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Comment by laidoffamazon | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty clear the Stanford elite think of the people who go to public schools as either lazy or stupid, perhaps both (maybe add in a dash of "NPC"? That's the new mold of thinking it seems). They'll whine and complain but they won't change their preferences because the point of Stanford is to get away from the types of people that go to UNC.

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I actually got looks of pity from people at an Ivy League party when I told them I went to a state school (the top public school in my state, no less)!

I really believe that places like Stanford (and even top Greek orgs at “lower tier” schools) are elitist in a way that’s harmful to society. They are pay-to-play for the vast majority of attendees (not saying you don’t have to be smart to get in - but the number of smart applicants is far greater than the number of slots and they consistently favor applicants who can pay $100k/year in tuition[1]). They’re also a straight shot to the institutions that control the world - my friends who went to Ivy Leagues now work in government and media, while my state school friends work in tech (not FAANG but startups and medium sized firms), public health, and non-profits.

Perhaps most disturbingly, these elite schools do in fact seem to be the ones least open to independent thought. At that Ivy League party, when people talked about something serious (not gossip or TV or whatever), it was inevitably their career trajectories, real and imagined. The parties at my state school had discussions ranging from local politics to heterodox economic theories.

The place where I disagree with the article is the idea that these elite schools were once unique bastions of free thought. Research your local public university and you’ll find that they were a hub for, as an example, anti-war protests. Kent State was Kent State, not Harvard or Yale.

I think (and this is my guess, not anything I have research to back) the “anti-fun” shift is some strange combination of healthy respect for the people (mostly underpaid janitors, groundskeepers, etc.) who have to clean up after the shenanigans of rich children and a collective fear of having an image of yourself doing something stupid preserved forever on social media.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/coll...

This reminds me of an interview with Noam Chomsky, intellectual and professor at MIT, where he said that he can't prove it but he suspects students at the elite universities are no smarter than the ones at public universities. They're simply more obedient. There's plenty of bright folks that refuse to jump through the hoops necessary to get accepted at the elite schools.

I dunno about Stanford, but my interactions with MITers gives me the same impression. If you didn't attend to MIT or one of the other big schools you're lesser.

Maybe that's what these schools should focus on when they teach compassion, diversity and inclusion.

This is true. When I interviewed at a large investment bank for a position as a developer on a low-latency market making desk after completing my PhD in EE at the University of Washington, the managing director, who had a Master's from Stanford, wondered "why UW" and asked "why didn't you go to Stanford?"

Virtually all the traders were from elite schools. Devs and quants had diverse backgrounds.

(I got the job.)

Its interesting how here in the Czech Republic all the good & famous universities (Charles University, Masaryk University, Mendel University, Czech Technical University, etc.) are all public schools while private ones are hardly even on the radar.

Sure, same for Oxbridge, the Canadian schools (Toronto, UBC, Waterloo, McGill), the Japanese schools, the ETHZ, EPFL...

Stanford is also significantly more selective than all of those institutions. But unlike the IITs or Tsinghua, which are as or more selective, it's not based on grades and scores, but also additional class signals.

They’ve all actually read Kundera.

Someone ignored me completely when I mentioned the school I went to (ranked like 110th in USA) and I felt pretty bad.

I know elite college people are smart but I feel like they can also be really mean/petty. Granted, I’ve only met a handful people from such institutions and only one person didn’t act weird about it.

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