What Oxford taught me about posh people

I'm currently reading Taleb's Antifragility book and he strikes a similar tune: The education system being little more than a way to cement social status, with actual innovation and entrepreneurship largely taking place outside it. Wealth leads to education, not the other way around.

I find this topic fascinating and it makes me see discussions about underfunded education systems and universities from a different angle.

My life goal was to attend one of these elite universities. I desired to work at companies such as Google or Apple.

After graduating from the Czech Technical University I realized that

1. I am much less special then I thought

2. There is much more hard working focused average people then the few talented superstars, both usually achieving the same

3. Surprisingly many of the exceptionally smart people in my social bubble, some of them graduated from the best universities in the world, "left the system" and focus on doing creative small thing's in their everyday life, instead of pursuing their parents dreams

4. Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair

5. I will do my best to teach my kinds to strive for understanding, a love for beauty and a complexity of the world, instead of focusing on grades and stuff

6. The two guys I knew, who attended Oxf. and Camb. were both fired because they were more talk then action. Not a representative sample though. Just ruining my illusion.

#3 and #5 are by-products of extreme privilege. Take your average bootcamper, they usually rack up a huge bill majoring in something in college (often a literal dream major), then somehow field a 17k check to just waltz over to tech when they need an office job finally.

Not everyone can do this. You have to be really lucky to play games like that and still be fine.

The same goes for ‘going off to start my own food truck’. These options don’t exist for people that can only afford one solid go at this.

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I've studied in Cambridge myself, and feel like some context needs to be added here for American readers not to misunderstand something here: Admission to Cambridge & Oxford isn't related to family wealth in the same way as admission to "elite" universities in the U.S.

For example: Tuition fees are in line with government-set rates and are no different for these institutions than other British universities (at least it was that way, back when I was there in 2005-2009). While the U.K. was part of the E.U. these low rates even applied to students coming to study there from elsewhere in the E.U. It is only "overseas" students who are asked to pay significantly more.

One thing that I found noteworthy when applying was also the fact that, for Cambridge, the admissions process had two phases: The first was academic acceptance. Those application forms made absolutely no mention of money. After a student has been academically accepted, there is a second phase in the application process that involves application to scholarships and ends with the applicant having to provide proof that they have the required funds to sustain themselves through the study period.

This was very different from what I remember about applying to universities in the U.S. which asked you to disclose your family's financial situation on the same application form that was also used to decide academic acceptance. That form, incidentally, also asked about things like family members who have attended the same university, etc. ...so there is much less transparency there to guarantee that a U.S. school wouldn't just use your socioeconomic standing directly as a criterion to decide admission.

There are, of course, impediments to social mobility into the class of Oxbridge-educated people, but it revolves more around academics than about money. For example, I found that the students disproportionately came from families where their parents were career academics. The relationship with those families having a lot of money was not something I particularly noticed.

The "poshness" of it all, particularly where undergraduate circles are concerned, also comes to a large extent from free choices that students themselves make to try to socially set themselves apart from their peers at other unversities. For example many willfully adopt "received pronunciation" to replace their natural dialects.