Does UChicago live up to its "extremely hard" reputation?

JHS
Mon, 06 Apr 2015 14:04:17 +0000

The sons and daughters of billionaires don’t have to fight anybody tooth-and-nail, and they know it. In my experience, they are quite happy to develop a network consisting of the most brilliant classmates they can find, since they instinctively understand that no one stays on top without a lot of first-class help. Senators’ kids are a similar story. They tend not to be children of billionaires, although most of them are children of very rich people who are also very powerful. They feel a fair amount of pressure to succeed in their own right, and they also know that having really smart friends can help.

Think, for example, of Bill Gates, who was not the child of a billionaire or a senator, but who was a member of a very rich, very powerful family, and who certainly had plenty of smarts himself. His sensational career owed quite a bit to people he befriended in school, chiefly his high school friend Paul Allen and his college friend Steve Ballmer.