Hard work is a (mostly) necessary but insufficient condition for becoming successful.

The main problem here is that much of US society believes it is a necessary and sufficient condition - i.e., they've perverted "you need to work hard to get rich" to "if you work hard you will get rich", or the more pernicious format: "if you're not rich you didn't work hard".

The last form of this thought is one of the most persistently toxic concepts of modern US society.

I think if you change it to "If you work hard you will get richER" I would say it holds true 99% of the time.

I disagree. If you have the right connections and someone willing to bankroll you, you can coast through school, get into a top university, and coast your way into a high-paying job that your connections arranged for you.

Except that this isn't true, because no sane benefactor works THAT unconditionally: the moment you're found to be coasting is the moment you get dropped like a hot potato.

The "sane" qualifier removes a lot of relevant benefactors from that analysis, unfortunately.

Case in point: categorical prioritization of progeny, inherited wealth, or the impact of power and wealth acquisition on the functioning of an otherwise more productive mind.

In that social class (the elite) working 30 hours per week is a serious dedication and the "coasters" they punt are the three-martini lunch types who work less than 10 hours per week but still feel entitled to "make decisions". Those people will be fired-- or I should say, "asked to resign"-- but they get nice severance packages and the right to write their own references. That's how the country club mentality works. You protect "your own" no matter what.

(ETA) Part of the reason we, as software engineers, don't have a lot of autonomy or respect is that we don't have the tribal mentality. Many engineers will gladly sell out their own colleagues to management in the hope of getting a promotion.

So yes, you can continually get through on connections despite what we would call meager effort, at that social milieu. It won't make you CEO, but you can move fairly seamlessly from one high-prestige job to another.

Are you suggesting that, like, i-bankers are a group known for its solidarity and generosity to their peers? That i-bankers wouldn't sell out their co-workers for a shot at promotion?

Or that, like, junior lawyers at big law firms are these community-minded individuals who just pick up the slack so that their colleagues can coast?

A lot of people from my college went on to be lawyers and i-bankers. My understanding of those jobs does not match your description. Like, even a little bit.

There are undoubtedly people out there who are underqualified and coasting in cushy jobs that they got through their connections. But the finance and law jobs that super-elite universities feed into to a grossly disproportionate degree are -- at their junior levels, at least -- overwhelmingly not those jobs. They're high-paid, but they're both grind-houses and shark tanks. Their cultures are ones of shallow relationships, little loyalty, and burning out junior employees to support a pyramid structure of more comfortable senior people.

I think that is less common or easy these days than you would think.

I don't know of people in the UK that can get into universities with significantly lower grades, just because of their family.

And the part about jobs migt be true for a family firm, but I doubt if it would work at, say, IBM.

"I don't know of people in the UK "

Yup, my fault, not clear enough. I'm talking about the US more than the UK, although now that UK universities have essentially been told by the government to behave like businesses, with poor people already less likely to apply than the rich since fees went from zero to almost ten grand a year in the course of a decade, I expect the UK to catch up soon enough in terms of buying your way into a good university (there is indeed already rumbling about places going to foreign students who can be charged far more than home students, establishing the principle, so I expect that as soon as universities work out a way to let people buy their way in, they will).

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Edit to answer this point below: ""Give up, no point working hard, you will never make anything of yourself, the game is rigged"?"

No. My alternative narrative is "know the game is rigged". If you're playing a rigged game, your chances are so much better if you realise this (hence my very first post here - the people who rig the game work hard to make the unlucky ones think it isn't rigged).

I think my narrative would be:

"Some people will have it much, much easier than you and some people will have it much, much harder. That is irrelevant to how well you do, so have at it."

So what would your alternative narrative be for people? "Give up, no point working hard, you will never make anything of yourself, the game is rigged"?

Yes, the fees for UK universities are higher and this will discourage some people from going to university. But the fee levels are still restricted and do not vary much between universities, and access to student finance is available to everyone, so I don't think the new system will make much difference at all.

Thing is, one could say that "be aware that the game is rigged, try to understand it, play by your own rules, and adapt to the rigged game in order to survive". Thing is, that relies on so many factors that simply aren't the case for people - intelligence, upbringing, world-experience, contacts, race, gender, education. Basically, there's always a chance you can make it no matter how fucked you are, but that percentage is so low you may as well say fuck it and start selling drugs, because the chance of you making it legitimately is orders of magnitude lower than the chance you'll get caught "making it" illegally.

"I don't know of people in the UK that can get into universities with significantly lower grades, just because of their family."

But going to the right school makes it considerably easier to go to the right University in the UK and going to the right school really is very strongly tied to wealth and status of families.

It is not actually very clear how much difference a student's school makes. Going to a private school on its own does not help with university admissions (if anything, it makes it more difficult). The superior quality of private education might improve the grades of lesser able but richer students, but there is still the ever present problem of accurately separating the effect of school type to educational achievement from the effects of family background/expectations/genetic inheritance...

Depending on how you look at it, this could be seen as a form of inheritance.