6 ms·

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

130 points by gabriel 17y ago

smanek 17y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224861 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224861
- gabriel 17y ago
  Uh oh. Honest mistake. I must have typo'd my search for this article before I posted it.
  - pg 17y ago
    That's ok. A year ago is long enough.
  - quizbiz 17y ago
    I thank you for bringing new eyes to an old article anyways.
    - gabriel 17y ago
      You're welcome! And here I was half expecting chaos to ensue the next time I checked in :)
- pradocchia 17y ago
  that was a good discussion, thank you.
johnnybgoode 17y ago
1) We live in a plutocracy. 2) The Ivy League (along with the university system as a whole) is an important part of it. If you accept these two things, and you're anything like me, this makes you angry. Ironically, if you asked someone who attends an Ivy, they'd probably tell you they're in favor of a classless society.
- smanek 17y ago
  We don't live in a plutocracy - there is a lot of economic mobility in America today (more than almost anywhere else at any other time). I won't bore you with anecdotal evidence (although I have plenty) but simply consider that the majority of millionaires in the US are self-made, first-generation wealth. On top of that, even if there was low economic mobility, that doesn't necessarily mean we aren't living in a meritocracy. A huge part of intellect is determined by genetics, and a huge part of wealth is determined by intellect. Simply put, it makes sense that, on average, richer people would have smarter babies than poor people. There's also the fact that well educated parents tend to instill values in their children that extol education, hard work, etc.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    Self-made millionaires doesn't imply "a lot of economic mobility." The sad fact is that a tiny tiny percentage of those who grow up in poverty are able to push out of it. Instead of blaming the lack of "values that extol hard work", take a look around at broken households, broken schools, broken neighborhoods: high crime, high unemployment, etc. etc. For every story of a self-made millionaire, you can easily find dozens more who were just as smart and hard working, but were fucked by circumstance. When you're poor, any minor problem becomes catastrophic—a sick relative, losing your job, whatever—and makes you start again from scratch. Someone working two menial jobs straight out of high school to pay the rent month-to-month simply does not have the same economic opportunity as someone from an upper-middle-class family, who can go to college and grad school, etc. > huge part of wealth is determined by intellect. Ignoring the huge problems inherent in this idea of "intellect" as some quantifiable quality, this isn't close to true. Parent education and income is by far the biggest predictor of future success. > richer people would have smarter babies than poor people. Let's see your evidence, please.
    - dkarl 17y ago
      A commonplace example of economic mobility: most of the sons and daughters of professors at low-prestige colleges have no problem earning two or even three times what their parents earn, if money is what they decide to pursue. They have all the tools required to enter a profession such as engineering, medicine, or law. If you have the cultural and intellectual prerequisites to be financially successful in America, an initial lack of money won't stop you from becoming a prosperous upper-middle-class professional. The barriers between the lower class and the middle class (including its upper reaches, the professional class) are cultural, not economic. Even people who seem to be held back by economic barriers are held back because of cultural barriers -- they don't know how to play the game and inspire the trust (both personal trust and the kind of impersonal trust embodied in a good academic, criminal, and credit record) that allows them to overcome the economic barriers. The barriers are easiest to see in extreme cases. For example, inner city adults who can't keep the jobs they're placed in because being ordered around fills them with rage, or because they don't realize they can't disappear for a week without telling anyone, even if they were dealing with their father's death and funeral in another state. Or poor kids who don't know there are lots of federal student loan programs with favorable terms. I know savvy kids who took loans they didn't need because the terms were ludicrously favorable, but some kids drop out of school and take menial jobs because they don't know that debt is a normal, accepted way of paying for college. The extreme cases are easier to see, but there are milder cultural challenges that are much more pervasive. Having worked for bosses from other cultures, I know that the consequences for being late with work depend greatly on how the situation is framed, and the "right" way to say "I worked my butt off on this, but it's harder than I thought" or "I've barely worked on this because you've had me putting out fires for the last two weeks" is dependent on culture. Even something as simple as acknowledging criticism is culturally sensitive. If your boss thinks you are blowing off criticism or being disrespectful, it can be a huge disaster. Understanding the differences isn't always enough. I quit working for one guy because I just couldn't adjust to him. (It may have been cultural, or just personal.) He was very emotional and assumed a close personal relationship with me. I like to play things cool and assumed that our friendship outside of work and our working relationship were separate. If I played it cool and didn't get emotional when he did, he thought I was blowing him off or showing indifference to him and our work. I was extremely stressed out by his displays of emotion at work. I found it extremely draining to try to respond with the appropriate emotions when all I really felt was distress and resentment that he was polluting (as I saw it) our working relationship with his unfiltered emotions. My only idea of how to display unpleasant emotions in the workplace was to mute them and deal with them by dispassionately discussing the concrete issues from which they stemmed. I was utterly miserable until I quit -- probably he was, too. And this was between two people with similar liberal political and moral convictions who were both educated in American universities. I think one of the biggest cultural questions that causes problems between people is what it means to have authority to give someone else orders. To me, the power to give orders is inherent in roles. If someone is my boss, they can tell me what to do. They might give me latitude, and I might try to persuade them to give me different orders, but if they give me orders, that's fine, I do what I'm told. It doesn't mean they're higher or better than me. It doesn't mean they're smarter or stronger. It's just a matter of the roles we play in the business (or sports team or what-not.) In some cultures, authority means personal superiority. Naturally, these different interpretations create anger, insult, and resentment when they come together. The Republicans played on this expertly when they described Sonia Sotomayor as "bossy." It won't sink her nomination, but it evoked a stereotype that has very intense emotional connections. It worked perfectly on me. I grew up in a place with a sizable Hispanic population. In Hispanic culture, authority tends to mean superiority. (One book I read said that in Europe, cultures believe in authority in rough proportion to how strongly they were influenced by the Roman Empire.) Of course, teachers have authority over students. When my Hispanic teachers talked to me, they talked down -- down from their superior intelligence, wisdom, education... all assumed to be superior because they had authority over me. My non-Hispanic teachers largely did not talk to me that way -- their default assumption was that we were equals who happened to be playing roles (teacher and student) in which they had the authority to boss me around and grade my performance. (Of course, there were exceptions on both sides.) The anger I felt at the way my Hispanic teachers treated me... well, I can still feel it today. To my mind, they had no good reason to assume they were better than me, and their assumption interfered with my education because they maintained their pretense of superiority at the expense of their academic objectivity. To their minds, they had to maintain a pretense of personal superiority, because otherwise they would lose their authority to give orders and maintain order in the classroom. So they talked down to me, patronized me, and made a point of responding to any show of knowledge or intelligence on my part by bossing me around even more. Now I'm probably rambling because the anger is running away with me.... But you can imagine that a Hispanic kid dealing with non-Hispanic authority figures might misread their attitude and think they are weak and should be disregarded. Anyway, I'm sure many white Americans have the same kind of painful culture-clash memories of Hispanic authority figures as I do, so describing Sonia Sotomayor as "bossy" and "overbearing" is a clever way of turning her, in my and other people's heads, into an authoritarian, patronizing Hispanic stereotype. Which, if true, would be a great reason for excluding her from the court, since the political ideals of the United States are (all my liberal tolerance aside) incompatible with belief in the natural superiority of those in power. But there's no reason to believe she is anything like that stereotype, and there are excellent reasons to believe otherwise. She was successful at Princeton and successful in the U.S. legal system. Along the way, she worked productively with, and earned the respect of, lots of people to whom authoritarianism is anathema. I'm sure that given what she has accomplished, she must be conscious of the issue, must understand it thoroughly, and probably comes down on the same side of it as most other Americans. But the stereotype retains its emotional power. Even after thinking through the issue and rationally reassuring myself, the stereotype still holds sway over my emotions. (Damn those culturally savvy Republican attack dogs! They've taken over a little part of my brain :-( )
gsastry 17y ago
Yale isn't nearly as bad as this guy claims. There're enough people who have plumbers as parents that it's easy enough to talk to anyone...
- psyklic 17y ago
  I'd say it depends on the person -- but if you want to withdraw from regular society, then you can.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    Haha...I love the irony of seeing this comment on HN, where the average employed reader probably makes double the median US household income and many of the rest are entrepreneurs trying to make millions in a few short years of hard work.
    - sho 17y ago
      I voted you back up, because it's important to bear this in mind. This is not your regular crowd, the vox populi here is not remotely representative. "the average employed reader probably makes double the median US household income" I'd clarify this to be relative to local conditions, taking into account the fairly large foreign readership (of which I am a part!) but it's probably about right. Do I smell a salary survey poll coming on ..
- joetrumpet 17y ago
  My parents are cleaners, but I'm not sure how much knowing me helps my peers at Princeton talk to them. It definitely helps, but the extent is hazy enough and more importantly my situation rare enough that I understand his point. Moreover, many people don't have any idea the backgrounds their friends come from: they can simply assume their friends are in a similar situation, since this assumption is right in a vast majority of cases.
alexgartrell 17y ago
This isn't a problem of the ivy leagues (or any college, the one I attend included). The problem is that society makes everyone think that they're the best at everything. Thinking "I couldn't possibly have anything to talk about with this 'common man'" is just an extension of this arrogance. People don't unlearn to relate to people in good Colleges, they just never knew in the first place. Edited to add: LOTS (if not most) of people at 'elite' Colleges know how to relate to 'average' people.
- dbul 17y ago
  There is at least one college which attempts to beat the arrogance out of you (see don rag), St. John's College. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Johns_College,_U.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Johns_College,_U.S.) At the end of sophomore year, the tutors at the college decide whether you belong there. Hubris is probably a strong reason for kicking out a student, though over two years humility is strengthened in most.
- dschobel 17y ago
  Exactly. I don't think I've ever attended a graduation at any level where the graduating class wasn't referred to as "the future" or the best and the brightest. It tends to be at university when one meets honest-to-goodness exceptionally intelligent people that we first learn our own limitations.
biotech 17y ago
"I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him." It's really not that difficult: watch sports. For men, it's the easiest icebreaker. A plumber in Boston? Chances are good he knows that the Red Sox swept the Tigers this week. There ya go - instant conversation. Like I said, this tends to work for men. As for talking to women... I'll let somebody else handle that one.
- kirubakaran 17y ago
  Yeah, and most people will appreciate the fact that you are making an effort and they will help you out in continuing the conversation. Not that hard really...
sown 17y ago
A contrapositive of this situation is sometimes you get judged as being inferior if you don't have have some fancy ivy league degree. Or maybe that's just my own inferiority complex speaking or a combination of both. I dunno.
- johnnybgoode 17y ago
  No, you're right. This is a big part of it. College degrees today are titles of nobility, thanks to state support. Yeah, I thought we abolished those, too.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    A title of nobility that has to be earned and is available to anyone with adequate grades? I don't think that analogy holds much water.
    - Ardit20 17y ago
      A title of nobility that is granted. I do not know about Harvard, but Oxford which I will assume is not so much different, has most of its graduates from private schools, especially Eton college seems to be their favoured. These kids, due to having the badge of Oxford are quite favoured in the highest ranks of law, politics, etc. I kind of wonder how much different is the teaching in oxford from any other university and if it is so different then why do other universities not adopt their system. Very few people from other backgrounds go to oxford, therefore it is quite a good analogy i'd suggest.
      - adw 17y ago
        I've got to disagree. Around half of UK-national Oxford students come from state schools (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4027010.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4027010.ece), and as that article says, that's at least in part because teachers scare their kids away from applying because of the very perception you're espousing. What's more, independent schools are a very varied lot. The vast majority of the independent sector is day schools which are effectively high-end grammar schools with a strict dress code. I'm not going to pretend there isn't an advantage to going to one, but they're not substantially better than the best schools in the state sector: that's borne out by the statistics. The teaching in Oxford and Cambridge is much more intense, and has a much greater emphasis on one-to-one and one-to-two teaching than any other Britihs university. That's where the real advantage lies; the reason it's not adopted elsewhere is that it's eyewateringly expensive. (The odd legal status of Oxford and Cambridge, historically, was at least in part to support the cost of the tuition system). The problem with Oxford and Cambridge is one of perception rather than reality. The kids who get the grades (think 1600 SAT for our American friends), and who apply, have a decent chance of getting in.
pradocchia 17y ago
I attended an elite prep school, took two years off and then enrolled at my local state university. A few thoughts: 1. You are the future leaders of America: I heard this frequently, and never understood the import, really. I get uncomfortable when too many people agree with me, let alone do what I say. Why would we all aspire to leadership? And where does that leave me, stranger to my own cohort? 2. The gap years between high school and college were great. I met a Stanford-cum-Oxford philosophy grad who had dropped out and was traveling the world. I had just had a few philosophy classes in senior year. So while he rolled the joints, I asked about Hume, and Popper, and Watts. Yes, I forgot most of the details. 3. Any decent university will have a few excellent professors somewhere, starving for good students. Be one! On account of my time off, I tested out of all the lower-level requirements and went directly into upper-level seminars with at most 10 other students but usually 2-3. I attended and presented at conferences as a sophomore. It was awesome. I already had a decent education from high school, but damn did it get better. 4. Many of my friends and family were quite concerned about my choice of colleges. A middling state school? I often felt the need to explain or justify myself, though in retrospect it would have been better just to talk about all the exciting things I'd been doing, rather than apologize for poor appearances. [edited for style]
- DTrejo 17y ago
  Wait, tell us more! What made you stop going to the elite school? Did you have any tricks to help you find those excellent professors? What other exciting things?
  - jyu 17y ago
    The easiest way to find awesome professors is talk to upperclassmen and grad students in your major. Grad students have to meet and talk with profs a lot more than undergrads, so they usually get a better feel for profs.
  - pradocchia 17y ago
    The short answer is that I didn't get into Stanford, and I couldn't justify the cost of other schools. I'd already had the liberal arts education so I didn't need to do that again. I wasn't sure what I wanted to study, didn't want to be doctor or a lawyer, but I also wasn't ready to drop out all together. The state school was cheap, had lots of graduate programs so I knew there would be something interesting to do. And I could always transfer out after a year or two with a perfect GPA. But once I got there and compared notes with my prep school friends who were already in their junior year at various big name schools, I realized I had a good thing going and that transferring out wasn't so attractive after all. If I really needed a pedigree later on, I could acquire one in graduate school. The long answer (?) is that while one half of my family is highly educated, the other half is comprised of tradesmen and small business owners with little formal education. I had a choice--I could have gone to Harvard, had that been my goal. I had all the prerequisites and could have traded on family connections if need be. I had the option, and I opted out. That's a lot easier than standing outside the gates and saying "I don't need this," even though they never would have let me in anyway. I am not that strong. re: professors It's much easier to find and get the attention of good professors when you are a big fish in a little pond. They will find you. Obscure departments are better than big name ones, but even a comp-sci department will have plenty to offer once you get past the hazing. At a no-name school, you trade duller classmates for better access to the faculty. There were a few good students at my university to be sure, but outside the upper level and graduate classes, the mediocrity was astounding. At least I didn't go in expecting big things! Elite schools can be really disappointing that way. re: exciting things This wasn't my route, but two years at a Jesuit monastery somewhere in Europe could be pretty exciting. You could learn Latin and the local language, work alongside the monks (?), and quiz them on their studies. Philology, the precursor to modern linguistics, is very interesting but has high barriers to entry (multiple classical languages). Fields like that are self-selective. Italy has lots of small scale yet sophisticated manufacturing, so that would be an obvious direction were you so inclined. Lots of legal hurdles but it can be done. Take that back to college and you'd be in a class by yourself.
dschobel 17y ago
My sympathies to the author, that is one mixed up dude. What kind of person (at 35 no less) still identifies so strongly with the school they attended as an 18 year old? And to be wracked with guilt about it? And to blame his schooling for his inability to speak to the plumber? This is nothing short of neurotic.
- Daemmerung 17y ago
  Neurotic indeed. The author was born in 1964 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Deresiewicz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Deresiewicz), which makes him the same age as me. Thus we probably attended Yale as undergraduates at the same time. Yet I recognize absolutely none of the dynamics that he describes. It is never quite clear what he is narrating from his own remembered student experience versus what he is surmising from observing Lit students around him. Now, I didn't attend an elite prep school (quite the converse), nor did I remain in the academy after graduating (no loss for the academy, given my GPA...). So perhaps I received a subtherapeutic dose of whatever has saddled him with such despair. But I have no problem communicating with my fellow rural firefighters, a merry mix of garbagemen, carpenters, surveyors, innkeepers, pastors, snowplow repairmen, and the occasional stray programmer. I can take commands from an irrigation pipe salesman or a backhoe operator. They can do things I can't do, while I can do things they can't do; there is mutual respect. Occasionally they tease me for employing a sixty-four dollar word when a ninety-eight cent word would do, but we maintain communication, and we value our differences. Certainly, my experience as as member of the pampered elite must have been very different from his. Am I the outlier, or is he?
  - dschobel 17y ago
    Ah he's an academic (per your wikipedia link). That explains a lot. That is the land where pedigree is everything, especially so in the humanities. No wonder the poor guy is so confused, enough time in the ivory tower and he actually started to believe the company line. Not to bash on academia exclusively, I've seen the same thing from friends in the legal industry. I think it applies to any industry where reputation and prestige is paramount.
gurtwo 17y ago
I grew up and live in Europe. English is not my native language. When I was a teenager, the words Stanford, MIT or Ivy League were totally alien to me. In fact the world and the metaphor they represent were all unknown to me. I wish I knew of their existence, but nothing in my environment prepared me for being one of their students. So of course these institutions are for an elite. Not everyone gets the same opportunities, because not everyone is even aware of those opportunities. A sense of sadness suddenly shocks you when you realize it's too late for entering in the circle. The article and the comments here are mostly American-biased. In fact, HN is many times very American-biased. There's nothing wrong about it, but please realise it.
- travisjeffery 17y ago
  There are equivalents for nearly everything. The word MIT, Stanford and Ivy League are simply in your words Oxford and Cambridge. That's your issue.
- dschobel 17y ago
  I wish I knew of their existence, but nothing in my environment prepared me for being one of their students. That's nonsense. There are fantastic universities the world over: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=243&pubCode=1&navcode=137 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=24...
c00p3r 17y ago
A+, A-, B+ - everything was "explained" in "Brave New World". "I'm glad that I'm Beta..."
known 17y ago
I think a successful ENTREPRENEUR is worth 10 MBAs and 10 PHDs.

130 points by gabriel 17y ago

smanek 17y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224861 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224861

gabriel 17y ago
Uh oh. Honest mistake. I must have typo'd my search for this article before I posted it.
- pg 17y ago
  That's ok. A year ago is long enough.
- quizbiz 17y ago
  I thank you for bringing new eyes to an old article anyways.
  - gabriel 17y ago
    You're welcome! And here I was half expecting chaos to ensue the next time I checked in :)
pradocchia 17y ago
that was a good discussion, thank you.

johnnybgoode 17y ago

1) We live in a plutocracy. 2) The Ivy League (along with the university system as a whole) is an important part of it. If you accept these two things, and you're anything like me, this makes you angry. Ironically, if you asked someone who attends an Ivy, they'd probably tell you they're in favor of a classless society.

smanek 17y ago
We don't live in a plutocracy - there is a lot of economic mobility in America today (more than almost anywhere else at any other time). I won't bore you with anecdotal evidence (although I have plenty) but simply consider that the majority of millionaires in the US are self-made, first-generation wealth. On top of that, even if there was low economic mobility, that doesn't necessarily mean we aren't living in a meritocracy. A huge part of intellect is determined by genetics, and a huge part of wealth is determined by intellect. Simply put, it makes sense that, on average, richer people would have smarter babies than poor people. There's also the fact that well educated parents tend to instill values in their children that extol education, hard work, etc.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  Self-made millionaires doesn't imply "a lot of economic mobility." The sad fact is that a tiny tiny percentage of those who grow up in poverty are able to push out of it. Instead of blaming the lack of "values that extol hard work", take a look around at broken households, broken schools, broken neighborhoods: high crime, high unemployment, etc. etc. For every story of a self-made millionaire, you can easily find dozens more who were just as smart and hard working, but were fucked by circumstance. When you're poor, any minor problem becomes catastrophic—a sick relative, losing your job, whatever—and makes you start again from scratch. Someone working two menial jobs straight out of high school to pay the rent month-to-month simply does not have the same economic opportunity as someone from an upper-middle-class family, who can go to college and grad school, etc. > huge part of wealth is determined by intellect. Ignoring the huge problems inherent in this idea of "intellect" as some quantifiable quality, this isn't close to true. Parent education and income is by far the biggest predictor of future success. > richer people would have smarter babies than poor people. Let's see your evidence, please.
  - dkarl 17y ago
    A commonplace example of economic mobility: most of the sons and daughters of professors at low-prestige colleges have no problem earning two or even three times what their parents earn, if money is what they decide to pursue. They have all the tools required to enter a profession such as engineering, medicine, or law. If you have the cultural and intellectual prerequisites to be financially successful in America, an initial lack of money won't stop you from becoming a prosperous upper-middle-class professional. The barriers between the lower class and the middle class (including its upper reaches, the professional class) are cultural, not economic. Even people who seem to be held back by economic barriers are held back because of cultural barriers -- they don't know how to play the game and inspire the trust (both personal trust and the kind of impersonal trust embodied in a good academic, criminal, and credit record) that allows them to overcome the economic barriers. The barriers are easiest to see in extreme cases. For example, inner city adults who can't keep the jobs they're placed in because being ordered around fills them with rage, or because they don't realize they can't disappear for a week without telling anyone, even if they were dealing with their father's death and funeral in another state. Or poor kids who don't know there are lots of federal student loan programs with favorable terms. I know savvy kids who took loans they didn't need because the terms were ludicrously favorable, but some kids drop out of school and take menial jobs because they don't know that debt is a normal, accepted way of paying for college. The extreme cases are easier to see, but there are milder cultural challenges that are much more pervasive. Having worked for bosses from other cultures, I know that the consequences for being late with work depend greatly on how the situation is framed, and the "right" way to say "I worked my butt off on this, but it's harder than I thought" or "I've barely worked on this because you've had me putting out fires for the last two weeks" is dependent on culture. Even something as simple as acknowledging criticism is culturally sensitive. If your boss thinks you are blowing off criticism or being disrespectful, it can be a huge disaster. Understanding the differences isn't always enough. I quit working for one guy because I just couldn't adjust to him. (It may have been cultural, or just personal.) He was very emotional and assumed a close personal relationship with me. I like to play things cool and assumed that our friendship outside of work and our working relationship were separate. If I played it cool and didn't get emotional when he did, he thought I was blowing him off or showing indifference to him and our work. I was extremely stressed out by his displays of emotion at work. I found it extremely draining to try to respond with the appropriate emotions when all I really felt was distress and resentment that he was polluting (as I saw it) our working relationship with his unfiltered emotions. My only idea of how to display unpleasant emotions in the workplace was to mute them and deal with them by dispassionately discussing the concrete issues from which they stemmed. I was utterly miserable until I quit -- probably he was, too. And this was between two people with similar liberal political and moral convictions who were both educated in American universities. I think one of the biggest cultural questions that causes problems between people is what it means to have authority to give someone else orders. To me, the power to give orders is inherent in roles. If someone is my boss, they can tell me what to do. They might give me latitude, and I might try to persuade them to give me different orders, but if they give me orders, that's fine, I do what I'm told. It doesn't mean they're higher or better than me. It doesn't mean they're smarter or stronger. It's just a matter of the roles we play in the business (or sports team or what-not.) In some cultures, authority means personal superiority. Naturally, these different interpretations create anger, insult, and resentment when they come together. The Republicans played on this expertly when they described Sonia Sotomayor as "bossy." It won't sink her nomination, but it evoked a stereotype that has very intense emotional connections. It worked perfectly on me. I grew up in a place with a sizable Hispanic population. In Hispanic culture, authority tends to mean superiority. (One book I read said that in Europe, cultures believe in authority in rough proportion to how strongly they were influenced by the Roman Empire.) Of course, teachers have authority over students. When my Hispanic teachers talked to me, they talked down -- down from their superior intelligence, wisdom, education... all assumed to be superior because they had authority over me. My non-Hispanic teachers largely did not talk to me that way -- their default assumption was that we were equals who happened to be playing roles (teacher and student) in which they had the authority to boss me around and grade my performance. (Of course, there were exceptions on both sides.) The anger I felt at the way my Hispanic teachers treated me... well, I can still feel it today. To my mind, they had no good reason to assume they were better than me, and their assumption interfered with my education because they maintained their pretense of superiority at the expense of their academic objectivity. To their minds, they had to maintain a pretense of personal superiority, because otherwise they would lose their authority to give orders and maintain order in the classroom. So they talked down to me, patronized me, and made a point of responding to any show of knowledge or intelligence on my part by bossing me around even more. Now I'm probably rambling because the anger is running away with me.... But you can imagine that a Hispanic kid dealing with non-Hispanic authority figures might misread their attitude and think they are weak and should be disregarded. Anyway, I'm sure many white Americans have the same kind of painful culture-clash memories of Hispanic authority figures as I do, so describing Sonia Sotomayor as "bossy" and "overbearing" is a clever way of turning her, in my and other people's heads, into an authoritarian, patronizing Hispanic stereotype. Which, if true, would be a great reason for excluding her from the court, since the political ideals of the United States are (all my liberal tolerance aside) incompatible with belief in the natural superiority of those in power. But there's no reason to believe she is anything like that stereotype, and there are excellent reasons to believe otherwise. She was successful at Princeton and successful in the U.S. legal system. Along the way, she worked productively with, and earned the respect of, lots of people to whom authoritarianism is anathema. I'm sure that given what she has accomplished, she must be conscious of the issue, must understand it thoroughly, and probably comes down on the same side of it as most other Americans. But the stereotype retains its emotional power. Even after thinking through the issue and rationally reassuring myself, the stereotype still holds sway over my emotions. (Damn those culturally savvy Republican attack dogs! They've taken over a little part of my brain :-( )

gsastry 17y ago

Yale isn't nearly as bad as this guy claims. There're enough people who have plumbers as parents that it's easy enough to talk to anyone...

psyklic 17y ago
I'd say it depends on the person -- but if you want to withdraw from regular society, then you can.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Haha...I love the irony of seeing this comment on HN, where the average employed reader probably makes double the median US household income and many of the rest are entrepreneurs trying to make millions in a few short years of hard work.
  - sho 17y ago
    I voted you back up, because it's important to bear this in mind. This is not your regular crowd, the vox populi here is not remotely representative. "the average employed reader probably makes double the median US household income" I'd clarify this to be relative to local conditions, taking into account the fairly large foreign readership (of which I am a part!) but it's probably about right. Do I smell a salary survey poll coming on ..
joetrumpet 17y ago
My parents are cleaners, but I'm not sure how much knowing me helps my peers at Princeton talk to them. It definitely helps, but the extent is hazy enough and more importantly my situation rare enough that I understand his point. Moreover, many people don't have any idea the backgrounds their friends come from: they can simply assume their friends are in a similar situation, since this assumption is right in a vast majority of cases.

alexgartrell 17y ago

This isn't a problem of the ivy leagues (or any college, the one I attend included). The problem is that society makes everyone think that they're the best at everything. Thinking "I couldn't possibly have anything to talk about with this 'common man'" is just an extension of this arrogance. People don't unlearn to relate to people in good Colleges, they just never knew in the first place. Edited to add: LOTS (if not most) of people at 'elite' Colleges know how to relate to 'average' people.

dbul 17y ago
There is at least one college which attempts to beat the arrogance out of you (see don rag), St. John's College. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Johns_College,_U.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Johns_College,_U.S.) At the end of sophomore year, the tutors at the college decide whether you belong there. Hubris is probably a strong reason for kicking out a student, though over two years humility is strengthened in most.
dschobel 17y ago
Exactly. I don't think I've ever attended a graduation at any level where the graduating class wasn't referred to as "the future" or the best and the brightest. It tends to be at university when one meets honest-to-goodness exceptionally intelligent people that we first learn our own limitations.

biotech 17y ago

"I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him." It's really not that difficult: watch sports. For men, it's the easiest icebreaker. A plumber in Boston? Chances are good he knows that the Red Sox swept the Tigers this week. There ya go - instant conversation. Like I said, this tends to work for men. As for talking to women... I'll let somebody else handle that one.

kirubakaran 17y ago
Yeah, and most people will appreciate the fact that you are making an effort and they will help you out in continuing the conversation. Not that hard really...

sown 17y ago

A contrapositive of this situation is sometimes you get judged as being inferior if you don't have have some fancy ivy league degree. Or maybe that's just my own inferiority complex speaking or a combination of both. I dunno.

johnnybgoode 17y ago
No, you're right. This is a big part of it. College degrees today are titles of nobility, thanks to state support. Yeah, I thought we abolished those, too.
- dschobel 17y ago
  A title of nobility that has to be earned and is available to anyone with adequate grades? I don't think that analogy holds much water.
  - Ardit20 17y ago
    A title of nobility that is granted. I do not know about Harvard, but Oxford which I will assume is not so much different, has most of its graduates from private schools, especially Eton college seems to be their favoured. These kids, due to having the badge of Oxford are quite favoured in the highest ranks of law, politics, etc. I kind of wonder how much different is the teaching in oxford from any other university and if it is so different then why do other universities not adopt their system. Very few people from other backgrounds go to oxford, therefore it is quite a good analogy i'd suggest.
    - adw 17y ago
      I've got to disagree. Around half of UK-national Oxford students come from state schools (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4027010.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4027010.ece), and as that article says, that's at least in part because teachers scare their kids away from applying because of the very perception you're espousing. What's more, independent schools are a very varied lot. The vast majority of the independent sector is day schools which are effectively high-end grammar schools with a strict dress code. I'm not going to pretend there isn't an advantage to going to one, but they're not substantially better than the best schools in the state sector: that's borne out by the statistics. The teaching in Oxford and Cambridge is much more intense, and has a much greater emphasis on one-to-one and one-to-two teaching than any other Britihs university. That's where the real advantage lies; the reason it's not adopted elsewhere is that it's eyewateringly expensive. (The odd legal status of Oxford and Cambridge, historically, was at least in part to support the cost of the tuition system). The problem with Oxford and Cambridge is one of perception rather than reality. The kids who get the grades (think 1600 SAT for our American friends), and who apply, have a decent chance of getting in.

pradocchia 17y ago

I attended an elite prep school, took two years off and then enrolled at my local state university. A few thoughts: 1. You are the future leaders of America: I heard this frequently, and never understood the import, really. I get uncomfortable when too many people agree with me, let alone do what I say. Why would we all aspire to leadership? And where does that leave me, stranger to my own cohort? 2. The gap years between high school and college were great. I met a Stanford-cum-Oxford philosophy grad who had dropped out and was traveling the world. I had just had a few philosophy classes in senior year. So while he rolled the joints, I asked about Hume, and Popper, and Watts. Yes, I forgot most of the details. 3. Any decent university will have a few excellent professors somewhere, starving for good students. Be one! On account of my time off, I tested out of all the lower-level requirements and went directly into upper-level seminars with at most 10 other students but usually 2-3. I attended and presented at conferences as a sophomore. It was awesome. I already had a decent education from high school, but damn did it get better. 4. Many of my friends and family were quite concerned about my choice of colleges. A middling state school? I often felt the need to explain or justify myself, though in retrospect it would have been better just to talk about all the exciting things I'd been doing, rather than apologize for poor appearances. [edited for style]

DTrejo 17y ago
Wait, tell us more! What made you stop going to the elite school? Did you have any tricks to help you find those excellent professors? What other exciting things?
- jyu 17y ago
  The easiest way to find awesome professors is talk to upperclassmen and grad students in your major. Grad students have to meet and talk with profs a lot more than undergrads, so they usually get a better feel for profs.
- pradocchia 17y ago
  The short answer is that I didn't get into Stanford, and I couldn't justify the cost of other schools. I'd already had the liberal arts education so I didn't need to do that again. I wasn't sure what I wanted to study, didn't want to be doctor or a lawyer, but I also wasn't ready to drop out all together. The state school was cheap, had lots of graduate programs so I knew there would be something interesting to do. And I could always transfer out after a year or two with a perfect GPA. But once I got there and compared notes with my prep school friends who were already in their junior year at various big name schools, I realized I had a good thing going and that transferring out wasn't so attractive after all. If I really needed a pedigree later on, I could acquire one in graduate school. The long answer (?) is that while one half of my family is highly educated, the other half is comprised of tradesmen and small business owners with little formal education. I had a choice--I could have gone to Harvard, had that been my goal. I had all the prerequisites and could have traded on family connections if need be. I had the option, and I opted out. That's a lot easier than standing outside the gates and saying "I don't need this," even though they never would have let me in anyway. I am not that strong. re: professors It's much easier to find and get the attention of good professors when you are a big fish in a little pond. They will find you. Obscure departments are better than big name ones, but even a comp-sci department will have plenty to offer once you get past the hazing. At a no-name school, you trade duller classmates for better access to the faculty. There were a few good students at my university to be sure, but outside the upper level and graduate classes, the mediocrity was astounding. At least I didn't go in expecting big things! Elite schools can be really disappointing that way. re: exciting things This wasn't my route, but two years at a Jesuit monastery somewhere in Europe could be pretty exciting. You could learn Latin and the local language, work alongside the monks (?), and quiz them on their studies. Philology, the precursor to modern linguistics, is very interesting but has high barriers to entry (multiple classical languages). Fields like that are self-selective. Italy has lots of small scale yet sophisticated manufacturing, so that would be an obvious direction were you so inclined. Lots of legal hurdles but it can be done. Take that back to college and you'd be in a class by yourself.

dschobel 17y ago

My sympathies to the author, that is one mixed up dude. What kind of person (at 35 no less) still identifies so strongly with the school they attended as an 18 year old? And to be wracked with guilt about it? And to blame his schooling for his inability to speak to the plumber? This is nothing short of neurotic.

Daemmerung 17y ago
Neurotic indeed. The author was born in 1964 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Deresiewicz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Deresiewicz), which makes him the same age as me. Thus we probably attended Yale as undergraduates at the same time. Yet I recognize absolutely none of the dynamics that he describes. It is never quite clear what he is narrating from his own remembered student experience versus what he is surmising from observing Lit students around him. Now, I didn't attend an elite prep school (quite the converse), nor did I remain in the academy after graduating (no loss for the academy, given my GPA...). So perhaps I received a subtherapeutic dose of whatever has saddled him with such despair. But I have no problem communicating with my fellow rural firefighters, a merry mix of garbagemen, carpenters, surveyors, innkeepers, pastors, snowplow repairmen, and the occasional stray programmer. I can take commands from an irrigation pipe salesman or a backhoe operator. They can do things I can't do, while I can do things they can't do; there is mutual respect. Occasionally they tease me for employing a sixty-four dollar word when a ninety-eight cent word would do, but we maintain communication, and we value our differences. Certainly, my experience as as member of the pampered elite must have been very different from his. Am I the outlier, or is he?
- dschobel 17y ago
  Ah he's an academic (per your wikipedia link). That explains a lot. That is the land where pedigree is everything, especially so in the humanities. No wonder the poor guy is so confused, enough time in the ivory tower and he actually started to believe the company line. Not to bash on academia exclusively, I've seen the same thing from friends in the legal industry. I think it applies to any industry where reputation and prestige is paramount.

gurtwo 17y ago

I grew up and live in Europe. English is not my native language. When I was a teenager, the words Stanford, MIT or Ivy League were totally alien to me. In fact the world and the metaphor they represent were all unknown to me. I wish I knew of their existence, but nothing in my environment prepared me for being one of their students. So of course these institutions are for an elite. Not everyone gets the same opportunities, because not everyone is even aware of those opportunities. A sense of sadness suddenly shocks you when you realize it's too late for entering in the circle. The article and the comments here are mostly American-biased. In fact, HN is many times very American-biased. There's nothing wrong about it, but please realise it.

travisjeffery 17y ago
There are equivalents for nearly everything. The word MIT, Stanford and Ivy League are simply in your words Oxford and Cambridge. That's your issue.
dschobel 17y ago
I wish I knew of their existence, but nothing in my environment prepared me for being one of their students. That's nonsense. There are fantastic universities the world over: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=243&pubCode=1&navcode=137 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=24...

c00p3r 17y ago

A+, A-, B+ - everything was "explained" in "Brave New World". "I'm glad that I'm Beta..."

known 17y ago

I think a successful ENTREPRENEUR is worth 10 MBAs and 10 PHDs.