We establish universality at the hard edge for general beta ensembles provided that the background potential V is a polynomial such that x -> V(x^2) is uniformly convex and beta is larger than or equal to one. The method rests on the corresponding tridiagonal matrix models, showing that their appropriate continuum scaling limit is given by the Stochastic Bessel Operator. As conjectured by Edelman-Sutton and rigorously established by Ramirez-Rider, the latter characterizes the hard edge in the case of linear potential and all beta (the classical "beta-Laguerre" ensembles)