Don't Diminish the Value of Education

Roger Cohen shares a "rags to riches" story:

Fazal Fazlin has an American story. Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, he came to the United States in 1969 with an engineering degree and little else. Now he lives on a five-acre estate in the waterfront mansion that once belonged to Nelson Poynter, luminary of the newspaper business.

This reminds me of when I was in law school, and a classmate from a well-off family shared that the carpet in his dorm room was from his parent's first apartment in the U.S., the one-room apartment where he had also spent his earliest years. I didn't know anything about his background, save for it being pretty obvious that his parents were now quite wealthy, and I asked, "You mean your parents started out here with nothing? He laughed, "Yeah, if you count their Ph.D.'s in the hard sciences as 'nothing'".