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<p>Wow. This is pretty bizarre, IMO. Okay, I’m sure that some snobs believe this, but I know I wasn’t taught that at UChicago, and I don’t believe people are taught that at Ivy’s.</p>
<p>I think it’s true to some sense, when I tell people around here that I’m going to Clemson when Tufts, Harvard, BU, MIT are in your area, you get some crazy looks at you as if you aren’t “good” enough. Quote from the article:</p>
<p>" I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (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.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all."</p>
<p>I think a lot of people make false assumptions that somebody is not smart because they aren’t going to a top school. There are smart people at schools like George Mason too!</p>
<p>Where he went to school didn’t teach him this. He’s a snob. Plain and simple. Period. The end.</p>
<p>I’m guessing that he went to Yale. I think he has some very good points though if you read the whole article (it is long though)</p>
<p>“Where he went to school didn’t teach him this. He’s a snob. Plain and simple. Period. The end.”</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure I saw this around here before…</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/526528-disadvantages-elite-education.html?[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/526528-disadvantages-elite-education.html?</a></p>
<p>Yeah, I seem to remember this article as a topic that excited a lot of CCers. I didn’t read it when it was posted before, but I read the article this time. So, thanks for posting this, Pierre. </p>
<p>Deresiewicz is telling it like it is. Absolutely. Sometimes the truth hurts, and we want to say “No!” - especially when we’re young.</p>
<p>I remember reading this before, and I think the kind of attitude (especially the idea that you can’t talk to “normal” people) is something that some people bring to elite schools, not what they take from it. I think the article is poppycock.</p>
<p>This article has been discussed numerous times. This guy’s a snob and he was a snob before he ever set foot on campus. The fact that he can’t talk to his plumber? What, he’s incapable of making small talk? He’s pretentious and the article is nonsense.</p>
<p>I’m glad my wife does all our plumbing. I can talk to her. 
(She’s a college dropout, but also makes more than I do. But my long years in graduate school taught me how to cook…)</p>
<p>I say very little to my plumber, because he charges by the hour.</p>
<p>He got the article published and that seems to have been the main goal; manufacturing a controversy out of a few points = publication.</p>
<p>Note this is in The American Scholar, which is published by Phi Beta Kappa and thus is preaching to an elite class about elitism. In other words, a form of navel gazing combined with some simple social criticism. That criticism in the piece is that elites are self-reinforcing - which, btw, is a version of the point Herrnstein & Murray made in the oft-reviled The Bell Curve, that there is a “cognitive elite” which is growing more separated from the rest of society. </p>
<p>One problem with arguments like this are that they fail to address data about social mobility, how income changes over time, how many elite alums are first (and likely only) elite alums from their family, etc. Another is even more basic: what is the alternative? A lottery for college admissions and then a lottery for jobs? Government action to prevent self-segregation by ability and intelligence and motivation? Like I said, navel gazing and some easy social criticism.</p>
<p>I glanced at this article and it is so ridiculous. It’s not Yale’s fault that the author can’t talk to a plumber. Yale’s job was to give the author an academic education, not to teach him about how the world works. Elite schools don’t make its students smug and self-congratulatory, that kind of attitude comes from having a narrow world view. I know people like that and I always felt like the reason they were so full of themselves was because they had never moved away from the small town where they were born. There are smart people who don’t go to college because they didn’t have the opportunity. It’s irritating when someone who gets the opportunity to have the best education this country has to offer still finds something to complain about.</p>
<p>I remember this from last time it circulated. Just skimmed through it again. The author still sounds like a whiny jerk.</p>
<p>Hey, Mr. Ivy League! You must not have registered for How to Talk to Your Plumber 101:</p>
<p>“There’s water all over the bathroom floor. Make it stop. Nice weather we’re having, yes?”</p>
<p>In business, it is common to take advantage of snobs like this who underestimate the skills of those who went to schools further down the food chain. They are snobby until they get their heads handed to them. There is even a name for it – “shoe-scuffing.” When you want to be underestimated, you adopt an attitude as if you were scuffing up your shoes a little bit before going in the room.</p>