
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008) - jmarbach
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/
======
Mz
The remarks here on HN dissing this article piqued my curiosity, so I began to
read the article. It's been a long ..year...and I am super tired, so I am not
going to manage to actually read the whole thing.

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._

~~~
nimchimpsky
"the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice"

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?

~~~
csallen
_> Thats why an elite education is an advantage._

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.

~~~
lmm
Any school will have a culture. Those that pride themselves on diversity tend
to have one narrow kind of variety, and extreme monoculture on other axes - or
else have a bunch of subcultural groups that don't really talk to each other.
There's a kind of fundamental conservation: for people to be able to
communicate and work together requires a certain level of cultural
commonality.

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.

~~~
Mz
One criticism the article makes is that people with elite educations are
expected to be leaders of the entire country (or community or other group),
yet they often do not understand the common man at all. I think this is both
valid and note worthy. It goes a long way towards explaining the discontent of
"the 99 percent."

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.

~~~
lmm
I think the idea that there's this homogenous "common man" is bogus. If you
pick your leaders from 1% of the population then they won't represent everyone
- but that's true whichever 1% of the population you pick, and leaders by
definition are a minority of the populace. If you picked, say, the employees
of a particular steelworks to be leaders, rather than Yale graduates, you
wouldn't end up with a group that was any more representative.

~~~
Mz
My concern is for how power gets exercised in a harmful manner such that it
actively victimizes the most vulnerable members of society. As a mother, this
is the opposite of what I understood my role to be.

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.

------
jondubois
I graduated from one of the top universities in my country (top 50 in the
world) and we learned pretty much exactly the same material as they did at
MIT.

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.

~~~
argonaut
I went to Berkeley for CS and knew people that went to MIT and Stanford, and I
don't agree. You're right the curriculum is the same. _Everything else_ is
different. Just one example: lots of undergrads do research. They get to work
(albeit basically as trainees) in some of the top CS labs in the world.

~~~
jghn
I've long espoused what jondubois says above and many people have told me what
you say here in response. That might be true but now that I'm in a position to
see lots of new hires it doesn't seem to make a difference, at least not for
CS grads. We hire a bunch of MIT grads and they seem to have roughly the same
distribution of success as all of the other new hires. I'll grant you that
this is anecdata but it is the one situation where I have a lot of experience
where the connection angle does _not_ exist.

~~~
Buge
It might depend on what you are hiring them for. If it's for research the
elites might do better. But if it's for software engineering there might not
be a difference.

~~~
jghn
That's possible, I can only speak to standard SWE type roles, and in those
situations the inter-person variance is larger than the inter-institution
variance.

~~~
argonaut
Many of the top students at Berkeley, Stanford, MIT don't get standard SWE
roles. They go to quant finance and make 300k straight out of undergrad. They
go to PhD programs. They start a startup with YC. They do Google APM or
something similar. They work as analysts in a VC firm.

------
kalid
Much of this resonated with me.

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...](https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-
understanding-of-eulers-formula/)

~~~
danharaj
The link you provided seems to omit the fact that i^i is multi-valued, which
is a consequence of a fundamental property of the logarithm.

~~~
kalid
That's true, let's just go with the principal value for now :).

(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.)

------
dibstern
These aren't the disadvantages of an elite education, it's the disadvantages
of not having sufficient breadth of experiences with people from a sufficient
breadth of social-economic backgrounds.

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.

~~~
sidek
Yup. I go to an ivy and many of my best friends are construction workers or
service workers who will likely never attend college. It's because I wasn't
sheltered (nor particularly wealthy as a kid).

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.

~~~
jghn
As with many things I feel the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

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.

------
BigJeffeRonaldo
And this is why Trump's win was so confusing for many citizens if the US--too
stuck in their bubble to understand the rest of the world and its happenings.
See also Nassim Taleb's essay on the Intellectual Yet Idiot class:
[https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211...](https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-
idiot-13211e2d0577)

~~~
yedava
The alleged confusion presumes that only elites voted for Democrats. But if
you look at the voting trends, urban areas tend to vote Democrat and it is a
far stretch to presume that there is no working class living in urban areas.
In fact I'd wager there are far more working class people living in urban
areas than in rural areas.

------
jeffmcmahan
I have a bachelor's degree in philosophy and linguistics from an elite
university. My parents owned and auto parts store in a small town, which was
next door to my grandparents' bakery. Based on my experience, it seems this
guys' problem is a boring backstory; no university can or should make up for
the fact that you don't regularly mix with non-university types.

------
jstewartmobile
This was a well-written article. A lot of people are hating on it as a "poor
little rich kid" argument, but I didn't see that at all.

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.

~~~
cletus
I assume you mean Thiel funding the downing of Gawker after their scurrilous
behavior and attempts to justify anything under the First Amemdment, then that
one actually has my full support.

As for the rest, to quote Dennis Hopper (IIRC) "I'm not crazy. I'm rich. Rich
people are eccentric".

~~~
jstewartmobile
I'm criticizing his means more than his ends in that particular example.

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.

~~~
josepi_
Fosh. Dude is a scumbag. You know that meeting he just put together for/with
Trump, with all the tech. leaders, centered around tech. employment? You know,
the one with people like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook,
Elon Musk, Ginni Rometty, Brian Krzanich...and Alex Karp.

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.

------
adjkant
I think the key mistake this piece made is assuming that having an elite
education stops you from being culturally and socially aware beyond your
class. Sure, many top colleges don't teach this, but as someone who grew up in
a family with under $20K income who goes to a pretty good private school, I've
seen a very distinct difference in some of my classmates. The education isn't
the problem, the bubble is.

I read this article some time ago, so pardon if my memory failed me.

------
adpoe
I think the issue at stake here is the nature of higher education in the US:
specifically, what are its putative goals?

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.

------
SmooL
I would think that it goes without saying that higher education is not the 'be
all end all' in overall 'life' education.

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.

~~~
ovibos
Sure, but I think that the self imposed barriers the author talks about may be
more common in ivy league graduates.

------
egocodedinsol
Before this gets flagged to oblivion, I have one criticism and two defenses of
the article.

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...](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-
limitations-knowledge)

~~~
rayiner
My brother went to Yale and this does not seem consistent at all. Maybe the
author had shitty friends.

~~~
egocodedinsol
I don't mean that people at elite institutions are mostly shitty, or even
those who've said these things are shitty - I have great friends from my time
in school. I hope I did not paint a picture of snobbish assholes who do
nothing but sit around and talk about how great they were. I didn't want to be
defensive and write a whole paragraph about how much I value the friends and
discussions I had in school. I miss my college all the time, and I think there
was something special there. It really was an extraordinary place, in large
part because of those around me.

However, I did still see these patterns, in others, and in myself.

------
gtani
One thing about some of those elite institutions, Columbia, Penn, Chicago,
Yale, teh area south of UC-Berkeley, are that they find themselves in the
middle of not well doing urban centers. You could call them ghettos. You have
a lot of privileged kids who have their first contact with unprivileged or
people who have fallen out of the middle class. Most of them choose to ignore
it, but a few take notable action to improve the situation.

------
protomyth
Since the education talked about is quite far out of my experience[1], I am a
bit concerned that any education could so influence a person that they cannot
make small talk with someone else. This actually sounds like an isolation
problem or a total need not to be embarrassed. I know some folks are shy and
suffer real problems, but this isn't it. It just sounds like someone who has
lived with a sect of some sort for a long time. I just have a tough time
believing the education did it.

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.

------
pascalxus
Making small talk is a skill, just like any other. You don't need to skip
college to figure out how to small talk.

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.

~~~
kuschku
It’s not just a skill. If you’ve been mostly around people of the upper class,
and in such schools as well – as the article says – you might be able to hold
small talk with people from other countries, but not with people from your own
country’s lower class.

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.

------
tokenadult
Summer 2008, and widely criticized from then to now. I wonder if a professor
of English can ever have the same perspective as a professor of biology or a
professor of mathematics. I don't think he has made the case that higher
education that can properly be called "elite" is actually disadvantageous.

[https://psmag.com/the-problems-with-william-deresiewicz-s-
ne...](https://psmag.com/the-problems-with-william-deresiewicz-s-new-
manifesto-aa3bd2fa7cdf)

~~~
egocodedinsol
I don't think he made that case, either. But it doesn't stop some of his
observations from being thought provoking.

I do agree that a science professor would likely have an entirely different
perspective.

------
dbg31415
> Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is
> priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.

The speech that the blog was paying homage to when it picked a name.

* The American Scholar || [http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm](http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm)

------
peteretep
Brits figured this shit out a long time ago: you talk about the weather.

~~~
Mz
Brits also are much more okay with embracing the idea that there are separate
classes. Americans like to think we are better than that and (like to imagine
that we) treat all people in some idealized egalitarian fashion. In practice,
it is a lot, lot harder to treat everyone equally well and try to ignore class
divides than to have protocols in place for bridging the gap between people
explicitly of different classes.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's entertaining how far we in the states go in denying we have classes. Some
years back a blogger tried to cook up a taxonomy of our class system. Since we
don't have words to describe them he adopted archaic Indian terms instead.
Brahmins are the NY/CA elite, Vaisyas are the Trump voting worker caste, etc.

[https://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes...](https://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/castes-of-united-states.html)

Other writers have recognized and described it too:
[http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html](http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html)

Even our very own Michael O. Church: [https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-
Political-Agnostics/mess...](https://www.meetup.com/Philadelphia-Political-
Agnostics/messages/boards/thread/49570124)

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.

~~~
smallnamespace
The fear of recognizing a caste system is that once you use words to describe
something, the words themselves become a tool to reinforce and then codify
that system.

I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.

~~~
danharaj
On the contrary, without the words to describe such structures, they remain
hidden from discourse and direct criticism. This protects the implicit
structures by rendering them unassailable by democratic processes.

~~~
peteretep
I am half remembering an issue with feminism and hierarchies; groups would
naturally form hierarchies anyway, but without any formalism or recognition of
them, the effects were made far more insidious

~~~
yummyfajitas
I think this is what you are referring to:
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
intrasight
> We were “the best and the brightest”

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.

------
killersmalls
"Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with
which young Americans have been blessed." Might just be one of the most
entitled statements I've ever read.

~~~
AnimalMuppet

      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
    

You have a valid point that, for the less well off, hearing rich people whine
about how hard it is to be rich is really grating. But there is also the flip
side - wealth really can make you a slave to your money.

------
fatso784
Poor sap. Really, I think you can do both, but you have to supplement the
education with actual experience (like travel, volunteering, and normal jobs)
and not buy into the hocus-pocus businesstalk mumbo-jumbo. At least, if you
want to be normal. If you want to be in business, by all means, concede
yourself to the Ivy monolith.

------
petegrif
What BS. This guy can't talk to a plumber and it's the fault of elite
colleges? Pleeese!

------
DoodleBuggy
Existence in a bubble is almost always a disadvantage.

------
partycoder
I would say that the upper class of each country has a distinct subculture.
And now those subcultures have somehow converged into a global subculture of
the rich.

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.

------
ken47
As someone who went to an "elite" institution, I wonder why all education
can't be elite. In the past, there were physical limitations -- only so many
students could fit in a lecture hall, on a campus etc. So the optimal
arrangement at the time was to try to match the highest-potential students
with the most qualified educators -- a system that could be gamed, requires
imperfect approximations, but the best that was available at the time.

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.

~~~
scarmig
Elite isn't about the quality of the instruction. Elite is about who is
instructed. By definition, you can't have a broad-based, democratic elite.

~~~
ken47
> Elite isn't about the quality of the instruction.

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.

------
VLM
Cult-like dedication toward conformity and disengagement from the real world.

If they were selling daisies at the airport they'd be "rescued" and medicated.

------
lgessler
TL;DR:

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.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hm. I went to Stanford. Famous for diverse, risk-taking non-mediocre
graduates. I guess its the exception that proves the rule?

~~~
dlo
I went to Stanford, and I disagree. Sure, there are exceptions, but most
fellow alumni I know are very boring.

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-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/19/ex-stanford-
professor-i-was-pushed-out-after-reporting-sexual-harassment)

And actually, I am seeing to it that alumni and current students do something
about this. Enough is enough.

~~~
CardenB
What's wrong or boring about any of the things you mentioned? What would you
do differently?

~~~
dlo
There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF.
With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a
problem?

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?

~~~
wyager
Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of
utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving
the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value
charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the
homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for
encouraging practical charity that was a lot more effective before our current
age of plenty.

~~~
dlo
I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any significant
way with an extra $100. Not even a homeless person would find this quantity
helpful over the long-term.

~~~
wyager
> I can't imagine a single person whose life would be better in any
> significant way with an extra $100.

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.

~~~
dlo
Re: "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)."

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.

------
peter303
In The Devil Wears Prada, Emily is told "a million would kill for a position
like yours" when demurrs about her troubles. The author should be thankful
they were able to get a nice education, even though it may come short in
common sense. You can pick that up later if you want to.

------
mcguire
" _Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John
Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men,
both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate._ "

Wasn't Bush II a Yale graduate?

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Yale and Harvard Business School.

------
akhilcacharya
My question to people that disagree with the article - I don't go to an elite
school, ranked about 55 in CS - what can I do to make myself elite? Or do I
not have upward class mobility at all?

------
AnimalMuppet
That first paragraph is a perfect expression of the last election - the Ivy
League guy can't figure out how to talk to the plumber, _even when they 're in
the same room_.

------
chiaro
It's funny. When I first read this article it must have left a strong
impression for me to have recalled it now, in the wake of the election. I see
someone else felt similarly.

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.

~~~
gragas
> in the wake of the election. I see someone else felt similarly.

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.

~~~
chiaro
I didn't write the article (nor as far as I know, anything like it) so you're
reading rather a lot into my comment. I wasn't even commenting on the
article's own view point necessarily, but rather the degree of alienation
between the two Americas it exhibited back in 2008.

I'll have to track down the original HN thread, it'd make some interesting
reading.

------
cm2012
Understanding of others is probably more correlated with an elite education
than not.

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.

~~~
protomyth
> Understanding of others is probably more correlated with an elite education
> than 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.

------
bootload
_" I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.”"_

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"_.

------
cafard
There is something maddening about the sort of discourse in which the
expensively educated try to impress one another by doing penance for their
educations and advantages. Also, does the plumber really care whether he has a
conversation with the professor?

------
bb101
"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."

Now there is a useful quote to carry around in your head.

------
known
AKA
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority)

------
usmeteora
as someone whose parents never went to college, and I went halfway through
highschool from the nations top 50 worst highschools (time magazine did an
article on that) to a boarding school on scholarship and then got scholarship
to a private top ranked institution (not ivy so "second tier" because top 20
universities instead of just ivy), and while I wouldnt redo the past for a
second, to be catapulted into a completely different world like this literally
overnight while driving home from boarding school to my poor parents fighting
and my mom dealing with alcholism and stressing about how to pay the $50
application fee just to apply to college, and pivot between that everyday
really does make you see how disparate the world is.

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.

------
bradknowles
Note that this article is from 2008.

------
potatoman2
Looks like all those years of education didn't help this author learn how to
write short, concise paragraphs.

------
douche
I feel like I am in a weird, interesting situation. I grew up as a complete
redneck, rural, appalachian hillbilly, despite all efforts of my jumped-up
grandmother to try to instill some European class. I proudly wore my Haines'
T-shirts and Carharts pants, with steel-toed, kevlar-lined chainsaw boots for
years... I graduated high school in such a Beverly Hillbullies environment,
then got accepted, against my expectations, at Dartmouth (they must have been
low on the rural white boy quota that year...) I showed up in Hanover, NH, my
first day with my pickup, my chainsaw, my rifle & shotgun, and a full set or
mechanic's tools.

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.

------
kutkloon7
The intentions behind the first paragraph of the article are undoubtedly good,
but it reads a lot like "Boo hoo, I can't engage in small talk with this pleb
because I'm too educated for him.".

------
rublev
edited

~~~
munchbunny
> I love when the elite romanticize the lives of the prole. It's super easy to
> think "Yeah, $750 apartment, a bit for food, go out for a beer once in
> awhile, work 9-5, great!" Until you realize that unless you play a perfect
> hand with every dime, the slightest expense can cripple you at a moments
> notice.

"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.

------
thesimpsons1022
wonder how many potential uber/facebook founders there could have been which
instead decided to graduate and work at a big company for the prestige.

------
BipolarElsa
This article is utter rubbish. Anyone who possesses an elite education will
never suffer in their life. They're in the upper-echelon of society. I have no
pity for them and they are not at a disadvantage.

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.

~~~
Spooky23
When I was on the Harvard tour, the guide was an Ivy League groupie -- she had
applied and failed to get into Harvard, went to a good "backup school", (I
think Case Western) and finally transferred into Harvard in her sophomore year
-- without transferring any credits.

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.

~~~
munchbunny
I hope you don't mind if I challenge you on your very last sentence. Why do
you consider losing the opportunity a plus?

~~~
Spooky23
Not at all. At that time in my life, I would have been attracted to that kind
of gig, and having been a customer working with those kinds of firms, I
wouldn't have liked it.

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!

------
holri
The Disadvantage of a an Elite Education is the possibility of a Trump
election.

------
paulsutter
The solution is near. The "elite" will be a lot less smug when their jobs also
get replaced by technology. No need for melodramatic navel-gazing.

Anyone notice that some the most "elite" schools are total no-shows in AI
research?

~~~
wenc
Unfortunately, this is the wrong conclusion -- the jobs of the elite are
precisely those that don't get replaced by technology. Automation only affects
those jobs are systematic and repeatable.

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.

~~~
paulsutter
Would you care to place a bet on which jobs will be replaced by technology?

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.

------
intrasight
If it weren't for the 1% (smartest not wealthiest) we'd still be living in
caves, we'd have no cure for disease, we'd have no internet (or Hacker News!).
I, for one, am extremely thankful for elite/ivy educations and for what these
institutions and their graduates have made possible for the rest of humanity.
If the only price we pay is that they don't know how to talk to dumb people,
that's a price I feel is worth paying.

