Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic

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Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic.

The point that the author makes about who attends elite schools is important, not just to education, but to all of society.  Here is what he writes – followed by a comment and a personal observation.

“…So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success…”

“…[with respect to diversity] Visit any elite campus… and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals…”

“…the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all…”

“…This system…creat[es] an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead…” [emphasis added]

This last point is critical – especially when the produced elite is produced by another elite: professors.

Many of my colleagues consider any system that produces inequality as both bad, and dangerous for society.  Yet, they don’t try to change what is happening in their own backyard.  I have always wondered why this is.

I think it comes from their isolation from – and lack of personal inexperience with – the difficulties that many of their own graduates have (because of an insufficient education).  I think this isolation leads them to believe that “things aren’t that bad”.

Their lack of experience makes it hard for them to see the difference between someone getting a good engineering job vs. a borderline engineering job.

In my own case, I grew up in East Texas.  Everyone went to the same high school.  Successful professional and business people lived a couple of blocks away from truck drivers.  The guy with an Indian motorcycle rode past our house every day – so did they guy with the souped up car.  When I was thirteen I became interested in chess problems, but when my friends with the motor scooters came by, we went for a ride, or went to their house to work on the scooters.  (Their father drove an ice cream delivery truck.)  I didn’t consider any of this unusual.

So, here is the bottom line.  I think this experience of not being special, or isolated, had an influence on my world view.  That’s because I have experience with the difference between becoming just a small town, optician say, vs. a small town truck driver, vs. as happened to my friend, becoming a Stanford graduate and making a small fortune consulting.  (He and his father were always working on car engines in their driveway.)

So much for musings.