasn't because of a bad company culture.
  • yellowbuilding 8y ago
    If you’re interested in addressing this problem, you need to look at economics. The reasons are not simple, but the bottom line is race and gender focuse equality efforts _always_ fail to help the lower class. Always. Statistically, gender and race gaps in economic equality have only grown since the 1970s.
• cortesoft 8y ago
  A big part of that is the result of choices that Californians have made. We choose to be a high tax state, and we chose to invest heavily in higher education via the UC and CSU system. This has paid off, and California is reaping the benefits of a highly educated workforce. I feel bad for Georgians, but they have chosen to have lower taxes and fewer services.
  • QML 8y ago
    Don’t forget our community colleges, which are perhaps even more impactful. Even an average student can go to school and later transfer to a CSU or a UC. Beyond a standard 4 year degree, they also help with getting younger students ahead and older ones continuing their education.
    • cortesoft 8y ago
      Of course! My mom was a transfer director at a community college for many years... I saw how many people transformed their lives through community college.
  • kanox 8y ago
    It's not clear how the parent post blames this on "economic stratification" when siblings in highschool have the same economic status because of their parents. His sister just went to a different better school.
    • thatoneuser 8y ago
      He was making a broader observation of how the classes did so much different when it came down to simply where the people were at.
    • muzz 8y ago
      And his sister may also have worked harder or simply been smarter than him.
  • muzz 8y ago
    Good point, and one which is seldom mentioned. States like Georgia could learn a lot from states like California
• TomMckenny 8y ago
  >it's economic segregation we need to watch out for. Absolutely. And if wages rose faster than returns on capital, every employee would benefit. But note: race, gender, religious bigotry etc are wedges that prevents cooperation for reform among wage earners. And now there's a bit of inter generation hatred added to that wedge. And the mechanisms are immensely complicated. Sometimes it is overt[0] but most of the time it's subtle broadcast choices, feed algorithms that select the most shocking story or subconscious habits that span generations. Somehow things like "merry Christmas" vs "happy holidays" far out play any discussion of wage theft or unlawful evictions. If we could just chill, understand that minorities are not taking over the country and move on to economic issues we'd all be far better off. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#%22Southern_strategy%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#%22Southern_strate...
• maxerickson 8y ago
  barely breaks the top-50 And then of course there is the stupid attitude that going to a mere top 50 school somehow isn't an accomplishment.
• thatoneuser 8y ago
  And you know, if we framed it as economic segregation it could absolutely fix the racial/gender issues. I mean if we, say, ensured everyone had an equal starting point (more or less) at 18, we would dramatically have had to reduce down those other issues. But what’s better is we will not have left opposite <race/gender> out of our consideration. Race and gender are a problem but it seems like those two things get way too much attention given other paradigms that demonstrate a more wholistic approach to social fairness.
• alanfranzoni 8y ago
  About colleges... this was posted some days ago: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-college-the-big-business-nobody-understands https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...
• whack 8y ago
  Let's add some real numbers to this discussion. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/economic-mobility-study-race-black-white-women-men-incarceration-income-chetty-hendren-jones-porter https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17139300/e... "White children whose parents are in the top fifth of the income distribution have a 41.1 percent chance of staying there as adults... But for black children, it’s only 18 percent. Among children who grew up in the bottom fifth of the distribution, 10.6 percent of whites make it into the top fifth ... and a tiny 2.5 percent of black children" Ie, your odds of being in the upper middle class if you grew up: White and rich: 40% Black and rich: 20% White and poor: 10% Black and poor: 2.5% Clearly parental income plays a big role, but so does race. We can crunch numbers all day and argue over who has it worse. But it seems far more productive to just acknowledge that they are both pretty bad, and to focus on fixing both problems.