How Much Is Your Brain Worth?

The other day, I saw "Good Will Hunting" again on TV, which brought back a lot of memories of Harvard and Boston. At one point, Will Hunting's love interest, Skylar, who was attending Harvard, made fun of herself by saying that her brain would be "worth over $250K" in the end, referring to the total cost of her private school education. With inflation, if the movie were made today, she would have said "half a million dollars" instead!

While Will Hunting is a fictional genius who did not have to go to school to be better educated than the Ivy Leaguers, we all have read about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft and Facebook. A friend of mine was invited to a conference at Harvard recently, and his fellow panelists were encouraging the student audience to "believe in themselves and live out their dreams". When it was his turn to speak, he said, "you may think you might be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but chances are that you are not. Therefore, don't drop out of Harvard, as your hard-working middle-class parents invested all that money into giving you the best education. You can't just quit, do some crazy startup, and when things don't work out, go back to your parents' safety haven. That is not fair to the parents." I was highly amused to hear his rather unusual speech, or shall I say, a speech that is unusual for a conference, but perhaps all too common for a private conversation between a kid and his parents?

Because I received a full scholarship to attend Harvard, and graduate school is free for natural sciences anyways, my brain really is not worth much money at all. I grew up in China during the destitute years. In fact, I think the amount of money I have paid in nannies and daycare centers for Winston has already exceeded the entire amount that has cost my mom to raise me until I left China. Of course, that is not a fair comparison. But it did make me wonder - with all the heavy investment in schools, tutors, extracurricular activities, will I be able to make Winston a better and happier person than I have been?