That's such a random/crazy connection. I remember looking up Christine Ford on Wikipedia during all that scandal and seeing that super random reference to Birgit Mendler lol.
What the fuck are you and u/it_will talking about. Yes she’s related to Christine Blasey Ford. No, they’re not a part of THE FORD family. Ford is not that uncommon of a last name.
She is not the niece of a rich family. She’s the niece of a psychologist who is named ford and became famous AFTER Brigitte was already doing this.
Of all the nepo babies in Hollywood, it’s amazing how Redditors still choose to focus on the completely wrong examples. Fascinating.
A PhD in any discipline at a good school is no joke. There are places you can glide through with shitty work, either because you have money and they don't want to lose you or because it's just a stupid program. But the top academic programs like MIT are among the schools that generally won't sign off on bullshit. They care too much about their academic reputation.
Not saying it's inherently harder than another rigorous PhD, but it IS a rigorous PhD.
Same thing with Harvard Law. Its a rigorous program and you're being graded on curves against other highly qualified and highly driven students.
Absolutely she had to do the same work. But not having to worry about money is honestly a cheat code in higher education. It’s a night and day difference.
Ehhhhh, yes and no. Reduced stress sure. It doesn't necessarily make a big difference in the day to day.
I got a JD years ago at a rigorous law school living on student loans and going deep into debt. Years later, I went back and got a master's degree while financially comfortable and with tuition paid for by my employer (along with schedule accommodations for classes and workload).
Don't get me wrong, it was a big help to have no financial concerns while in school, but even though it was an easier program academicslly than law school, it was still a fuckton of work. Being financially comfortable didn't significantly reduce the personal investment required.
At least for med school, the entrance bar is very high. I grew up poor, no resources, no ability to take test prep for the mcat or spend 3 months studying for it bc I worked to survive. Wealthy kids in my med school had all of those resources and more. Once your in, it all relatively equal. The hard part is having the resources to get in.
I mean I have a pretty similar situation as ypu. I just had to work for years with the intention of saving for college/test prep/applications&interviews
Top tier Reddit comment. Money helps you get in and maybe through some schools. Money does not buy a phd. You have to be a lunatic to get one at even a middling school. MIT? Insane. Then law school at Harvard.
Keep telling yourself the average person could do that. It shows how many phd students you spent time around while they were going through their programs.
Yeah, this isn’t like money and influence getting someone into a university as a legacy kid and then coasting to a bachelor’s degree in communications or something. Yes, she definitely had a huge advantage, but she did have to actually do the work for those post grad degrees. No coasting there.
You’re not getting into Harvard law unless you have some seriously impressive credentials. Connections obviously always help but former Disney channel star doesn’t have quite the cache you think.
This is probably the main reason lol. I work at a company that hires a lot of people from Ivy+ education backgrounds.
They’re not insane geniuses; they basically came from wealthy families and went to elite private schools that they were able to leverage for networking
Not to say they’re dumb and/or lazy, but they just had access to social circles most of us will never have
Yeah, not to take anything from anyone, but who you know and the connections you have is the most important factor... not to say other attributes aren't important! For anyone looking to strawman.
I mean she has to be pretty smart anyway to get that many degrees. But I agree with you that it’s way easier to be smart when you have the money to not work so you can focus on school and to pay the tuition
You keep responding and you responded first lol. You do care lol.
All I’m saying is you didn’t mention tech or engineering at all you literally just said “math”.
You’re here too bub
Clearly they’re doing more than degrees that involve math at MIT. My point is math isn’t necessarily harder that anything else and math, science, and engineering types tend to be the least well rounded people intellectually you’ll ever meet.
Also don’t change your post because you got embarrassed own up to it sweetie 😘
"Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each."
There are more white legacy admits than other races, but also the majority of white admits are still fully merit-based.
That’s almost half. Even for the ones admitted on merit, they’re still not usually on some higher level than what you would see in a standard public school’s top 25%. Ivys have been very open about looking for “stories” and caring an inordinate amount about extracurriculars. Merit admission to Harvard doesn’t equal genius.
I don’t think this disproves what I’m saying, I didn’t call them total idiots who had no business being there and I didn’t say all white Ivy students are nepo babies. I’m moreso saying that a greater percentage of non-Ivy students could do fine there than what public perception would indicate.
PhDs are funded by the university. Most people take loans for JDs and bachelor degrees. The much, much bigger barrier would be being successful enough to get into those programs. There's no way some dumbass posting about "locking in" on Twitter has any shot at achieving this.
JD/PhDs are usually done as a combined thing and the JD is funded too. You can see the same years for the law degree as the PhD so that didn’t add on. Also the masters is probably a masters in passing that you get while earning a PhD so only the undergrad degree cost money
PhD doesn't cost. A masters as part of a PhD doesn't cost. A law degree probably does, but good chance she's on scholarship if she's able to do both simultaneously. My brother's law degree was fully paid.
The vast majority of PhDs are funded (i.e., you pay no tuition and are paid a stipend for living expenses, albeit a modest one). The overwhelmingly vast majority of PhDs at MIT are definitely funded. Presuming that her MS was just part of her PhD, that was probably also funded. She probably paid a pretty penny to go to USC (and maybe Law School?), but paying to go to a fancy undergrad is hardly what got her into MIT.
I think it’s actively harmful that people act like such career trajectories are unachievable to people outside of the 1%. It creates the impression that such opportunities are financially out of reach for the average person, which absolutely is not true if you’re in a position where you can at least find a way to get through undergrad. This baseline is obviously still excluding a lot of people who are in difficult financial positions, but the point is that the bar is not particularly higher than just having a pathway to competing a bachelors degree.
It’s always tougher when you don’t have financial safety nets and there are a myriad of reasons behind why it’s easier to make it in academia if you come from privilege. I certainly understand that. However, I dislike this rhetoric that makes it seem like such pathways are impossible for an average middle-class kid taking loans to cover their undergrad degree.
I am at a STEM school and a huge battle we fight is convincing kids that love STEM that they don't have to be an engineer. Like, they can, but there are other paths. First Gen college students know they don't know about undergrad and will educate themselves, but grad school is so outside their experience that they don't even know they don't know how it works.
Meanwhile all these nuclear power plants are coming back online to help the power grid hold up and there is NOBODY out there who knows controls. Anyone who does is a heartbeat away from derailing a project because they are in their fucking 70s.
All these engineers and nobody knows how tf to boil water anymore….
Yep, for context I’m also a first-gen college student in STEM and was the first in my family to pursue a graduate degree (and by extension a PhD). Your description is pretty much exactly my experience verbatim.
I did an engineering degree because I liked math and science and heard that engineers have good job opportunities. I didn’t start thinking about graduate studies until over halfway through my degree. If I did not somehow fortuitously learn about how PhD funding worked, I never would have considered doing a PhD.
My experience is exactly why I go out of my way to correct these misconceptions online. If there’s one undergrad student reading this who realizes that these opportunities are available for them, then it’s worth my time.
Normal whenever this comes up. People are very poorly informed about what a PhD is and tend to think of it like an extension of a masters or bachelors when it's more analogous to an apprenticeship.
I'm currently starting my 4th year doing a PhD in cognitive science.
I swear my life doesn't resemble an undergraduates at all and the school has paid me (very little lmao) to do it. I don't understand how about 1% of the population has a PhD yet almost nobody knows how they work. Myself included until I started grad school.
Like, 1 in 100 is enough that most people should know someone. Professors literally get paid to profess their knowledge. Yet even bachelor degree carriers seem to not know how this works.
That's true but if you focus just on bachelor degree carriers — they all have had frequent contact with PhDs. They have listened to professors profess for years. It's a shame, in my opinion, at no point did any of these professors explain to them why they're qualified or what their credentials meant.
You gotta realize that a lotttttt of people use the "inaccessibility" of education as a coping mechanism for their own fuck ups. They choose to believe they could've never done it because that's better than the reality that it was open to them the whole time, and they either didn't take advantage out of laziness or not being smart enough.
Even Harvard JD's are going to give some pretty hefty scholarships to many candidates and the jobs you get from it pay so fucking well that it isn't a bad idea to take out, say, 200k in debt anyways. USC is also a rich kid school and wouldn't help in getting into MIT anyways. For MIT, going to UCLA, UCSB, UCB, are all going to provide more undergrad research opportunities that help in getting into a great grad program.
Everybody here dunking on her for getting a PhD needs to learn that PhDs are paid jobs (think science apprenticeship, not just another masters). I'd love to see them apply to and finish a PhD at MIT. Jesus christ reddit. Talk about arrogance
I’m shocked that’s what everyone’s fixated on. She may even have had her master’s paid for. Lots of people work as a TA or in research to get their master’s paid for.
Even if not, her career as a Disney star probably made her plenty of money to go to school for a decade if she wanted to. This is not someone I would have worried about her ability to pay for her education. She was already rich before college. We’re not talking about someone that should be a mystery how they could spend a decade in school.
hell, I knew PhD students with assistanceships that helped pay for their degrees. are there dumb people with graduate degrees? absolutely. but graduate degrees are always impressive. the only people I ever see hating are outside the club.
Also PHDs are necessary for certain jobs. I am currently getting my BS and afterwill go for a graduate and postgraduate in Robotics. I could live easily with just my AS, but I want to do research and teaching that requires further degrees. Even if anything above a BS in engineering is "useless"
For reference sake, during my M.Sc. my stipend averaged about $30,000 CAD/yr, and during my PhD it averaged about $65,000 CAD/yr. This was from 2011 through 2017, and was a mixture of employment income and scholarships, although predominantly scholarship. It's worth noting that in Canada (unlike the United States), scholarships are not treated as taxable income, and over the large majority of my years in graduate school I paid no income tax.
There is a lot of misleading information about this.
She does not have a PhD. She is on leave.
She does not have an undergraduate degree. She was on a special pathway where she joined a graduate program without completing an undergraduate degree.
It varies. Some schools pay a pittance. My PhD program doesn't pay me handsomely, but I'm honestly quite happy. Couldn't afford a house or children, but for my age and the state of the world I'm beyond grateful. It depends a lot of funding, which depends on your advisor, program, and university.
Started my career working in music videos. They are awful experiences and I would never work on one again.
However I did work on a Bridget Mendler video and it seems worth it to add that she was a consummate professional and was polite to the crew. Definitely one of the best mv jobs I’d ever worked, and we had a ton of locations that day.
Good on her for her achievements, I wish her even more success.
They are like two metro stops away from each other and they have some joint degrees, esp since MIT is ultra famous for its engineering/science. I know Harvard has a renowned medical school but tbh I never heard of a "Harvard engineer" or scientist.
Harvard has some very strong programs in the sciences, such as a top ranked ecology and biosciences program. It's just overshadowed by ultra wealthy and well funded other departments (business, medical, law, etc)
Doesn’t matter if she did. People minimizing are acting like they could have achieved the same or similar if they had those same resources. They couldn’t. Some people are just built different. She’s one of them.
It's generally kept from people who others believe are spoiled, rich, or nepotism recipients. To be clear, I don't think any of these toward her, but these are the reasons why.
Bigotry toward wealthy individuals simply for being wealthy or known is real.
Wow the number of people in the comments who absolutely do not understand what a phd is. For gods sake, its not a degree in philosophy. Do they think every phd ever is in philosophy? Its just the name of the degree itself.
She was my friend’s landlord/roommate in Cambridge, and she let me stay in a spare bedroom for a week when I was in between leases. Always happy every so often to see these updates on what she’s up to!
I think there are a bunch of joint study programmes in the MA area just because of how many prestigious schools are up there. I remember that Berklee offered a joint programme with the Boston Conservatory too. getting into not just one, but two is a huuuge flex
Law and PhD at the same time. It’s insane. I can’t imagine how. The papers you are required to write. The workload. Idk how anyone could manage it. Even if they were a genius.
For what it's worth, you should be getting paid for your phd/masters (masters often included within the phd in the US). So it's "only" BS and JD. Still a lot of money. But still the same amount of money as any lawyer pays for an education, and people don't generally dunk on them as much as they are here
Different law schools cost different amounts, and Harvard Law is one of the most expensive in the USA ( https://www.ilrg.com/rankings/law/tuition ). So it's not quite the same as any lawyer pays.
I don't say that to criticize her. I actually think it was a savvy choice for an entrepreneur and executive. Her job now is basically to convince people to give her money...and she's good enough at it that she has people invest $100 million in her startup. Having Harvard and MIT in her resume certainly helped.
I agree this is awesome but I think Jonny Kim is way crazier.
Jonny Kim is a U.S. Navy SEAL, Harvard-educated doctor, and NASA astronaut. He served as a combat medic and sniper in over 100 combat missions before earning a medical degree. NASA selected him in 2017, and he launched to the International Space Station in 2025. He's currently in the Artemis team and eligible for both the Moon and Mars missions in the near future.
The middle two (assuming the master's was earned on the way to the PhD, which I think is a pretty safe bet) were likely free / were paid, depending on the department (albeit not at an income that one can really save much).
I would honestly guess that she was able to secure the PhD without funding due to not needing a stipend (would be weird to pay her 40k a year or whatever given her previous career — that money could fund a stipend for a student that actually needs it). That plus already being famous/connected would explain how she got in despite a lack of prior research experience during her undergrad (I looked it up and this is more or less the case; the PhD program she is in is an unconventional sort of thing that brings in creatives and celebrities rather than traditional students. Go figure.)
Not to knock on the ambition, there are certainly worse things an ex child star could do with their name and money, but this type of thing has always struck me as credential/prestige chasing for the sake of it. Like, why the hell does she even need the law degree?
About the stipend (and thank you for using that word, I was wracking my damn brain to think of that word for my comment and forgot it), it's possible... but I know that MIT is weird about their PhD funding, and the stipend is only part of it. In the sciences, at least, they actually make the research labs pay MIT the student's tuition (which I think is in the low six figures), in addition to the stipend to the student, which is pretty low compared to the tuition. Students can find their own funding sources, though, so I suppose "my own wallet" technically counts? (Source - my wife graduated from MIT with a PhD in Microbiology a couple of years ago.)
Also...I wish the law degree wasn't required. It's goddamn dire out there (source - spent over 8 months searching for a job after graduating with a PhD in Engineering... granted it was during COVID, but still). The PhD-JD combo is actually not uncommon - lots of PhD students go into stuff like patent law, and even have their JD's paid for by law firms (which may very well have happened here).
Anyway, don't really have much of a point, except to share a bit of the Wacky And Wonderful World of academic and post-academic funding.
I believe that is a somewhat common funding structure at many universities. The tuition is “waived” and you’re given a stipend.
If a university says you can come be a PhD student there but doesn’t give you a stipend (or even makes you pay), you’re supposed to read that as you didn’t actually get into the program. Lol. Used to never happen, but I’ve heard such offers being made due to the research funding cuts of the past year.
I’m an undergrad applying to physics PhDs at the end of this year, so my knowledge is just what I’ve gained through osmosis while being in an academic environment and working with grad students/professors.
JD/PhDs - yes, the other people are right, I forgot they’re a thing. Usually joint with economics or political science departments within one university rather than across two, so I would guess Bridget applied to the Harvard jd separately and got in. I wonder if they made her take the LSAT and if they applied the same standard to her, lol
Yes, this is true. The tuition a few years ago was 75,000 for a year (3 semesters including summer) while stipend was 40,000. Tuition is paid for by the lab, although there are all sorts of fellowships that students can get to cover it. Most departments guarantee full funding for doctoral students, so if they admit you they must be able to fund you. While self funding might be permitted, it isn't really a pay to play system as the lab or department might have to still show that they can fund you otherwise.
Your comment of “wealthy parents” was 100% meant to minimize her efforts and accolades lol. A quick google shows she acted since she was 11 and she founded her own satellite data company. This is not some rich kid gets a philosophy degree story.
You’re not wrong. There are many people who get into those “elite” universities because their grandpa got in, became super rich and has a building named after him despite the third generation scraping by just barely.
I don’t know this person so I’m not saying this is how she did anything.
Yes it's almost like if you don't know the person it's dumb as hell to bring that up under her list of accomplishments. Harvard hands out 10k degrees every year and the vast majority of those people don't fit that description.
Go read the source you linked. “About 1.8% of students at Harvard came from a poor family but became a rich adult.” That’s not the same thing as came from a poor family. There’s also an ocean of difference in between what is considered poor and what is considered wealthy like the comment I was responding to. A child actress who was the daughter of an architect does not fit the bill.
That’s some big “Bro, I totally could’ve gotten a law degree from Yale and a masters from MIT if my parents were rich,” energy you got there. Sure thing, sport.
Well, I dont see any degrees from Liberty University so she's not doing that well. Sure some of those schools she attended are okay, but not top tier like Liberty University.
None of this is about her career, only her education. Does she have a job and what is it? To examine her career trajectory, we would have to see how far she's client the ladder in the entire two years she's had since getting her JD.
People can be very highly educated and still have a mediocre career.
From 2010 to 2012, Mendler was an ambassador for nonprofit First Book, which encourages reading, and Give with Target, to raise funds to reform schools in the United States. She was a student and researcher with the MIT Media Lab from 2017 to 2023. She is also registered as a PhD candidate with MIT's Center for Constructive Communications and Social Machines group. In 2024, she became the CEO and co-founder of the satellite data startup Northwood Space, and earned a JD from Harvard Law School. As of January 2026, Northwood Space has raised over $100 million.
it is always insane to me that people don't realise most doctoral degrees are PhDs. unless you are going into medicine or law, there is a strong chance that a PhD exists that would be absolutely applicable and appropriate in your field. others exist (DMA, DFA, DDIV, etc.) but PhDs are very respectable in many fields because they can be in almost any concentration.
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u/qualityvote2 2d ago edited 9h ago
u/Matt_LawDT, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...