Winning The Privilege Lottery: To What Extent Does Birth Decide Our Fates?
Yes, I know – the topic seems all too familiar. Well, that’s because it is. Spoken in whispers behind drawn curtains while introspectively ruminating about life, or animatedly debated amongst peers at a social function, the privileges bestowed at birth have always been topical and contentiously so.
When Communications Specialist and Poet, Mr. Iboro Otongaran. responded to Barr. Unyime Luke’s comment about the fated binariness of the Haves and Have Nots, I knew we had an animatedly debated back-and-forth on our hands guaranteed to be as polarizing as it was going to be enlightening.
Where did the discourse take place? The Uyo Book Club WhatsApp group. You can picture it as a roundtable conversation; virtual, yes, but engaging enough to hold your attention and pass the message across.
According to Mr. Otongaran, the Law of Social Reproduction seems ever so true in climes like Nigeria. 
“Children of messengers tend to end up as messengers; no breakout. Children of ministers and senators end up running the NNPCL, the CBN or becoming ministers and senators themselves. True upward social mobility is well-nigh nil here. That’s what I meant by the lack of a pathway up. It may not be a total absence of access to the penthouse, but it’s almost impossible to get there.”
He does have a point. Scratch that – points. One can hardly negate his position without coming off as somewhat dismissive. And, as he expatiated while responding to Dr. Ntiense Utuk’s anecdote about elevating himself beyond the aspirational containment of such socioeconomic glass ceilings, exceptions do not negate the general tendency.
Or maybe personal experiences are culminating into a projected bias. Maybe Dr. Utuk’s insistence the pervasiveness of such marked and ambitious socioeconomic caste systems are exaggerated. Are there numbers corroborating these assertions? Research, I did.
According to a 2023 report published by the New York Times, children from wealthy families are almost 40 per cent more likely to get university admission than, well, everyone else. Wait for the next part. Kids from ultra-wealthy homes are 200 per cent more likely to get admission, given they get the same test scores as everyone else. It’s even higher for Ivy League Schools such as Harvard and Stanford. In the Nigerian context, juxtapose the equivalents. Birth privileges, anyone?
So, evidently, your socioeconomic designation factors in eventually in the attainment of your educational pedigree. What advantage then does such a pedigree bestow on you? Again, let’s see the numbers. I’m a techie and my default is to exemplify with instances in the digital tech sector. I promise this will be devoid of the bamboozling tech jargon techies are ever so guilty of infusing in their writings. Let’s get to it, shall we?
You’d think with all of the mantra of equal opportunity and level playing field recited in the tech startup world, it’d hold. Reality, they say, is more potent than perception.
Beta Boom did a comprehensive study which puts the birth privilege in perspective, and shocking the report is.
Venture Capitalists are more likely to fund tech startups with founders who attended Ivy League Schools. Your idea might be innovative, your startup metrics might be impressive but there’s one decider written in neon light with a question mark: “Which school did you attend?”
Founders of unicorns (companies with more than $1 billion valuation) tend to be alumni of prestigious schools. Here’s the catch: These founders had their educational pedigree work to their advantage to get the capital injections which funded their ideas. That educational pedigree, for most parts, stemmed from the socioeconomic statuses of their birth. See the connection? The domino effect?
“Oh! That’s America!” Is it? Let’s bring it back home then. TechPoint Africa did the “West African Startup Decade Report” a while ago. Carefully peruse the numbers I’d state in the succeeding paragraph.
42 per cent of the most successful founders had a university education in the U.S. and the U.K. That leaves 58 per cent open, right? Well, 44 per cent of Nigerian-trained founders schooled in Covenant University, the University of Lagos, and the University of Lagos. These founders also benefited from the educational pedigree bias and being deemed to be from “Ivy League Schools”.
So, they get millions of dollars in venture capital funds, grow their ideas to become reputable tech brands and, consequently, they benefit from being founders of prior successful startups. Again, are you seeing the connection? Need I go on about the potentiality of being passed over a job if your competitors are foreign-trained?
This isn’t a woe-is-me, life-has-been-unfair-to-me pity party. Shelve any thought of wallowing in self-pity. It achieves as much as a single brick barricading a river’s tide. If anything, it’s a realization that if you didn’t have your palm nuts cracked for you at birth by benevolent gods or win the birth lottery, it was wholly circumstantial.
At the very basics of existentialism, we just are: born so we can exist . There’s nothing we can do to rewrite the conditions of our births. At least not until time-traveling becomes an experiential thing. Recognizing the odds are stacked against you early enough can either be motivational enough to surmount such natal socioeconomic hurdles or just accept what fate has birthed you.
Maybe we weren’t so lucky with the birth lottery picks, but living presents us with opportunities to make the most of what we can find.
