Are You Smart or Just Born Wealthy | Daewe Aung | TEDxInternationalSchoolofMyanmar

Hello, I'm going to start with a question: how many of you have been told at least once in your life that if you work hard enough and study hard enough you will get into a good university and in turn get a good, well-paying job okay no? be stereotypical, but for you they are Asian parents. I am right. I've had the exact same conversation over and over again with my own parents and it goes something like this: they study so hard, no, mom and dad work so hard. so that you and your brothers are where you are today, but unfortunately getting into a good university is not

just

about studying hard enough and having good grades, as seen as we invest our money in these universities in the hope that they will pay us in multitudes throughout our lives.

We also try to find out if it is a worthy investment. With that statement alone we have to ask ourselves: are we really intelligent or were we

just

born

rich? Let's start with a very obvious example. The Ivy Leagues are some of the most prestigious and best universities in the entire world Harvard Princeton Yale and all the others entering an Ivy League school is like drinking from the Holy Grail. It's telling everyone that you managed to get into any of the top 30 universities. My parents have really instilled this thought in me. since he was 10, but according to the New York Times, one in six students at select private colleges come from the highest income percentile range.

A study conducted at Harvard and Brown University in October 2023 compared SAT and ACT scores and found a correlation between a child's wealth and their admission to college, what this means is that they compare test scores with each other. , compared similar test scores of two different children and tried to figure out why one person got in and the other didn't, according to a CH a child. Students who came from the highest income percentage range were twice as likely to get into a private university compared to middle and upper middle class students, so you have to wonder if these universities don't accept lower income students just because they don't want to.

Harvard Economist Raj cheddy asks if these highly selective colleges are in America and they take kids from influential families with very high incomes and basically funnel them to stay on top and for the next generation. If I were to answer Mr. Cheddy's question, I would have to say that colleges have been doing this for centuries and it's called legacy admissions. Legacy admissions is just a fancier word that colleges use to hide the fact that they engage in nepotism and Nepotism at its core is favoritism based on relationships, it could be asking your parents if you could do an internship at their bank or asking your favorite professor, who you know likes you too, if he could write you a great letter of recommendation, that's what nepotism is okay so now as an international student I can't lie to myself here and I have to be aware of my own privilege, I suck. nepotism and I reek of money my teacher friend once went on a tangent about how just by the way I walk and talk he realized that I never worked a day in my life in that sense you can only tell how privileged I am to be where I stand, I am a student from an international school who is learning French.

I don't think I have to present proof of its existence. We can look to the Kardashians for that, but seriously, nepotism is so ridiculously prevalent in our society that we don't even blink unless it's that outrageous or if it directly affects us and our own achievements again, according to Harvard and Sons. of Brown University alumni, as selected colleges, were seven times more likely to get into a private college, seven times more likely to get compared to the highest income percentile, that's how prevalent nepotism is, so this is the part where someone might argue that these are just private universities.

Public universities like the University of Texas and the University of Virginia are much more equitable when it comes to admissions because of the fact that they are private, I mean public, so maybe the solution is to just not go to a university private, become public, right? three of these things have something in common, all three come from elite private universities, so what does this tell us? It tells us that the game is not only played by the rich, but that they do it, which is why the romanticism of these universities arises. It is natural when it turns out to be a path to power and influence.

Professor Donarski, who worked with you at Michigan, to try to make private university emissions more equitable, put the point perfectly, this shows how much difference IVs make between the political elite and the economic elite. the entire intellectual elite is coming out of these schools, so what can we do? It's not that we can break an already established hierarchy and it's not that we can change the family we come from and you're right, we can't, however, it's a cliché. As it seems, we always have options to choose from today I will give you two: A, you can change your environment or B, you can adapt to it.

Look, humans are naturally sociable beings, we take habits from others and they take habits from us. If you are thinking about choosing a, you may find that the friends and family around you do not support you in your own achievements and I know it's hard to let go of people you deeply value and appreciate, but you have to evaluate yourself too. These people around you really are valuable or they are an ancient object that you are praying for, they will become valuable to you again if this applies to you, you may want to start thinking about changing your environment if you are thinking about choosing it, you might notice. that the people around you are always working towards their goals, working towards their achievements, so as I said before, because humans are social beings, you also want to acquire these habits, this does not mean that you are changing your personality or that you force yourself to be one.

Someone you are not, simply means that you are adapting, so today I have given you two options, but they both have to do with taking control of your environment, so choose wisely because shaping your environment is what shapes your future. , thank you.