The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html

by nreece • 18 years ago

131 69 18 years ago

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

"An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed."

How awful! Those miserable Ivy League kids and all that they miss out on. I never knew they had it so rough. We really should do something for those poor kids going into these schools. A warning or something. Maybe we should start some sort of charity to help them.

motoko• 18 years ago

What a great idea! Chairing a charity will finally put those poor Ivy League children to hard work.

Herring3• 18 years ago

The entire article reads like satire. He can't talk to a plumber, the poor chap. Maybe he should publish a few thousand words in some "venerable but lively quarterly magazine".

run4yourlives4• 18 years ago

You're missing the point of his comment.

You're also missing the point of life if you continue to hold "being rich" to such a high level.

smanek2• 18 years ago

That was surprisingly good.

Although, I think it paints with too fine a brush sometimes (narrowing its conclusions to the Ivy Leagues).

For example, I've definitely noticed a loss of solitude and way too much over specialization too early. A lot of the people I know in Ivy League schools began competing and winning in contests in their chosen field by middle school. I understand that a University would rather admit a USAMO or Intel Science Fair Winner - but the competition there is so intense it forces students aiming high to begin specializing before they're even teenagers.

Frankly I've taken more math courses than anyone ever should, and there are still some USAMO problems that I couldn't solve given unlimited time. Take a look: http://www.unl.edu/amc/a-activities/a7-problems/USAMO-IMO/q-... And they expect 16 year olds to do that!

Hell, I've personally seen a few high school science fair projects that are essentially graduate level work involving genetic engineering and monte carlo simulations.

Although, to be fair, a lot of these kids also try to see the bigger picture and recognize the role of their formal education (they are usually the ones who end up as quants or traders ;-)).

cperciva2• 18 years ago

USAMO problems... Take a look

Ok, it's wildly unfair for a Putnam fellow to be looking at these, but since you asked... I think I can see how to solve problem 6, but I'd have to take a few minutes to make sure that my solution works. The other 5 problems took me about 30 seconds each.

Hell, I've personally seen a few high school science fair projects that are essentially graduate level work involving genetic engineering and monte carlo simulations.

Funny, I was about to say that I've seen far too many graduate students doing work which is essentially high school science fair material.

smanek2• 18 years ago

<irony> wow ... that just makes me feel bad about myself. </irony>

Even so, that's very impressive. After looking through, I only see likely solutions to 3 of the 6, and I would still have a fair amount of work to even verify those 3.

goes and mopes in the corner

Alex3917• 18 years ago

The easy way to solve any math problem: Reformat it to look like a Google problem set, and then tack it to the corkboards in the hallway.

swombat2• 18 years ago

The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

Interesting... I found the opposite. I went to Oxford University (as elite as it gets), with a head big as a balloon, and clearly thinking myself better than everyone. Four years in the presence of people whose intellect crushed me like an insignificant cockroach taught me humility. Since I still needed to believe that I wasn't... you know... just plainly inferior, that forced me to re-rationalise what it means to be "better", and to come to the conclusion that intellectual prowess has nothing to do with being a better person.

It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

I also disagree with this, to an extent. My time in Oxford made me a more rounded person, intellectually, inter-personally, and emotionally. And I think that was the right result - that's certainly what my parents hoped when I went in. I think the purpose of education is to make people - not just minds or careers. A person is a combination of many different things, including mind, network of connections, desires, abilities, and a myriad other things.

Mind you, Oxford might just be different from Yale... perhaps Yale should take a leaf ;-)

cperciva2• 18 years ago

Oxford taught me that I'm a better computer scientist than I am a mathematician (or at least, that I'm better at algorithms than at algebraic number theory), but it didn't teach me humility.

I realized that intelligence has nothing to do with being a better person when I came up against the apparent contradiction that all of the fascinating people I enjoyed talking to were far less intelligent than myself. :-)

swombat2• 18 years ago

Different paths, same destination :-)

cglee• 18 years ago

This wouldn't seem like a contradiction if we had better definition of intelligence. For example, it wouldn't seem like a contradiction to say you enjoy talking with fascinating people who were all worse than you at math and logic.

whacked_new2• 18 years ago

How do far less intelligent people fascinate you? Is it because they know something that you don't, and/or are able to see things in ways that are new to you? Or perhaps they are less concerned about evaluating the level (in anything) of the other party?

If I was sitting next to Tiger Woods I would probably talk very little about golf, knowing that we share little in common in that area and would make for a very one-way conversation. Perhaps, then, it would appear that I have interesting things to say, although the whole time I am a golf idiot (or sports idiot, or math idiot, whatever).

Or is it something different?

bocajuniors• 18 years ago

a couple of years ago i saw an academic ranking of british universities.sheffield was the best with oxford and cambridge around 20th place. so maybe you're right that oxford is different from yale

zandorg• 18 years ago

It's funny. I hadn't started University, and I was accepted at Sheffield to study AI. Now, I arranged to meet a hypertext legend to help him with a recent project, and I ended up having Christmas dinner with this guy, and some of the faculty and the head of computer science at Sheffield.

Something tells me it would have been better going to Sheffield than going to this local University just for this reason, but we all make mistakes.

As it happens, I became friendly with the head of computer science at my local University choice, for doing well in a computer trivia quiz.

hugh2• 18 years ago

I've seen a lot of university rankings, and I've never seen one that looked like that. If you had a link it would be useful, but pretty much every ranking I've seen has had Oxford and Cambridge as the two top British universities.

Example: http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm with Cambridge 4th, Oxford tenth and Sheffield in place 72, just ahead of the University of Arizona.

yef3• 18 years ago

My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class.

I didn't go to an ivy league school, but is this generally accepted as true? Is this other people's experience, or is the author's opinion more of an outlier?

nostrademons3• 18 years ago

It's true but incomplete, in the way that so many written articles on the web are.

If you explicitly went up to an Ivy League or top liberal arts student with the above quote, most of them would be disgusted. It's not like people walk around campus all day talking about how everyone else is inferior to them. Someone like that would probably be considered an antisocial boor.

But the point about not having anything to talk about with people who didn't go to an Ivy or other top college is true. One of the selling points of Ivies & top liberal arts colleges is that they "teach you how to think"; well, if they teach you how to think, how do you relate to other people that think differently? There's a shared depth of experience that going to a top college gives you, like the close relationships with professors, chance to talk to well-known public speakers, hanging out on a lush green quad in the middle of a city, or being able to break lots of rules without the administration caring. People who went to state schools, community colleges, or no college at all often didn't have that experience, so what's there to talk about?

This is ameliorated somewhat depending on what you choose to do after college. I went into computers, where many of the best programmers went to no-name colleges or dropped out of high school, so a.) I can always talk tech with other people in the computer field and b.) I found out pretty soon that where you went to school isn't a good proxy for ability. Some of my friends are bakers or teachers or secretaries, and they're sitting firmly in the real world. But the financial system and top law schools are populated with huge proportions of alums from top colleges, so the "Amherst bubble" (which includes Harvard & Yale & Columbia & Brown & Dartmouth & Swarthmore & Williams too, except they undoubtedly call it by their own school name) extends over it too.

yef3• 18 years ago

I dunno. Something doesn't quite add up to me. There are certain topics that all people like to talk about, regardless of how they think. Knowing those topics reveals certain tricks to talking to different people. "Ask the expert", where you compliment someone on their skill or knowledge (plumbing, say) and then ask them for more details, showing genuine interest as they talk. People who have kids or pets are also pretty easy to talk to, because they're proud and love to talk about them. Humor, sports, and local news also tend to break the ice.

So I'm truly curious what's at work behind this inability or unwillingness to talk to "the masses", as it were.

nostrademons3• 18 years ago

"Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out."

That is so true. At Amherst, practically the only way to not get an Amherst degree is to finish your 4 years and not complete a major. (Guess how I found that out... ;-)) Steal an ambulance, drive it around the freshman quad, and crash it into a tree, and you get a 1-year suspension. Embezzle $13,000 from the school newspaper and you get a 4-year suspension. Both of those are real incidents, and their perpetrators are either Amherst alums or back at school now.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

What were the disadvantages again? The students are 32 flavors of vanilla? Something like that. I went to a poor school and the students were 32 flavors of shit. So think about that the next time you open your mouth to complain.

adrianwaj• 18 years ago

Despite the disadvantages, the author "taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008." Additionally, right now, his homepage states he is on a break. So, at the end of the day, where would the author rather be? Would he rather send his kids somewhere else? I doubt it, but internally he may have a streak of contempt while living and working in this environment.

I visited Stanford for a few hours while travelling through California and even the bookshop clerk pretended I was some sort of king. Maybe she took acting classes, or denies the fact were she not employed by Stanford, many of the students wouldn't give her much more than the time of day.

I have nothing against Standford or the people that attend, and the article rang true with my experience passing through the school and my experience with people in that 'sphere' of influence. I don't associate myself with any sphere, and I aim to look at everyone's humanity. Furthermore, I went to a top univeristy (in Australia), but was one of the 'searchers,' so perhaps you can go to an Ivy league school but obtain the benefits on your own terms. When I got to university, I realized that not only had I not 'arrived,' but that I had barely even started. It really depends how deep you want your journey to go.

Says the article: "There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded."

Social exclusion as practiced by the 'elites' (or anyone with any modicum of power) has its usefulness - it's a way to get ahead and stay ahead with that power. As such, people that are excluded shouldn't take it personally when they realize that the person or people who are excluding them overtly or covertly have designated them as their worst enemy, biggest rival, and their greatest fear. Ironically, for those not truly confronting their fears, the greatest power is deflected.

hugh2• 18 years ago

Furthermore, I went to a top univeristy (in Australia), but was one of the 'searchers,' so perhaps you can go to an Ivy league school but obtain the benefits on your own terms.

Well, a top university in Australia is very different to a top university in the US. Not because they aren't good -- Australia's top unis are probably better at least than the Ivy League's worst -- but because they don't have nearly the same sense of elitism. I guess this is mostly because of the way selection is done by course rather than by university -- it's far easier to get into the least selective courses at Sydney or Melbourne than it is to get into the most selective courses at Southern Cross or Charles Sturt.

(Full disclosure: I went to Sydney, and now I work at a not-elite-but-not-bad university in the US)

zasz• 18 years ago

"I visited Stanford for a few hours while travelling through California and even the bookshop clerk pretended I was some sort of king. Maybe she took acting classes, or denies the fact were she not employed by Stanford, many of the students wouldn't give her much more than the time of day."

You know, there are some Stanford students who work in the bookstore. I think your accusation of all Stanford students having contempt for people who work at the bookstore, especially since it was just extrapolated from the behavior of a clerk who could've been a Stanford student himself, is highly unfounded.

mattchew• 18 years ago

I second the "surprisingly good" comment. I have one friend who managed to get into the Ivy League and come out with a law degree. A lot of what was said in the article reminds me of him.

Having excessively high expectations for his kids (or, you could say, excessively narrow) is the worst of it. I want to tell him, you have three kids, odds are they are not all going to be Ivy League scholars. But he can't imagine any other future for them. Going to be rough on him and his kids alike, I'm afraid.

coglethorpe• 18 years ago

One thing I've learned is that there are many people like the plumber mentioned in the article that do better than many Ivy League grads financially. I know one person who has a two-year degree, worked as an electrician, and built his business to where he's one of the wealthiest people I personally know. Another sold his junk yard (which made him good money for years) for over a million. According to the book "The Millionaire Mind" there's plenty of folks like that and just as many graduates of big schools who live paycheck to paycheck to show how "rich" they are.

xiaoma• 18 years ago

The richest guy I've met never had any post-secondary schooling except Hamburger U. He owns 12 McDonald's franchises and each clears about 1.5 million a year.

Herring3• 18 years ago

The plural of anecdote is not data. There will always be exceptions to any rule.

workpost• 18 years ago

Talk to a few good plumbers and you'll realize that they are all set. Kids these days want to go to college and get "white collar" jobs and this has created a huge opportunity for smart people who work in the trades.

davi• 18 years ago

For the "searchers" there are other, better schools than those of the Ivy League. I still wish I had gone to one of them.

Less seriously, but maybe relatedly: Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed; Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.

rcoder2• 18 years ago

As another Reed dropout, I can say with some confidence that we're more numerous (at least relative to the student body size) than those who leave Harvard early. At one point, Reed's graduation rate within six years of matriculation was substantially lower than the four-year rate of most of its peer institutions, though those numbers have come up a lot in the last 5-6 years.

Reed has many of the intellectual trappings of an Ivy, but little of the opportunity to rub elbows with the rich & powerful. Jobs excepted, most of the college's famous alumni found their success in academia and the arts, not the business world.

Frocer• 18 years ago

I agree with many things said in this article, but there are many plus sides of "elite" education that shouldn't be overlooked.

For instance, I am going to generalize here, but most people I know coming out of these "elite" schools are more driven. My only explanation is that drive is what got them into these school in the first place. And being surrounded by driven and smart people who aren't afraid to challenge conventional wisdom is by far the biggest advantage in my opinion

Disclaimer: I went to a public university for a year before I transferred to an Ivy League school.

run4yourlives4• 18 years ago

I wouldn't say they're more driven, but that they realize that their lot in life has no limits, whereas a standard university grad imposes limits on themselves - their dreams become hobbies, and work becomes work.

sspencer• 18 years ago

Spot-on.

I used to date a girl who went to Brandeis, which aspires to the Ivy League at every opportunity. In fact, by her admission it was the safety school of many who applied to Ivy League schools but were denied entry in the end. The students essentially had all the (sometimes subconscious) elitism of the Ivy Leaguers, combined with a massive chip on their shoulders due to their supposition that they were Ivy League material that mistakenly ended up at Brandeis. It was fascinating to read this article since she (and many of her colleagues) have many of the exact traits he describes, especially that "I have arrived" mentality.

Great submission!

run4yourlives4• 18 years ago

>"The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists."

That's probably the most profound argument against our society that I have yet seen in a one liner.

newt0311• 18 years ago

Since when dud "grabbing what you can get" become wicked especially once long term implications are accounted for?

run4yourlives4• 18 years ago

Last time I checked, our society frowns on me beating up old ladies for their money.

The comment addresses the seeming contradiction between our views on beating up old ladies, and outwitting dumb people. For example, witness the practices of many payday loan operations.

I'm not taking a stance one way or the other at this point, but I found the comment compelling.

rams• 18 years ago

"But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite."

I used to wonder about the creativity bit at my previous startup job. The guy was a serial entrepreneur, very clued in technically, was a great communicator, had a great sense of humour etc, etc, Heck, he even threatened to write code once. Wharton, HBS, Blah, Blah. Like I said technically qualified and clued in as well. But I couldn't understand why he had zero interest in doing anything original and was hell bent on chasing tail lights. All he was interested in was in making the right noises, adding features that would send out the right signals, etc. At that time,the area we were competing wide open and there were several gaps that could have filled in very creatively. Add to that, entirely clueless competition.

That's when I decided that Ivy league folks are not all that creative. They are very tribal in ways that you and I may not realise immediately.

timr2• 18 years ago

The premise is good, but the conclusion is flawed.

There are Ivy-league alumni who are creative and inspired, just as there are public school alumni who are insipid and shallow. The interesting question is, how could someone go through all of that high-quality education, and not gain the capacity for introspection that would allow him to be more original?

daveambrose• 18 years ago

This was a great article.

I actually just wrote about this last night: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224729

Spyckie• 18 years ago

They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

Anyone else feel like they're in this boat?

krschultz2• 18 years ago

Probably most of the people here, we're the people who are actually interested in learning and doing not getting affirmation (a degree) of our worth. I am going to college, but to actually learn something and not for a piece of paper.

Interestingly I have heard from my friends at Harvard & Columbia that they are disappointed with the kids there, i.e. no one is actually an intellectual and everyone just seems to be legacy.

albertcardona• 18 years ago

Nearly by definition a hacker is someone who doesn't aspire to live in compliance.

What strikes me is how much the Ivy League issue bothers HN readers, measured by comment number and intensity. As if there was something unsaid in the lives of each of us, something profoundly disturbing.

sethg2• 18 years ago

Can I get reality checks here from some people who actually attended Ivy-league schools? The author's description of Yale doesn't match my experience with MIT very well, but of course, MIT isn't one of the Ivies.

neodude• 18 years ago

I go to an Ivy League school, but not Yale - one of the lesser well-known ones. There are certainly people here who have "arrived", and are skating across, partying, until they get their job at Wall Street, but there are some genuinely interesting, 'searcher'-type people here as well. They do expel people here; the school administration is pretty harsh, actually. The academics aren't easy; sure, you can pick easy classes and get your A-, but your major classes are unlikely to not require some serious work, and you have to do a major. There's definitely a sense of severe detachment with the real world, but that may be more about the isolated location than the prestige.

MIT sounds awesome, actually - people in touch with reality! Humble people! People who don't expect it to be easy, and hence complain about things being so hard! Maybe I should have applied, but apparently their financial aid isn't too good.

When I visited Yale, their sense of entitlement was very, very stifling. From anecdotal comparisons, Yale seems way relaxed, academically, as well.

akd• 18 years ago

> apparently their financial aid isn't too good

nonsense. Harvard, MIT, and Princeton have the best financial aid in the country (besides of course Olin, Cooper Union, and the military academies...)

sethg2• 18 years ago

There's a cultural norm at MIT that you should complain about how hard your workload is, but I don't think that really counts as humility. Students are usually too busy to think about their social class.

kingkongrevenge• 18 years ago

Blowhard nerd with an ego wonders why he only gets along with nerds. What else is new.

And correlation is not causation. He never stops to ask whether the brats he's complaining about are simply drawn to elite education and not at all produced by it. The idea that college fundamentally changes people seems far fetched to me.

aston• 18 years ago

MIT probably counts as one of the "elites," Ivy or not. But I would say my experience there runs counter to a lot of the points in this article.

The diversity at MIT is not only geographical and racial, but also cultural, socioeconomic, sexual, and anything else you'd care to measure. The culture is not at all self-affirming; most students come in wondering how they got in and leave glad to have made it to a degree. Engineering's obviously well-respected, but it's clearly not a glamorous profession, so that chase for social status and immeasurable wealth is really downplayed since most good engineers won't get there. And MIT students say they went to school in Boston (rather than Cambridge) not out of noblesse oblige, but because lots of people think it's in Michigan.

I guess the "mind and hands" ethic grounds you a little.

geebee2• 18 years ago

that's a very good point. I posted earlier that I think the experience of going to Berkeley was very different from Harvard because it's a public, but some of the difference may be attributed to the culture of Engineering. I've met MIT and Stanford engineering grads, and I definitely don't get the same vibe I get from the Ivy-Lawyer types.

rcoder2• 18 years ago

> ... that chase for social status and immeasurable wealth is really downplayed since most good engineers won't get there

I think that this is an excellent observation, but I also think it's worth noting that many good engineers don't care if they get "there". If you're naturally inclined to find reward in problem-solving, then trained in how to solve progressively more complicated (and therefore rewarding) problems, the value comes from that activity, rather than in accumulating wealth.

Many engineers I've known are anything but "grounded," especially when it comes to their opinion of their own technical prowess, but that doesn't necessarily make them money-motivated.

geebee2• 18 years ago

I enjoyed the article as well, very insightful. However, I wish the writer had commented a bit more on the sharp divide between top publics and ivy-type institutions. The differences between a UCLA student and a Yale student are also very stark, but in a way that is different from the distinctions drawn in this article.

As a product of UC's (UC San Diego Math/English major followed by MS in Engineering at Berkeley), I know my experience was utterly different from an Ivy, mainly because I attended Columbia Law school for one semester before dropping out to get the MS in Engineering. I learned that you can absolutely sit on your thumb and get through an elite law school at an Ivy. Berkeley engineering was as brutal and uncaring as Math at UCSD: one mistake, and your ass is out.

I'd say that students at top public universities aren't coddled like Ivy Leaguers, and they're more acutely are aware of the possibility of failure, but still have the opportunity to succeed on the highest level and work with the top researchers in their fields (this isn't just true of Berkeley, it's true of many large, research oriented publics, like Texas, Washington, Michigan, Illinois, as well as UCLA, UCSD, etc...) Check out rankings for PhD programs and you'll see a heavy representation of these schools, especially in Engineering and the Sciences.

Overall, I'd say that the danger isn't an elite education, its a culture of entitlement. Nobody leaves Berkeley feeling entitled to a damn thing, and almost everyone feels like they got knocked around a bit. Part of the reason is the sheer number of undergrads at these publics. Berkeley may have a great faculty, but you have to compete with four-five times the number of undergrads to get there. No wonder Berkeley is a little more willing to grade hard and kick people to the gutter. You just can't coddle 24,000 undergrads. You have to start shedding them.

And there's the problem - Berkeley may be, uh, character building, but does that sound like a fun way to spend years 18-22? You have a better chance of making your Venture Capital connections at Stanford or Harvard. Kinda sucks, but membership does have its privileges, and honestly, doesn't it sound better to go to a school that won't give you a C in physics and deny you entry to the CS major?

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

I've had a few Harvard and Princeton friends, and we related to each other just fine. They were just normal people that had a good education. They had no problem hitting on bartenders, talking about sports, rubbing elbows for jobs, or doing any of the other things that normal people do.

Methinks the English prof likes to be dramatic.

justokay• 18 years ago

Having done my undergrad at an Ivy League institution, I can say without a doubt that everything mentioned in the article is absolutely true. I would even go so far as to say that most of my peers were for the most part semi-competent (on good days), driven individuals with either the skill and nurturing to game the system. The result is a fairly disappointing group of people who care more about a Wall St./Big Consulting job, but honestly, admissions officials care little to change the system, so this is the result. That said, however, many of the undergrads I have TAed for at Berkeley have the same mindset, with the exception that the Wall St. job is now a job at Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc.

To a certain extent, we shouldn't care about Ivy League institutions, because in the end, they are just a name, right? What is sad, though, is that there are brilliant professors at these universities having to teach these pathetic students, and not those who actually care and have some skill in a particular subject. What is sad is that parents, employers and institutions themselves proclaim that these students are the best and the brightest and we believe them. What is sad is that the resources of the Ivy League institutions are widening compared to strong public/private universities, but the "elite" institutions are not giving these resources to those who can best take advantage of them (I think what should have been more carefully scrutinized was Harvard President Drew Faust's comments a few months ago that Ivy League institutions will have the best scientific research because they have the most money/best profs, and that other institutions with fewer resources should work on "smaller problems" - the most disgusting thing I have heard in a long time). In short, the whole system is powerful, yet completely broken.

If, by some luck of lottery (at least in my case), you are someone who really cares in this "elite" environment, once you get past the disappointment of not relating to your peers, you have a great opportunity to do research for professors who are not only brilliant, but also very helpful since you are one of very few who care. I just hope that the many others like me who did not win the lottery get the same chances I do. I know at Berkeley, the grad students are given tremendous opportunities with respect to research (with probably only slightly more money concerns than places like Stanford/MIT), but it's very tough for an undergrad to get the same opportunities. I know I wouldn't have survived as an ugrad here, but I'm not sure if other institutions have similar environments.

bokonist• 18 years ago

I agree with most of his criticisms, but disagree strongly with his conclusion. My main beef with the Ivy League is that it neither trains people to be productive nor broadens minds. I don't really don't think it's possible for a government funded institution to broaden minds ( and yes, even the Ivy's have massive amounts of government subsidies). The professors in the humanities and social sciences act much more like an insular priesthood than purveyors of free thought ( which is not surprising considering the origins of the university and the selection process of professors). Comments on news.yc show far more free thought than I found in sections at Yale. I also do not think Joe carpenters' tax dollars should be subsidizing Yalie English literature majors. It's amazing how professors advocate that the government should do more to tax the rich and give to the poor, while never realizing that state funding for higher education is among the most regressive government spending that exists.

The university functions essentially as a gatekeeper to various credentialized professions ( scientist, professor, doctor, lawyer, civil service). As gatekeeper, it really does not need to educate you. Students have been selected for high enough IQ that they will learn what they need in grad school or on the job. The school's main job is to teach you to love the school, that the school is responsible for everything good in your life, and that the school makes you special. That way, when you end up making money, you will be sure to send money back to the school that was responsible for such happy times.

gunderson• 18 years ago

Great article. Even better news.yc comments.

cap4life• 18 years ago

I went to an Ivy League school and based on my experience, I found the author's comments to be exaggerated. How in the world could he not find anything to speak to the plumber about? Furthermore, why should he blame it on class differences when it was probably more of a case of social inadequacy? Although there are many ivy leaguers who major in econ or finance in order to work at an i-banking or big consulting firm in nyc, there are others who have different goals. My friends consisted of the latter and we created our own space within our school while still feeling very much a part of campus life.

keefe• 18 years ago

I went to a borderline elite school, Notre Dame. Many of the students had this sort of an elitist attitude. However, I noticed that those students who aspired to true greatness - who saw Einstein, Newton etc. as setting the bar - often had a more humble attitude. I think that this is because such an attitude is a hindrance imho, a waste of energy.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

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