I've never said this of a fellow startup, but I hope in earnest that they fail, not out of contempt, but because I don't want ever to have to sit in a seat like that.
Note: "below economy" class is a terrible idea for us, because it means that those seats will cost current coach prices, and what we call coach will become business class. (This has happened before; business now is what coach was in 1990.)
In fact, they offer incredibly good financial aid packages to people not even remotely poor (families earning over 100k still get discounts). Thus, very few end up paying the sticker price.
I wouldn't say it's "incredibly good financial aid", especially in light of the nightmarishly high tuitions universities now charge and the fact that an inordinately high percentage of people have to take on nondischargeable debt. It's price discrimination. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; it's arguably for the better that colleges do this, because if they didn't, poor students would have no hope of attending, but price discrimination is still what's happening.
Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.
What I'm getting out of this is that you prefer the term "price discrimination" to "financial aid." The specific choice of words doesn't really matter to me if they're describing the same phenomenon.
> Also, only a token number of low-income students are admitted to the top schools, due to "extracurricular" admissions criteria that are socioeconomic by design. This is why these universities can fearlessly offer need-blind admissions; poor kids rarely pass the extracurricular hurdles.
Since we're talking about top schools, let's focus on Yale. Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid. Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.
Enough people with some degree of need are passing the "extracurricular hurdles" that 55% of Yalies receive financial aid.
The vast, vast, vast majority of people in that 55% are not even remotely poor. Most are of upper-middle income and of even higher socioeconomic status (e.g. progeny of diplomats, famous art gallery owners, and esteemed professors who make a merely upper-middle income but are higher in social status).
Yale spends nearly $100 million annually on financial aid. And this is up from roughly $32 million in 2001. This is not just a "token" expenditure, nor is it a token growth in spending.
It "spends" that money by giving aid packages that can only be redeemed by purchasing their extremely expensive product. Don't get me wrong; I think it's better for universities to price discriminate in this case than for them not to do so. However, it's not accurate to claim that they're bending over backward to provide equal access to the poor, as they're demonstrably not doing this.
Looking at this specific example, Yale is free if you earn less than $60,000, and admissions is need blind. What more do you exactly want them to do?
The real systemic problem is in our primary and secondary education systems. Equality of opportunity does not exist at those levels, and this hurts people thereafter. I see no reason why elite universities should be the vehicle by which we purport to "correct" this glaring defect in our educational system. The problem is much too large for that.
I can tell you from experience: people making upper-middle income don't get much aid from the ivies. If you're poor, it's free, and if you're rich, who cares, but if your family's income is in the low six figures, you're looking at big loans.
I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.
Why does the fact that most Americans qualify for some aid make the Yale's 55%-on-financial-aid stat a red herring?
(I suspect that, in what I write below below, I must not be responding to your actual point, but can you clarify what your point is?)
It's not like Yale is giving lip service to aid - it's giving $92,000,000 annually. This means that, on average, each Yale student gets $17,700 per year.
But since we know that 55% receive financial aid, it means that among those who do receive aid, the average package is $31,000 per year.
55% of Yale students get almost their entire tuition paid for by the university. This is not counting outside scholarships, etc. This isn't just "some" aid - this is a huge amount of aid on an annual per-individual basis.
The stat that is traditionally used to show socioeconomic diversity (or lack thereof) is the % of students receiving Pell Grants, and in this department Yale remains weak, but it's not for lack of effort...
While median / average family income at Yale remains fairly high, financial aid is huge. I'm someone who gets crushed in the fuzzy middle range, but I still appreciate its generous policies. Wish that they were more generous, or that the cost of living in the greater Boston area was lower so that my family income was lower and aid was correspondingly higher. That's one big bummer - something reasonable in one part of the country might make you rich in Oklahoma, but that can't be, or isn't, taken into account.
"Diminishing returns" also means next to nothing. Technically speaking, it means that the second derivative of output with respect to input is negative, when we care about the first. For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day.
What actually matters is not whether returns diminish, because this tends to happen right away if inputs are allocated to the most efficient projects, but the point where the marginal value gained is less than the cost of the input.
"For example, you exhibit "diminishing returns" for each calorie you eat-- the first 500 is far more important than the second 500-- but this doesn't mean you eat only 500 calories per day."
No, but it does mean there exists a point where you should stop eating more calories.
These are completely different markets. The majority of car consumers just want reliable transportation; the car is essentially a commodity. If Japanese cars are of higher quality, people will buy them instead of American cars.
With university degrees, quality of education is second and prestige is first in importance. These are correlated but not always the same, and this is one of the reasons why academia is not vulnerable to upstarts, unless there's a radical shift in how to evaluate prestige (and I doubt there will be).
Both are vocational necessities for most professionals in the U.S., but the "prestige" of the car one takes to work is irrelevant whereas that of the degree is essential.
In the UK, the prestige of the car one drives is at least as relevant as the degree one has. Really, and I don't see how the US is any different. A few years back (when I lived at home) my Dad's company prevented him getting a Renault Espace as a company car. He wanted it for reliable transportation and to get children and stuff around. But he wasn't allowed one, because it wasn't professional enough. So we got an enormously long Volvo instead, which was great because the rearmost seats faced backwards -- anyway, I digress.
The point is, social signalling is very important in both cars and degrees, and if I had to rank them, I'd say car prestige could even matter more than car quality, whereas education is the other way around.
This can change quickly. American cars in the 60'ies were not commodities, design was much more important back then.
There is nothing intrinsic in education which makes the university's prestige the most important. Look outside USA, e.g. at northern Europe where the prestige of the university is not important, but the grades and (esp.) the person are.
For some professions the university and grades is all that's considered when employing someone. But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.
> But for others (e.g. programming) you need to test the person yourself because the university and grades doesn't tell you (reliably) how good the candidate is.
In many small programming shops I know of, whether or not you even have a degree is irrelevant for pretty much this exact reason. A healthy GitHub portfolio & a blog with some reasonably insightful articles > any CS degree you can name (including MIT).
If a 16-year-old asked you, sincerely, what the best past forward for a programmer was for them, would you unhesitatingly recommend uni? I have my doubts.
I have felt for some time that the best education in CS is a macbook pro and a 2 year backpacking holiday and this conviction is only growing over time.
It's a virtual certainty that upstarts wont have the same prestige.
The situation is even worse if Upstart Tech is non-accredited. Unfortunately, it will be very difficult for Upstart Tech to become accredited if it doesn't behave exactly like Dinosaur Tech - most of the requirements consist of measuring inputs (e.g., contact hours, student services), not outputs (student knowledge).
There's a difference between expecting the service you paid for and being a demanding prick. Expecting that a financial advisor somehow get your child into a prestigious preschool is the latter.
We have, at the top of society in a milieu most of us will never see, some really rotten people with a lot of power and influence. This realization explains a lot.
This could have just as easily been written by a Gen Xer or a Late Boomer. The problem is that people who are 25 now are comparing their economic fortune not to those of people born 10 years earlier, but to those of people born 30 to 50 years earlier, who entered the working world in the Mad Men era.
If you were late Silent or early Boomer (b. 1930 to 1950) you faced an extraordinarily easy career game. Even in advertising, the era's analogue of banking, people left work at 6:00. Unlike those who are young now, you didn't have to bust your ass through college and internships. People dropping acid at Woodstock in '69 could walk into executive-track corporate jobs in '70 and be VPs by '72. They had it really fucking easy. Today you can't get a decent entry-level job with a 3.4 GPA and no internship.
The sunny era, however, didn't end in 2008 or 2001, but much earlier. If you were leaving college in the mid-1970s stagflation era, you'd missed it. There were small, blippy, "booms" localized to a few industries (banking, then oil/gas, then dot-coms, then oil/gas, then real estate, then banking) in the next three decades, but the general prosperity never came back.
The problem isn't generational. It's class warfare. Plenty of Baby Boomers have been fucked just as bad as our generation has.
The worst villains are mostly Baby Boomers, but just because that's the generation who is in power, and most people of any generation are out of power.
I don't like ripping on "the Baby Boomers" because it's similar to the "politicians are awful, but my Congressman is great" mentality that keeps incumbents in office despite dysfunction. People who rip on the Baby Boomers will except their parents, and this makes sense, because the villainy isn't generational but class-based. So let's frame this issue in proper terms. There's been a whole lot of chicanery going on, but it's not something that can be placed on one generation.
Nope, it's pretty much generational, not class-based. Our grandparents built this country into the superpower that it is. They single-handedly built the Interstate highway infrastructure, fought and won WW2, built the manufacturing base of our country's economy, brought peace to Europe, and gave all of this infrastructure to their children.
Since then, their children have squandered national treasure and influence and their greed is dragging the entire economy down.
I agree with the gist of what you're saying, but "their children" who have looted and ruined the nation aren't just Baby Boomers, but mostly conservative, white, well-to-do Baby Boomers-- a small subset of them. I don't think they're any more or less repulsive than their Silent and G.I.-generation counterparts (Strom Thurmond, Robert Bork, Dick Cheney).
Also, the dismantling began in the 1980s when people who are generally considered pre-Boomer were in power. CEOs in that time generally had birthdates in the 1920s and '30s, not '40s and '50s. Reagan was one of the so-called "Greatest Generation".
This is largely a class issue. Baby Boomers did most of the villainy because most of the egregious opportunities presented themselves while they were in power. That's all. They're not any better or worse than the rest of us. (Born in 1983, I have no specific need to defend the Boomers, other than intellectual honesty.)
On the other hand, all generations of the American upper class and right wing have been fucking over all generations of the rest of us for about 30 years.
Well put. I agree with what you are saying. It's the subset of boomers that elected Reagan, Bush Sr, and Bush Jr, that have really screwed us all. Clinton would have never been elected if it hadn't been for Ross Perot. Essentially, we've had 30 years of "conservatism" and it's completely failed everyone but the top 1%. I use conservatism in air quotes because it's really anything but.
I agree. The rot in our society started with the Reagan Era. 2008 didn't make it suddenly appear; it just brought it back to the surface. The OP has a just grievance, but she's comparing the world she faces to the Mad Men era of social mobility, when her parents were (probably) children.
On formal principles, we'd expect that robustness and expressiveness are inversely related, on the principle that low-entropy data can be recovered with better fidelity than dense data, but I think I can name a counterexample to this principle in practice: I think Haskell does a phenomenally good job of being both expressive and robust if we consider a practical definition of robust, whereby pain is not measured by likelihood of error but the cost of an error. Compile-time errors are extremely cheap in comparison to run-time errors.
You want an "almost right" program to fail, but you want it to do so at compile time. Runtime silent failure is the worst.
Let's get real about something: they're business guys, and you're the technical muscle, right? You seem young, and you're probably as good at sizing them up (note your "great people" comment) as the average MBA is at writing code; by this, I mean, not at all. Don't even try. Make your decisions based on hard facts, such as how much equity you have already and when you will start collecting a salary, and not based on "warm fuzzy" feelings of loyalty or how much you will get "when times change". Unless you're seasoned and have been in the business world for a decade or so, you are way out of your depth when trying to size such people and their promises up. (Of course you like them! Their job is to make people like them. They probably like you, but do they respect you?) Business people over-promise because the worst of them are sociopaths and the best of them have great intentions and are wonderful people but still are ridiculously overconfident, just because they have to be in order to succeed in that world.
They may be great guys, but you really need to get a firm commitment regarding equity. You're taking a risk and have a right to know what the rewards will be. A promise, especially a subjective one, means nothing. What does a "big" share even mean? If the company is valued at $2 million and you get 0.25%, that's a $5000 bonus, which can be described as "big" but is quite lousy in comparison to what you actually deserve. Remember that the business guys, due to the overconfidence that is characteristic of that sort, would still consider such a grant very generous. After all, it's going to be a $10 billion company one day, and that 0.25% is going to make you a millionaire many times over, no?
You're taking as much risk as they are, and you actually have the technical skills. You deserve a better deal. If your leaving would hurt them as much as you think it would, then they will give you equity, and they'll actually respect you more now that you're not letting them take advantage of you. Or, they might let you go, in which case you're better off to have this happen sooner rather than later, after having wasted even more time.
Wowzer. I really appreciate the honesty -- and you're right about the fact that they are quite established MBAs and I am just a young idealistic programmer.
The fact that the CEO will often pull code off the internet and say we should use it shows me that respect is not really
there and from that, I've always questioned how much they respect me/my role/my abilities.
I think you're spot on about giving them the option of keeping me or not -- I don't generally like to threaten anyone about leaving, but I think if handled well, I can explain my expectations and what I'd like, and then go from there. With a backup plan of course.
> After all, it's going to be a $10 billion company one day, and that 0.25% is going to make you a millionaire many times over, no?
Sage wisdom, here. It's easy to seem generous when you're dreaming about carving off a tiny sliver from an enormous pie. Startups aren't an adventure, or a calling, or a mission from god - they're a business. And the fastest way to shed the BS and get down to reality is to insist on equity, in writing.
Agreed. Smiles, promises, and handshakes from the vast majority of MBAs mean nothing. If it ain't in writing it don't exist, and to proceed otherwise is great risk.
Note: "below economy" class is a terrible idea for us, because it means that those seats will cost current coach prices, and what we call coach will become business class. (This has happened before; business now is what coach was in 1990.)