Right before negotiating my severance in 2012, I wondered whether I should get a Ph.D. After 13 years in the private sector, I thought it would be nice to switch things up. Besides, if I got my Ph.D., I could demand people call me doctor, just like how our incoming First Lady demands to be called Dr. Jill Biden!

It is absolutely fine to request people address you as doctor if you have a Ph.D. or Ed.D.. Whether people comply with your request is another matter. Only around four percent of Americans have obtained a Ph.D. Therefore, people who have gone through the rigorous process of getting a Ph.D. deserve respect.

I’d like to think that if I got a Ph.D., I would play it cool and tell people, “Just call me Sam.” After all, I’m not only a believer in stealth wealth, but stealth education as well.

For a better life, it’s better to pretend you are dumber than you really are. Otherwise, people are going to expect a lot from you. They may ask you a lot of questions and constantly challenge you as well.

Time is our most precious asset. The dumber you appear, the more time you will have to do as you wish. Trust me on this. I have all the time in the world and it still doesn’t feel like enough!

Here was my thought process about getting a Ph.D. way back when. I’ll go through the pros and cons of getting a Ph.D. From there, you can make your own decision on whether it’s worth getting this degree or not.

If you’re thinking about applying to Harvard or the likes, don’t. There’s a rapid depreciation of a Harvard education that is going on right now. The people are revolting against the rich and connecting, especially when so many people are suffering during the pandemic.

When I was applying to colleges in 1994, I thought only extremely smart or talented people attended Harvard. I had heard stories about the rich buying their kids’ ways into Harvard, but I was unaware of the details until the bribery scandal.

As a public school kid with an OK SAT score, a 3.6 GPA, and unspectacular extracurricular activities (tennis team captain vs. eradicating malaria in a small village in West Africa), I decided to save myself hundreds of dollars in application fees and apply to mostly local state schools like UVA, Mary Washington, and William & Mary instead. Paying less than $3,000 a year in in-state tuition even back then felt like a steal.

Life After Public School

After graduating from William & Mary, I got a job in the international equities department at Goldman Sachs in NYC. That’s where I got to interview hundreds of Ivy League and other elite private institution graduates as part of Goldman’s consensus-driven interview process where even grunts get to interview candidates.

We ended up rejecting over 95% of the candidates due to poor fit. It wasn’t that they were not smart, because they were. We only wanted people we could sit next to for 12-14 hours a day. It obviously helped if they had an international background, spoke multiple languages, and had a passion for equities. But we were mostly looking for great teammates.

Rejecting the majority of elite private college graduates made me realize they are no different from you and me. For the next 13 years, I’d compete with these folks on the ruthless battlegrounds of finance and smash them to bits most of the time because of my hunger. 

Coming from a non-target public school background with middle-class parents, I wasn’t going to squander my opportunity for financial independence.

Today, I am a small business owner with business owning friends. Recently, some of us have noted a growing negativity towards alumni of elite private schools. This is a problem (or a solution) for parents who plan to spend lots of money starting in grade school in the hopes their kid will attend a school like Harvard. This is also a potential problem for private university alumni who might unfairly be judged by the masses.

If you are one of these alumni, don’t be upset about the trend against the 1%. Instead, read with an open mind and pay attention as your future or your kids’ future might depend on it.

This article will address:

1) Why there is a growing negative perception about private university graduates

2) What we’ve learned from the Harvard / Asian-American discrimination lawsuit

3) What you can do to fight back against the negative perception

Most people believe in meritocracy. If you work harder than your peers, you should get more reward. But as we all know, none of us are born with the same circumstances. For example, it may be harder for a poor kid from a single-parent household to compete against a rich kid with two parents and endless resources.

Given this uneven playing field, the San Francisco Unified School District decided to implement a lottery admissions system years ago for elementary, middle, and high school.

It didn’t matter if your neighborhood public school was a block away from your home. For the purposes of diversification and equality, your kid might only get accepted to a school 30 minutes across town.

Unfortunately, socioeconomic and racial diversity didn’t happen. Instead, wealthier families ended up sending their kids to private school, where the majority of students are white.

Are you wondering whether private grade school K-12 is worth it? I am since I have two young children. During the pandemic, where many small businesses have been crushed, many families have decided private grade school K-12 is not worth it. As a result, private school enrollment is down. Instead, parents have decided to homeschool, as my wife and I currently have done since March 2020.

When there is eventually herd immunity, I’m willing to spend money on the best education possible. Spending the most amount of time with our children before they become adults and providing a great education are the best gifts. But for now, w wait.

The problem with sending our kids to private grade school is a debate about fairness. Are we really going to live in a world where the rich continue to hoard their multi-generational fortunes while the rest just struggle to get by? Will the playing field continue to be so uneven that the middle class and poor must work twice as hard to get half as much?