The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
theamericanscholar.org
theamericanscholar.org
But, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I turned down a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities of my home state. I think I made the right call and I think I understand the impetus behind the writing of this article.
In a nutshell, if education is empowering, but pursuing that education actually narrows your life choices, then perhaps there is some flaw somewhere. For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder and this may come at great personal cost.
I was in my late 40s before I really understood how incredibly upper class my mother's values are. We didn't have much money when I was a kid -- or so I thought, though it turns out that is not as accurate as I believed at the time -- and I never thought of myself as upper class.
It took me a lot of years of intentionally walking away from this deeply rooted expectation in order to really reclaim my life for myself in a way that allows me to get what I want, not for me to become what society expects me to be.
So while I get that most people are not going to understand that there is a genuine cost involved and will simply sneer at the idea that there is any down side, as someone who recognized that downside at a young age and walked away, I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people and it does harm them and it does definitely harm their ability to be good leaders for the common man.
No one gave me an extra kicker. I turned my scholarship down for personal reasons, not because I was bought out by some competing school.
My older brother learned this the hard way—he listed a school (October of junior year) that he decided (April of senior year) not to attend. He lost the $8k in scholarship money that he could have gotten from the school he attended—which he could have gotten had he responded "undecided".
Yeah but thats a choice, whereas being poor is enforced.
Thats why an elite education is an advantage.
The article is horrible self indulgent drivel ... "you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you". They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
I feel like you missed his argument by about 3 words.
The author isn't saying that an elite education offers no advantage. He's saying that it has downsides as well. It's not 100% advantageous, and yet we tend to think of it as so.
> They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
It certainly does a better job than isolating yourself within a very narrow band of culture. In my experience, that's just how cultural experience works.
If you spend all your time hanging out with rich, smart, successful people, it's only going to make it harder for you to identify with people who aren't. If you spend all of your time hanging out with white people, you're more likely to feel awkward when you go to the black part of town. Etc. And the opposites are also true.
So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.
Rules made by elite are often rules made for the benefit of the elite as well. They often completely overlook the needs of the rest of the people and these rules may benefit the elite at the expense of the masses.
It is one of the reasons I walked away from my scholarship. I am unwilling to exercise power in that manner.
I don't care about diversity in leadership. I care about leadership that doesn't flush the whole system down the toilet so thoroughly as to cut even their own throats in the process.
If you're in the position of having elite status thrust upon you, it's generally in everyone's interest that you actually be good at that, and not just told that you're good at it because you followed the rules.
We must assume that most people, most of the time, regardless of their apparent status or agency, are not strong-willed philosophers, but prisoners to scripted expectations and obligations. We will all try to avoid struggle and have it easy, and in doing so condemn ourselves to the life of the living dead by staying in an ever-diminishing comfort zone. And for someone who is in this state to step into a role with great power and then coast along without vision or direction - well, that sure does describe a lot of people!
The other day I read a comment observing that commenters here have an almost Pavlovian response that compels them to disagree with the article. That seems right to me. A while ago I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300542, which touches on similar themes.
People bounce off a word choice or something in the first paragraph then either stop reading or skim.... then post about it.
'Upper class' means generational wealth and status, your grandfather was wealthy, a diplomat, and admiral, head of a large multinational, and you can trace your lineage back at least 8 generations, and likely back to before you were even Americans ... your family has had status for that long.
But yes - some people have 'high standards of behaviour', are genteel, polite, articulate, conscientious, well mannered etc. but don't have a lot of money. Many upper-middle class, even middle class types were like this just a generation and a half ago. I suggest fewer people are exactly that now, as the mores of society have shifted quite a lot in many ways.
Everybody in the upper class definitely knows they are in the upper class. It's not a 'revelation' you get when you are an adult.
Likely quite a few people think they are in the upper class and really are not.
I'm going by classical definition here, not the 'new world' American version of upper class, which is usually just economic.
That's not the definition used by the person you're replying to, so I'm not sure what your point is.
There is only one classical definition of upper class, the other is the very generic 'economic' version.
The commenter is clearly not referring to 'economic' upper classes as he referred to 'behaviours' 'social standing' 'expectations' etc..
He indicated his family once had a noble title but sold it - this is definitely the classical version of 'upper class'.
You want a 'pop culture' reference for actual 'upper class' (though it's 100 years ago) -> Downton Abbey.
> I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people
(emphasis mine)
For my business, the advantage is initial credibility to customers, but there's so much work beyond that. The software has to be useful, the sales process has to be navigated, and the customer has to be trained and supported.
I've realized life is what I make of it. If I want to converse with my plumber, then we will have a great conversation. If I find building a business fulfilling, then I will build a business. Cornell didn't teach me to do these things; Cornell also didn't teach me not to do these things. We had a diverse student body: this is how I think, and it's different from the author.
The key to me, is that they have a choice then and have choices later in life... you can learn to be not_rich=middle_class at a lot of different times in your life. Many of them will make you unhappy.
Perhaps it's a bit worse going to an Ivy League where everyone else is the same, but you could say that about staying in the same state, or joining the military (which has many different people, but an enforced culture).
In reality I don't think there is any significant difference in terms of education quality between the top #1 university and #100 for any given field.
But the difference in terms of opportunities after finishing MIT vs finishing some other good university is massive. It seems that if an investor or prospective employer hears the word 'MIT', 'Harvard', 'Stanford' or 'Yale' when you make a pitch, somehow you're considered to be much smarter than the rest.
I think it's partially due to this elitist mindset. 'Elites' seem to think that people who went to an elite college are many times smarter than everyone else - But the real difference is actually social connectivity.
People who went to an elite institution are closer to capital - This gives them more influence. They are more likely to become investors and employers themselves. Their elitist world view (rooted in the false perception that they make up an intellectually distinct group) means that they are more likely to hire/fund people who also studied at elite universities.
Elites think that people like them congregate around knowledge, but in reality, they congregate around financial capital disguised as knowledge.
You are overthinking it. Real elites, like everyone else, simply like what they know already; and they know those schools because they have been there, or know a lot of people who have been there, so they can evaluate the sort of challenges other pupils went through in a way that makes them more confident.
At its core, this is elitism in the oligarchic/aristocratic sense, not in the intellectual one.
It's not so much an issue of quality as it is brand recognition. I went to a top 20 State school, that is to say top 20 among State schools, and while, to me (if I can say so without sounding self-aggrandizing) that's a pretty good ranking, all told, not once in my life have I heard my school discussed in any media whatsoever as an intellectual powerhouse.
The top 'brands' get the largesse of the praise, and the lesser schools are left to fight for the scraps. I sense the balance shifting somewhat but nonetheless the attitude of 'if it costs more, it must be better' seems utterly pervasive.
I yearn to be proud of my education.
I yearn to be one of the 'cool kids', and I don't think it's because I have no sense of personal worth or that I am self-marginalizing. I simply think there is a crisis of hubris that we overlook in favor of pointing out instances where the 'have nots' do well.
For every kid from the hood who makes good, there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of upper management jobs handed to those who attend schools based on the meritocracy of wealth.
It is astonishing. It is the crux of why our cultural stagnation is reaching critical mass (see current President-elect for more on that topic, I mean seriously, who thinks Donny got into Wharton through acumen and not the bravado wealth affords the ineffably idiotic?).
My point is that your summary resonates hard with my own experience and I appreciate your perspective.
One of the biggest lessons of my Ivy-league education was, paradoxically, that it wasn't sufficient (or even necessary). At least not for the goals I wanted.
If you want access to the elite Wall St. or consulting jobs, then yes, you need it. Once you're in, it's almost impossible to be kicked out. Finish, interview, and you're on the path.
But I had longstanding doubts about the state of my actual education. Despite numerous engineering classes, I couldn't, for example, work out i^i in my head instantly.
Imagine someone asked you "Roughly, what do you think 2^512 to be?"
"I don't know exactly, but it's an enormous positive number, probably more than the atoms in the universe."
Ok. You should spit that out instantly. Now imagine someone asks "Roughly, what do you think i^i is?"
Is it positive? Negative? Real? Imaginary? Close to 1.0? Microscopic? Even if you eventually work it out after a minute, does your long delay mean you understood exponents or imaginary numbers? Is this something that should be solidified before, say, studying the Fourier Transform?
Despite scoring well in classes taught by famous professors, I couldn't answer such basic questions. This was literally middle school operations (exponents) used with high-school parameters (imaginary numbers). I was stuck -- and it didn't seem like anyone thought this a reasonable thing to understand.
It led me on a journey of self-education, but I needed to see firsthand that even in an Ivy-league environment, the basics could still be missed. It ended the fantasy that things were transformatively different in some other place -- it was up to me to fill the gaps.
ps. If you want to work out i^i in your head: https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding...
Instantly I spit out "a 4 followed by 153 zeros"
Now... looking it up it's actually more like a 13 followed by 153 zeros.
(I hadn't studied complex analysis when I wrote that post, learning it now. The various possibilities for the multi-valued solution follow a pattern however.)
Get your kids to do extracurriculars where they'll meet kids from lower-income households. It'll make them able to relate to them and understand them better.
Whether these extracurriculars would expose you to different ethnicities and world views is dependant on demographics.
I have never heard of community service as a requirement to graduate high school. (No school in my district had this requirement.)
Granted, I understand your overall point. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be accepted by "elite" colleges. In fact, I had applied to nearly 12 colleges that were highly respected in Computer Science and was rejected from all of them.
http://patch.com/california/redlands/2016-top-100-public-hig...
None of the top ten schools on that list seem to have a community service requirement [0].
There doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule regarding which schools do or don't have a community service requirement. Mission San Jose does, but Lynbrook does not.
[0] As determined by a quick google search for each to locate "$SCHOOL_NAME graduation requirements", followed by a quick scan for anything outside of required course credits.
Either way, your statement about the top 10 CA high schools is false. I attended Granada Hills Charter and San Marino high school (#1 and #7 respectively) and both do absolutely require community service. San Marino requires 40 hours over four years [1] and GHCHS requires 20 hours per semester [2]. A friend at Miramonte High School didn't have to do any community service but I recognize many of the schools on this list and can confirm they require community service. Searching for "graduation requirements" just gives you a list of credits you need but doesn't include community service or disciplinary rules for graduation.
[1] http://www.sanmarinohs.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=2241...
[2] http://www.ghchs.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_20226865/File/...
But sure, it looks like my naive search approach is inadequate, as it for the most part brought up credits (as you mentioned).
And to be fair, I don't think charter schools should be lumped in with the rest of the public schools, but that's probably just my opinion.
[0] http://cc.sduhsd.net/Counseling/Community-Service/ [1] http://www.lhs.fuhsd.org/resume
It's a general state-wide requirement in Maryland, for example. See http://coursebulletin.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/Home/Introduct... for reference.
And that's been the case for at least 20 years now.
And when you're there, talk to people. Not just ones who will help you climb the social ladder in whatever elite clubs and orgs you want to join. People of all stripes. It's a much more diverse group in every way than the author describes.
Honestly it sounds like the author was elitist and sheltered as a kid. And now they've realised this, but have decided to blame it on their university rather than deal with the fact that it was their own personal fault.
I spent my 20s working in STEM and living in between MIT and Harvard which meant that a large portion of my social circle was drawn from those schools. I see where both sides are coming from here. On one hand you're right in that there were also plenty of people in our circle who came from very different backgrounds. By and large these were normal people and not the sort of socially awkward weirdos the article describes.
On the other hand the article rings true at times. The bit about worrying about their occupation due to the 20 year reunion, I heard that exact thing countless times. The lack of recognition of the second chances to succeed or that they have a ridiculous social network that others do not was also a big thing. And through it all there was always a certain baseline, well, elitism. It was almost never direct but it was always there. It wouldn't be directed at the rest of us but you'd hear it amongst themselves, "I can't believe a Harvard graduate is doing that" when "that" is something that their good friend also does. That sort of thing.
But everything in life is a choice and if the author is so self aware of this "disadvantage", they have simple paths to fix it. Instead of people making more home food delivery start-ups, create one to help underprivileged get access to education or healthcare, etc.
The key take away for me is that if you decide to live your life based on someone else's terms, you'll never be truly happy. Create your own path on your journey.
With that said, my schools county still went for Hillary by about 20 points, so that's good.
He put his point at the end, and man is it a good one:
> The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.
I mean, just look at the crap Peter Thiel does in broad daylight, like funding lawsuits for vendetta-by-proxy and researching the blood of young people as a youth treatment. It's like Old Testament, incur the wrath-of-God type stuff (the blood, not the lawsuit), and the only thing that happens is Sam Biddle writes a screed and we go about our business.
As for the rest, to quote Dennis Hopper (IIRC) "I'm not crazy. I'm rich. Rich people are eccentric".
If I were on my game, I would have brought up Palantir and how they're helping roll out the infrastructure of our present and future police state.
Hmm, let's see.
Amazon employs 250k+ people; Alphabet employs 60k+; Facebook employs 15k+; Musk's companies employ 30k+; IBM employs 350k+; Intel employs 100k+; ... Palantir employs around 2000, but Alex Karp got to go to that meeting. I wonder who Palantir's biggest shareholder is...hmm?
P.S. The meeting also had Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Chuck Robbins (Cisco), and Safra Catz (Oracle)..and all three of Trump's children - who took seats from companies like HP, Dell, all telecomms, Xerox, and more. Seriously: fuck Peter Thiel.
I read this article some time ago, so pardon if my memory failed me.
Is it a place for intellectual growth and experience gaining for its own sake, or is it primarily for grooming & career preparation?
With tuition costs as they are, I'd argue that college is necessarily a career investment, almost entirely. And to view it any other way is either naively Romantic or somewhat deluded.
If I could really guarantee career success, social status, and great wealth, just by attending a school--I would.
If these schools really do grant entry to coveted and lucrative positions, and that's what they're selling to potential applicants, I don't see a problem. That's the product, and as products go, that's pretty darn good.
Personally, I think if elite education as entry-way to the upperclass--of and for itself--is an issue, then you're attending one of these schools for the wrong reasons.
Right now, it is often pretended that the goal of college is to learn, to grow, and to 'get an education'. This may have been true in the past, but today it is not. The goal of college is to prepare yourself for the work force, and any other view is somewhat financially irresponsible, whether your family has the money to blow, or not.
Moreover: much of the most important learning in life (intellectual and otherwise) happens outside of academia. It always has and always will. Schools can't do it all. If you aren't already intellectually curious, 4 years at Stanford--just by itself--won't change that. But if I can find a school that will be worth the investment of time and money for my career, one that will help me build a comfortable life for myself and support my family--then I think that investment is worthwhile, and I'll be happy to make it any day.
While I don't believe the author is directly incorrect in his claims of of university behavior/culture, I feel like most of the 'disadvantages' he lists are of his own decisions, whereas for a lot of people they are forced.
'Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me?'
There's nothing preventing the author from being a teach aside from his own mental barriers that he can overcome himself - I'm sure if he applied, most school boards would leap at the chance of having him. For others though, that simply isn't the case, and they have real, hard, economic/environmental barriers.
As a criticism, this article doesn't address the sciences. The availability of research money is a major reason to go to an elite science institution. If you want to do science, the best thing is to do it, and that usually means email a lab and asking to work there. More labs with more money probably means better opportunities.[0]
In the first defense, consider whether there's anything in this article that might also apply outside of elite colleges.
For instance:
But it isn’t just a matter of class. 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 was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college.
This resonates so much with what Daniel Ellsberg wrote to a young Henry Kissinger regarding levels of top-secret access:
Then, after you've started reading all this daily intelligence input ... you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools. ... it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. [1]
Finally, this article absolutely nails many of the patterns I have observed while at elite universities. For instance:
(If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) reminds me of when an acquaintence mentioned he was going to law school 'In Palo Alto'.
Or, one night at a party when I overheard a friend (future Rhodes scholar) say 'You know you're at <institution> when you use the term statistical variance at a theatre party!' Never mind that they'd used it incorrectly, it was emblematic to say the least.
[0](Please don't take this comment the wrong way - there are best-in-field professors at less-than-elite universities, but not as consistently). [1]http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsber...
However, I did still see these patterns, in others, and in myself.
But often when I did just say "Harvard", it became a big deal. Not always, but often.
It can make social situations weird. I socialise with a lot of people who are in the trades. I've had more than a few conversations killed when the person I'm talking with finds out I go to Harvard. Suddenly (again sometimes, not always) the person feels embarrassed because they aren't an intellectual, or unrefined, or something, and the conversation gets awkward fast.
It can also make some people just overestimate or overcare for you. I used to volunteer for a political party. The local organiser was nice and treated me well, like he treated everybody, but once he found out I went to Harvard he decided to give me double the attention, plus the cushy assignments, I guess in hopes of retaining me-- when really I just wanted to do the door knocking and phone calling like everyone else.
I wish that the name of the place I go to school didn't have cultural cachet far beyond its worth and that I could always just say it. But it does, especially where I'm from, where not many people have been anywhere near an Ivy. So sometimes I decide to not risk triggering this weird overblown cultural image, because I just want to be myself and not "that guy who goes to HARVARD". Many of my friends feel similarly. I don't know how this desire counts as noblesse oblige.
Totally different type of education, but the ultimate outcomes were roughly equivalent. We both went on to grad school (at top state universities) and both have done very well in our careers -- me in tech, her in pharma.
1) sent in the applications with the fees that I couldn't really afford and never even got a letter back. I figured it was a sign.
but the rest of the article is pretty interesting: the sense of entitlement, the one dimensional view of intelligence, and the SAT and prep track required to get to it all.
Somehow, this article reminded me of Catch in the Rye - especially the main character and his experiences in a prep school for college.
There’s an entirely different way of life there, entirely different life experiences, which lead to entirely different priorities, things you think about, and so on.
I’ve been in both circles due to family, people from the very bottom, and people from the very top, and you can’t just say "making small talk is just a skill".
And the other things you mention are also artifacts of this education: You only see this one perspective of life, which is so very different from what many other people experience, that you never even consider what their life might look like.
Smalltalk, like any communication, requires that you have a mental model of the person you talk with, but if you share none of their experiences, you can’t build such a mental model.
Although I wouldn’t recommend skipping college, I definitely recommend people to at least try to find a way with which they can experience the life through the eyes of a person of another social class at least once.
https://psmag.com/the-problems-with-william-deresiewicz-s-ne...
I do agree that a science professor would likely have an entirely different perspective.
The speech that the blog was paying homage to when it picked a name.
* The American Scholar || http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm
https://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes...
Other writers have recognized and described it too: http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html
Even our very own Michael O. Church: https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-Agnostics/mess...
I'm with Mz on this - we should start explicitly recognizing our caste system.
It's been helpful to me; once I figured out our castes and where I live in it, suddenly a lot of things clicked into place. For example, why do so many people not recognize me as white? It's because I don't give off the cultural signals of being upper caste (Brahmin in Moldbug's taxonomy) but I'm solidly within Brahim professional and social circles. Given these mismatched signals, Kashmiri or Argentinian seems like the most plausible hypothesis.
I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.
The best explanation I've seen of it is Chetan Bhaget's novel Half Girlfriend: http://amzn.to/2im0Cxq It's a masala romance novel, blah, but it's the only real discussion of the issue that I've seen.
He's also written a few newspaper columns on it: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/The-underage-optimi... http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/The-underage-optimi...
Very few people can even discuss these subtle, un-named caste systems, let alone argue against them. I can't stand Chetan Bhaget, yet I link to him anyway simply because he's really one of the very few who actually discuss it. Consider how difficult it is to even discuss Trump's victory in these terms as well.
I think that the best protection the caste system has is that we refuse to even give it a word.
Viva the difficult American social non system.
America does have 'classes' but they are completely different from the type of class system you'll find in the 'old world'.
Many self-made Americans would consider themselves 'upper class', by virtue of wealth, status and behaviour. But classically, you really can't 'move' into class, you pretty much have to be born into it. Or possibly marry into it.
Amongst the upper and upper-middle classes, the concept and practice of politeness ensures conversation. Children are taught at a young age to take an interest (or at least feign an interest) in the other person and think of a line of conversation that may be appropriate.
If you chat to a Brit and get beyond the weather, you'll notice that you will be asked a lot of questions. It's part conversation and part fact-finding. Some people would rather fall off the end of the Earth than ask where the other person went to school (i.e. it's rude to pry), but with 20 little questions we can work all that out and carry a conversation at the same time.
I always have to laugh when I see that phrase used by people who clearly don't know the derogatory connotations that it has carried since Halberstam's book of the same title.
I used to dream of being a rich man
Yeah, I swore I'd have it all some day
Once you taste it you will find
That it isn't worth a dime
'Till you're free enough to give it away
- Randy Stonehill
He who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.
- J. R. R. Tolkein
A golf club membership for example can cost $100,000. Some people will probably never save up that much, and if they did, they would never spend it in a golf club membership. But for some it's completely normal and part of their everyday lives.
Same with schools, same with restaurants, etc... by being strictly exclusive you set yourself apart from the rest and miss out on a lot of things.
Now, with today's technology, the best educators in the world can become accessible, on a read-only basis, to anyone. This is what we're starting to see, with the biggest brand-name universities exploring how to monetize such a system via MOOC's. When MOOC's mature, a lot of today's university admissions rituals will no longer make sense.
Take SATs for example -- a high school-agnostic measure of a student's capabilities. If instead, there were a standardized set of MOOC's, whose grading systems were trustworthy, then instead of approximating a student's ability to learn new material via a general standardized test, the course material itself is standardized, so SATs become redundant.
I can't wait to see where MOOC's go in the coming years, and "elite" education earn its name through means other than its exclusivity.
If you read the article, I think the author would disagree, as he refers to Yale and Columbia, not himself, as an elite education.
Here's a thought experiment. If Harvard's professors were swapped out for high school teachers, "elite" students would be less inclined to attend, and over several years, the quality of students at Harvard would almost certainly drop.
Conversely, if someone created a university with all the world's most renowned lecturers, in several years, "elite" students would likely be yearning to attend.
And I'm not clear on what you mean by "democratic elite." There would still be elite students. Two things would be different:
1) Their designation could be determined by cleaner data than was possible in a pre-MOOC world. In the current world, there are few clean baselines on which to evaluate students from different high schools, for example, which is one of the main reasons standardized tests like the SAT exist.
2) If we assume that a better lecturer will help increase a student's knowledge, regardless of the student's quality, then every student's knowledge could be maximized in the post-MOOC world, not just the small fraction that are able to gain entry to elite institutions.
If they were selling daisies at the airport they'd be "rescued" and medicated.
Going to an elite school
1. denies you the opportunity to empathize with anyone beyond a narrow spectrum of socioeconomics and culture
2. anoints you with a sense of self-worth and entitlement that is, if earned at all, only founded on a narrow set of skills: analytic ability and hard work
3. admits you into the class of seductive "entitled mediocrity", which allows you to fail spectacularly with essentially no real repercussions
4. constraints you, via social pressure, to a narrow set of "prestigious" career paths, among which you might not find the one that is truly right for you
5. shelters you from failure and encourages the idea that it is unacceptable, leaving you less likely to take on risk which might be necessary for growth and fulfillment
6. "is profoundly anti-intellectual", because students are encouraged more to acquire power and all that is necessary for it than cultivation of one's intellect, which requires such slothful indulgences as sitting in solitude, journaling, or even making time to have a relationship with a close friend
TL;DR for the TL;DR: elite schools' "real purpose is to reproduce the class system", instead of to grow their students' minds.
I'll add that when I read Deresiewicz's article in the New Republic and then went to his talk on my undergrad institution's campus, his tone was markedly more bitter than it is here in 2008. I suppose the situation has not improved in his eyes.
For example, many live in San Francisco, work for Facebook or Google, and do little of note besides the following:
- have an "interesting" hobby - work out at the gym - hang out with friends at the bar or club - work on their career - start a "start-up" - travel - ... other very self-serving pursuits
Most recently, I am very disappointed in my fellow alumni for not standing up for this professor:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex-stanford-...
And actually, I am seeing to it that alumni and current students do something about this. Enough is enough.
Sounds like a let down to me.
I want to know, how does it feel to have gone to a place like Stanford, only to end up in the same position as someone who went to a state university?
Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplus technology available even today, because the englightened folks in charge of soviet production focused a bit too much on the first-order "needs" of soviet society like Mosin Nagants and Nixie Tubes, whereas those foolish and vain Americans were wasting their time and elite educations following market demands for frivolous things that didn't serve society, like Color TV and food production beyond subsistence.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
Of course, a whole lot of poor people (probably the other 5/6 bn) won't be affected immediately but some years later they also start benefitting and today it's almost a (used) 100$ laptop per child equivalent (except for the poorest).
You can argue the same way about mpesa, bitcoin and other innovations/products.
Do charities have a similarly fantastic metric?
Example: Global warming is a result of the "market", an unexpected consequence from decades of growth. It can only be countered by coordinated action.
To get back to the topic at hand: The "elites" should be the ones who lead such a transformation instead of, say, just looking to advance their carreers.
Just a few related questions: Who is going to define who are the elites? If you say the people, then we end up in a democracy just like we have already and yet, I cannot see any optimization.
What if climate change can be evaluated not only as a single metric but as a tradeoff? E.g., nuclear energy vs CO2? Or cost of each marginal ton of CO2 saved vs. the things you can do with the same money (e.g. a few cancer therapies). Are there even appropriate "elites" who are experts in all of the above areas?
So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc
And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
By the time he's done, Bill Gates will have done more to impact disease and save lives in the world than probably thousands of your volunteers, yet he was a techie that built a start-up and sounds like the people you deride. Not everyone has to walk the paths you've set out as the proper way to do good in the world. And sometimes it comes later in life.
The problem with the article to me is that the author makes a lot of assumptions, maybe because of his upbringing and his lack of social intelligence. Not every one looks down on people of different social or wealth classes, particularly students who come from lower income or homes with less educated parents.
And more and more often, it does not come at all. The effective noblesse oblige of, say, the New England rich is by-and-large dead outside of New England in favor of a very exploitative, plantation-society-esque Southern "liberty".
There are enclaves where this isn't the case. It's hard to call San Francisco one, because the city and its very, very rich residents have done all they could to chase the poors away. (It is one of many reasons I refuse to consider living there.)
The fact that you chose to make this argument demonstrates you are using your evolved utility-heuristic hardware and not any sort of rational approach.
What you are probably doing is doing is clamping the utility of $100 to zero ("not significant" is the key concept). Then your brain, which is already bad at multiplying utilities, multiplied roughly zero by ten million people, got roughly zero, and then you made this comment.
Actually, it might not have even done that last part. It sounds like you jumped from "$100 is basically nothing" to "might as well not even consider the number of people gaining utility". It's a good effort-saving heuristic.
So that's the first problem with your argument; it's wrong from a utility theoretic perspective. It doesn't matter if the per-person amount is small. You have to multiply it by the number of people being affected (and your utility function's multiplier on their utility function).
The second problem with your argument is that you're making sort of a fallacy of composition. It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities. You gain almost nothing from any single bite of food, but it would be wrong to use this fact to claim that you don't gain anything from eating. Even if Google or Apple or Costco or Toyota have individually only contributed a few tens of thousands of dollars of utility to my life, their collective contribution represents the total utility I get from modern industrialization, which is very large. Similarly, if 0.01% of a population 10,000,000 can provide an "insignificant" $100 of utility to each person in that population, that's $100,000 of utility per person. For modern software, where marginal costs are negligible, we get incredible economies of scale.
Facebook and Google reach billions of people, providing at least tens of dollars of utility per year (probably more like hundreds), which translates to trillions of dollars of utility over decades. That's probably more utility than has ever been gained from charity.
At bulk scales, like we have in today's society, the kind of analysis your brain does by default doesn't work. It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people.
You are stating the opposite viewpoint without any support. And I don't agree with it.
Re: "It gives the wrong answer, which is why people think it's better to help a small charity case than do something that's mildly beneficial for a huge number of people."
I don't know why people are saying I think people should go to work for charities. This is totally a straw man argument, as my opinion is that charities often are a waste of talent.
Re: "It's true that $100 isn't much in the grand scheme of things for an individual. But all the utility you ever experience in your entire life is just the sum of lots of (arbitrarily) small utilities."
I agree. But the vast majority of people, especially in Silicon Valley, think this way. At least a few people should be tackling big problems. For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, we are deploying insecure IoT at scale, which is effectively building a weapon for our enemies to use against us. I'm hoping that someone is going to do something about this. Note that working on this problem is not entirely altruistic -- it is likely to be a very profitable endeavor.
There's a lot to address here. To be honest -- and I'm going to put this as politely as I can -- this discussion is not very interesting to me and I am going to bow out.
But in general, I will suggest that you stick to the facts. Calling someone, e.g. me, "irrational" is irrational. To turn it back to you, I think what you've done is you've learned about a theory in school (that I don't agree with) and you're merely checking to see if I'm in compliance with it. You should do your own thinking.
In addition to serving society, this would also be self-serving. I have to imagine someone working on this would become fairly wealthy or at least very eminent.
As far as I know, something close to nothing is being done about this problem.
Nothing I have seen in the case indicates anything beyond a large amount of awkwardness and lack of comfort. Most of the evidence that she was actually discriminated against with regards to tenure is entirely circumstantial.
Having been intimately involved with these systems while at Stanford I have seen how cunningly many intelligent people at these institutions co-opt and leverage the prevalently liberal political attitudes towards race and gender issues for personal motivations, interests and grievances.
In fact I served as a residence assistant and witnessed someone who is now a very prominent politician wrongly accuse one of our students of racial discrimination. Having known the accused student ... I knew for a fact that no discrimination was involved. The student that made the accusation instantly leveraged the incident on several public forums to build political and social capital. His entire persona was based around "fighting racial oppression" -- even when said oppression was constructed purely for personal gain.
What do you think the average person in the world does? 99.9% of people are even more boring than the person you described. It's hard to find people who are more interesting than that.
> other very self-serving pursuits
There's no relationship between boringness and self-centeredness. It sounds like you might be incorrectly conflating "boring" with your own definition of "meaningless" (in a moral sense). I don't think charity work is likely to be less boring than any "self-serving" interest.
Yes, perhaps some groups within some universities do contain individuals with certain proclivities that lead to cause certain behaviors that lead to certain outcomes, but not all!
Wasn't Bush II a Yale graduate?
I also remember a HN comment on it saying the blame for writer's inability to communicate across the class divide was more likely a profound lack of social skills. A point of view I'm still not entirely sure I agree or disagree with.
I think that's exactly why everyone is on about "liberal hubris."
It's because people like you who are so self-absorbed that you write articles about how you're too educated to talk to plumbers and how you sympathize with others who feel the same way.
When you discount everyone who disagrees with you for being "uneducated" and gullible, it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me that many would accuse you overwhelming hubris.
I'll have to track down the original HN thread, it'd make some interesting reading.
It's just that understanding of others is relatively rare in the first place among all humans. It's just way more annoying from elites because they tend to think they're very open minded, even when they are not.
In my experience, it is independent of education. I've dealt with the social service people early in my career and encountered people with true empathy (along with folks who had no business giving directions much less life advice). You find these folks in many careers and at many educational levels. If anything the focus required for intensive education might push people away from the understanding of others.
Rule of thumb for me, "^Street smarts^, will kick ^smart, smarts^ arse, most times." Important to remember this if you live by "'wit', not name".
Now there is a useful quote to carry around in your head.
I loved my boarding school because above all the normalcy led to emotional stability so kids could focus on themselves instead of drama. very little drama, very little dating. But everyone was actually very nice and happy. At the same time I felt like an alien even if noone intended it, because it was very obvious 98% of the students there had no clue what an elite system they were in. It also made it difficult to deal with conversations outside of school, like say going to my parents friends house for dinner. "oh you go to THAT school, good for your for being on scholarship. I bet the kids there are spoiled brats. how do you DEAL WITH THEM!?" and i would awkwardly have to explain that they were the nicest people I had ever met, and people went out of their way to make me feel included.
It was like switching between two alternate realities everyday, when the entire population of each world you pivoted between had no idea the other existed, and if it was mentioned, each world mentioned the other in immediate disdain, while perhaps the boarding school world had the more appropriate and politically polished "oh" to anyone who was not at our school. It was not even disdain just kind of like, a blankness in being able to relate to the outside world, but it was not because they were horrible or mean, just that we were all very busy, and to be clear, i much preferred the elite world I lived in, because everyone was so nice and I did feel more at home there than anywhere else in the world.
The gates and doors I had at my own elite beautiful campus of a boarding school were by far the nicest buildings i had ever been in, and it made me feel safe and loved and protected, a world that took care of me and cared about me more than anyone else ever had in the world.
This has been an advantage for me going forward. I got a degree in Electrical Engineering and ComputerScience, I also happen to be female, so being an alien/minority in almost every aspect has become normal for me.
But I can say ive adjusted so much better in the "real world" where competition is high in engineering and software dev, and noone is coddling you. Alot of my friends who took the same majors as me and went to get a job after their Beachelors like I did, had severe adaptation problems and it almost seemed childish to me but I realized I had lived my whole life in lower middle class life, I could carry on a conversation with anyone, and I was not afraid of venturing outside of my comfort zone. That may be a little bit gratiuitous, obviously I dont speak every language and things do scare me and I deal with the imposter syndrome almost daily but in general my ability and willingness to talk to anyone I meet while I'm out, and be creative in the jobs I want and understand complex economic and social impacts of the industries I work is much more developed.
Ultimately the key to evolution is adaptation and I would say I have more emotional adaptability to people and have a more intuitive understanding of economic impacts that have caused so much strife between upper and lower class, the dissapearing middle class, in a more human way.
Because while each of these worlds seem to be (in my opinion) more curious and therefore scared or clueless about the other world which they don't understand, inherently more judgmental without meaning to be, how i see each one is with personal memories of friends, real people, christmas dinners with the poor neighbors and also the incredibly rich girl I knew in boarding school who now interns at Louis Vuitton, and when other people assume the worst about her, I remember how her family let me live at their house when my parents were going through rough times, and her parents treated me as one of their own, and never made me feel inadequate, took my mind of horrible situations at home by bringing me along with their families to fundraisers and elaborate parties where I had a neverending choice of designer gowns to choose from "my closet is your closet" so in no way I feel left out. I remember her genorosity more than her evasive richness, I remember her heart to give and inclusiveness more than I remember her designer clothes, I remember her sense of humour more than I remember her aloofness to the daily grind of the outside world.
And to the real world I grew up in, I remember the extreme struggles of my parents as children and have grace for their inadequacies emotional and financial raising me, I remember the frustration of the neighbor who had been laid off due to a series of globalizing optimizations in his industry that were beyond his time and energy and education to understand, and how it culminated in judgement and frustration in an assumption at dinner about the kids at my school.
I try to remember the humanity in these people and it is much easier to do when you have personal experiences to associate on both ends of the spectrum.
I definitely think everyone could stand more to put themselves outside of their comfort zone, and habitat for humanity on a Saturday for a resume booster is not exactly going to provide the intimate and emotional experiences needed to understand how complex and divided we are as a nation, and just how deep cultural influences play into our prejudices against the unknown.
It was a pretty impressive example of culture shock. I'm better for having escaped the Franklin County, Maine, bubble and experiencing it, but it took some adjusting.
"Not to be rich" doesn't necessarily mean "precariously afloat."
I choose to interpret that line charitably, and take it to mean that many high impact roles in society (especially various roles in education) do not pay richly, so having the luxury to deprioritize income should mean that today's young Americans might be better equipped to focus on social impact first.
Edit: I saw that you edited your post and removed what you originally said. That's too bad. I would much prefer that we try to have a productive discussion than to just drop a curtain on the conversation.
> How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York?
You face them with your head held high. You chose a career that you find fulfilling. You're improving the lives of children, passing your hard-earned knowledge on to another generation.
From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get.
You're literally just reiterating the arguments the article makes except with a clearly visible chip on your shoulder.
Edit: Perhaps you should make your statement in one post instead of editing over and over again. You seem far too emotional to make a rational argument here.
Go ahead an ask anyone accepted into Yale if they'd trade it off for the same major at po-dunk State U.
What do you think their response will be?
Don't be daft. This is trash.
It's quite possible to be mostly satisfied with something and still have good reasons to be dissatisfied, and it's perfectly reasonable to write about those reasons. I doubt Deresiewicz would say that "po-dunk State U" is better.
It made an impression on me. I checked out the 2nd tier of school and found a bunch of white bread people from Jersey looking forward to a career in ibanking or medicine.
I ended up in a good state school with real people and no debt. I lost the opportunity to work at McKinsey or whatever, but I consider that a plus.
Fundamentally, the best thing hat I learned about in college was myself. Surrounding myself with type-As on some track would have stifled that. Honestly, I'm really happy with how life has turned out this far!
Mind you, I think personal greatness is completely unrelated to social class. I'm not saying "elite education means you have issues", I don't think it's a zero-sum game at all. But having grown up in a town teeming with millionaires, I have to laugh at the idea that many rich aren't positively hunted by their own defects. Yes, they can buy an island, but they can't sit still on it, they cannot be with themselves, they cannot reflect on themselves. They are captured, driven, mad, and get hysterical when they are recognized and pitied. So they have to keep company that has the same fears, like an unspoken pact. It's like drug addicts hanging out with drug addicts instead of the people who would ask them wtf they are doing with their life.
They can't read many great minds and even get half of what they say; sure, neither do many poor people, but that's more because they don't have the time or the language is too bloated for them, not because there is some inherent vampire/garlic type incompatibility. If you discuss the exact same subjects with a "normal" person in normal words, they in my experience are less likely to throw up all sorts of deflections, while other people realize this stuff is fit to dissolve the lies their lives are and get scared.
Fear is not strength, and powerful people have many options, but when those options don't include letting go of power they are basically slaves as well. The highest echelons of power are impersonal and systematic, only entropy and madness gain from them, no human person; and it takes personal strength to sail in such an environment and not end up as a bundle of sticks held together by delusions. It takes fierce motherfuckers, which is the opposite of people who can't answer a straight question, as many people in the "upper echelons" demonstrate. Pester me not with their pocket calculator stuff :P
That's pretty much 90% of the difference I notice between Yalies and State school students.
This is not fair to say. Many, if not most ivy leagues go onto have relatively normal lives.
I have a friend in Vermont who went to Yale. She is a 'marketing manager'. I don't even think she could pay for her education unless her (doctor) father did.
I took a tour of Stanford, the girl went to Dartmouth. I don't think the people giving recruiting tours of Stanford earn all that much.
Surely, it opens a lot of doors, and there are probably industries in which it can give one a cosy path, but it's not the 'guarantee' of anything.
Anyone notice that some the most "elite" schools are total no-shows in AI research?
The elite typically hold jobs in consulting, finance, management, government, etc. that require a lot of word-smithing and people skills.
The big blind spot for technologists is thinking that technology is central to everything. It is not. If you look at how society is organized, it's the folks with the people skills who are on top. People who are good with technology work for them.
Banks haves acres of class A office space filled with people preparing powerpoints to show each other. Those jobs will go away.
And those are the people who hire management consultants.