$3,000 of Math School Can Lift a Family From $10,000 to $50,000 a Year
He skipped the galas and treated giving as a numbers game, hunting for the highest return per dollar.
My First Million · I put 80% of my money in the S&P after a billionaire investor told me not toMonish Pabrey, an investor who had made money in the stock market, knew what he did not want from philanthropy.
He did not want the galas and the dressing up and the socializing. He described that whole socialite scene as unfulfilling, and he wanted a different way to give.
Pabrey liked solo, competitive games built around numbers, where one person studies a system and tries to beat it. He had approached investing that way, and he decided to approach giving the same way.
Pabrey's question was where a dollar he gave could do the most to raise someone's earnings. His answer was in rural India, a country of more than a billion people, where many very intelligent children have no access to good schooling and no clear pathway to a better life.
Without help, those children are likely to end up working on a farm. Pabrey focused on finding the smart, unschooled kids and paying about $3,000 for a year of training at a competitive math school.
Those schools were designed to feed students into the Indian Institutes of Technology, the group of elite public engineering colleges that serve as a pipeline to some of the best paying technical jobs in the world, including jobs abroad that require work visas.
The math was striking. For a one time payment of about $3,000 for that training, a family with earning power of about $10,000 a year could rise to about $50,000 a year. That is a fivefold increase.
Admission to the institutes is very hard, harder than admission to Harvard, Stanford, or any American college. By his own rough count, around 8% of his students were admitted, roughly 10 times the usual rate.
Those graduates could then qualify for visas and compete for some of the best paying technical jobs in the world.
Questions people ask
What is IIT?
IIT stands for the Indian Institutes of Technology, a network of public engineering and technology universities across India. They admit students through the Joint Entrance Examination, which is famous for its difficulty and low acceptance rate, and their graduates are heavily recruited by global tech and engineering employers.
Why does an IIT degree raise earnings so much?
IIT graduates gain elite technical training, a powerful alumni network, and a credential recognized by employers worldwide. Many go on to high paying software, engineering, finance, and research jobs in India or use skilled worker visas to work in the United States and elsewhere, where salaries are far higher than rural Indian incomes.
How do programs find talented rural kids with no schooling?
Indian education charities and coaching programs typically use aptitude tests, math competitions, teacher referrals, and village outreach to identify high potential students. Selected children are then given boarding, tutoring, and exam preparation, since the entrance exams reward sustained problem solving practice as much as raw intelligence.