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TL;DR: wealth helps a lot, but not in the "parents paid the diploma" direct way. More because good social status helps putting people in the right track. Hard w

TL;DR: wealth helps a lot, but not in the "parents paid the diploma" direct way. More because good social status helps putting people in the right track. Hard work is still required IMHO (at least for the engineering track, I do not know about the business schools variant). Wealth definitely helps in the sense it gives you a better environment to support you during your studies. About it helping you being tutored by fancy private organisms, this is true but I think it applies more to the "lower" part of the Grandes Écoles & co pyramid. You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent. About the set of high schools/classes préparatoires funneling a large part of candidates to top schools, that is definitely true. But again it requires a lot of work, you are not going to move through Henri IV or whatever to ENS only because your parents have money. But receiving a good education from birth and having family and friends who knows how the system work, because they moved through it themselves, helps a lot. But wealth helps because these places are usually in large cities (and mostly in Paris), which are expensive to live in. And to get there you have to come from good/prestigious high schools and have good grades, which again living in a wealthy family helps a lot.

hikingsimulator 5y ago
Wealth has a compounding effect.If your parents have the means to provide you tutoring lessons and a private education at top institutions from an early age, this has a stronger influence that mere talent. Talent is just not a good term to use here, it obfuscates that actual talent is rare compared to the much more common state of being "well taught and prepared," which is very much correlated to wealth and geography. Who gets to go to Top Schools in France? An majority of sons and daughters of Parisians. And I wouldn't imply top talents mostly occur in Paris. Entry into Grandes Ecoles is usually a function of three things: knowledge, preparedness, and, indeed, talent. But that last variable has a much lesser effect that what people tend to assume.
908B64B197 5y ago
> You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent. What's interesting is what they put the emphasis on. Polytechnique is probably the most theoretical math heavy engineering program I've ever seen. It's probably better exemplified by an anecdote from someone who did a double diploma from Polytechnique Paris and Montreal. He got flak in Paris for solving a problem using a numerical approximation, because there was a way to get to an exact answer. And in Montreal he was asked by a professor if he could "borrow his micrometer CNC machine" since he gave an answer that was way too precise for the material whatever he was working on was going to be made of.

hikingsimulator 5y ago

Wealth has a compounding effect.If your parents have the means to provide you tutoring lessons and a private education at top institutions from an early age, this has a stronger influence that mere talent. Talent is just not a good term to use here, it obfuscates that actual talent is rare compared to the much more common state of being "well taught and prepared," which is very much correlated to wealth and geography. Who gets to go to Top Schools in France? An majority of sons and daughters of Parisians. And I wouldn't imply top talents mostly occur in Paris. Entry into Grandes Ecoles is usually a function of three things: knowledge, preparedness, and, indeed, talent. But that last variable has a much lesser effect that what people tend to assume.

908B64B197 5y ago

> You are not going to enter Polytechnique or ENS solely because of that. It still requires a lot of work or talent. What's interesting is what they put the emphasis on. Polytechnique is probably the most theoretical math heavy engineering program I've ever seen. It's probably better exemplified by an anecdote from someone who did a double diploma from Polytechnique Paris and Montreal. He got flak in Paris for solving a problem using a numerical approximation, because there was a way to get to an exact answer. And in Montreal he was asked by a professor if he could "borrow his micrometer CNC machine" since he gave an answer that was way too precise for the material whatever he was working on was going to be made of.