Those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed.
UPDATE:
Prof Panos Ipeirotis wrote this comment, at TechCrunch:
NO CORRELATION BETWEEN IVY LEAGUE EDUCATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
NO CORRELATION BETWEEN IVY LEAGUE EDUCATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
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1. Attending an Ivy League school (especially for a graduate degree) does not mean that you have been born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But it is a catchy phrase, eh? (I am one of the silver spooned ones, apparently with parents hardly making $20K per year.)
2. “The top ten institutions in this group accounted for only 19 percent of the entire sample. In other words, 81% of the tech company founders came from “regular” schools.”
And we send the notion of “lift” to the garbage. Can we compare this 19/81 ratio with the ratio of graduates from these schools? What is the total number of graduates from the top-10 schools and the total number of graduates from the “regular” schools? I am sure that the top-10 schools do not graduate 19% of the total graduates.
But lying with statistics is easy.
Those who are born without the silver spoons in their mouths are more motivated to succeed… in Ivy League schools —as Panos I. demonstrated.
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Is the above statement true?
Chris, let’s avoid the populist catchphrases.
I have seen many “silverspooned” students being hungry for success, just to prove to their parents and to their colleagues that they can succeed on their own. Sometimes they even refuse any financial support, as a matter of principle.
And, conversely, I have seen other “poor” students wasting the $100K that their parents got through loans or by selling a house. They came to New York for enjoying their two years in New York of MSc education, getting a “gentleman’s C” and getting at the end the degree, which will then proudly decorate a wall in their homes.
It is easy to say to the public things that they like to hear. (Who doesn’t like a Cinderella story?) The problem is that the truth is often much more complicated.
The study would have problems passing any serious fact-checking. “Inspiring” but not set up properly to identify the factors that lead to success. You could equally well present the article as “Elite, Ivy-League schools are over-represented in the ranks of U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs and achieve greater business success than others”. [This is from the conclusion of the article, and which is ALSO wrong.]
The bigger problem is how the findings are presented in the blog post. Vivek falls into the fallacy of the following style: “Only 10% of the accidents involve drunk drivers. So, it is safe to drive drunk 90% of the accidents are from people that drive sober.” But in this case, instead of drinking, driving and accidents, we have Ivies and founding companies. Vivek simply wants to say something, and says it. The numbers simply serve to give some pseudo-credibility to this post.
The story, though, appeals to the masses, who loves to hate “the establishment”. So why bother with checking the consistency of the arguments?
I have done the mistake of posting in the comments. The even more grave mistake was to sign with my own name. The mobs apparently do not like someone to point out the flaws in the interpretation of the statistical findings. It is “academic nitpicking”. Apparently, bursting the bubble is not something that should be practiced in such forums.
In times like that, I truly think that the movie Idiocracy really depicts the future of the US.
And I just got this report as well
http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/news/news.cfm?doc_id=101840
Well, I acknowledge what you say.
The story I linked to was funded by the Kauffman Foundation, which is a serious org.
150+ comments were left under the story at TechCrunch, and I didn’t read them, I acknowledge.
(I read all the comments at Freako, and i enjoyed them all.)