Like many, I am a product of poor public school education and a mediocre 4 year State College and without a doubt, loathe not having received an elite education. That said, I cannot disagree more with the author of this article. I’ll point out a few obvious disadvantages that students of poor and mediocre (non elite) education befall.

1) A poor or mediocre education makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.
Using myself as an example, I could not hold an intelligent conversation with the head of say, Harvard Law School on the subject of law without sounding like a complete incompetent fool. Similarly, s/he may very well feel completely out of touch in trying to discuss the benefits of sporting jeans 7 sizes too large while skateboarding versus skin tight jeans stolen from little sister. In both cases, the less learned of the two would simply not be experienced enough to offer a “professional” opinion. And if you asked me which of the two subjects (law or skateboarding) I would prefer to hold mastery over, I would have to say…….uh hmm…Law. I speculate that most of you out there would also chose law over skateboarding.

In sum, elite education leads to the mastery of the most important academic subjects while poor and mediocre education can hardly claim such accomplishment.

2) I’ve spent close to 20 years attending some of the most diverse public school and college institutions in the USA (in Los Angeles) and in all honesty, I still find students overwhelmingly segregating themselves according race, class, and whatever other identities they carry. Mexicans with Mexicans, Filipinos with Filipinos, Russians with Russians, Persians with Persians, “White” Jews with “White” Jews, African Americans with African Americans, Armenians with Armenians, Indians with Indians, Lower Class WASPs with Lower Class WASPs, etc. I could go on and on. And this is happening in public schools with students of very diverse backgrounds. I realize that this phenomenon is not occuring nationwide but certainly in Southern California. So, while these schools are not homogeneous, students still resort to clan mentality and find a way to gravitate, by and large, to their own peeps. So much for non-elitist education trying to unite the many races and classes.

3) My poor and mediocre public education taught me to to believe that people who didn’t go to an equally poor and mediocre school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class.

4) Mediocre universities … select for and develop one form of intelligence: average intelligence. … social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational mediocre.

5) At mediocre colleges and universities you also get an endless string of second chances. In fact, I’ve had classes where if you were to acquire the maximum extra credit points available, you could take your grade from a C+ to an A-. Now that’s a lot of extra credit points. Not to mention the chance of turning in every paper or project in 2 or (less common) 4 weeks overdue.

6)A poor or mediocre education gives you the chance to be (let’s be honest here)just another Joe with a degree. If Joe is lucky enough to have a moderately rich family, well then his chances of starting his own business, putting a down payment on a house, purchasing a new, reliable vehicle are dramatically increased. If mediocre Joe is fortunate enough to have some money in the family, then the probability of Joe going on to earning a PhD are also dramatically increased. Too bad that most mediocre Joes with mediocre education DO NOT have money in the family. So instead they take out university loans to pursue that PhD and end up being in dept for a long long long time while living in a cheap apartment and wishing that they had not the financial strain that prevents them from taking on writing poetry or painting.

Where there’s a will there’s a way, but it’s not necessarily the smartest or most advantages way.

7) If you truly believe that students from elite universities like Yale or Harvard are “content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. And that only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey,” try sitting in a classroom or hall packed with mediocre students at a mediocre university…you’d come out of there having lost faith in the human race! Am I being drastic? yes, to prove a point. I have sat through many hours of lecture and laboratory classes at mediocre state universities and have disdained all but a selected handful. Why? Simply put, these institutions function more like automobile manufacturing plants than they do like places of higher learning. In these mediocre universities you’re lucky to reach your senior year philosophy seminar before you’re expected to ask “the big questions.” I’m talking about truly revolutionary questions, not just the same old questions that Kant or Foucault asked.

Would I trade my poor and mediocre secondary and post-secondary education for an elite education that AT THE VERY LEAST guarantees that the “institution’s name on a piece of paper” will get me the interviews that “Mediocre Joe” could only dream of getting? You bet your sweet self I would!

I do think though that in high school, among the smartest of the lot, the individuals in the subset that most strongly regards education as a purely instrumental stepping-stone to GOODSTUFF — i.e., the anti-intellectuals — are *much* more likely to attend (if possible) an Ivy than a strong liberal arts college or a non-Ivy that is especially strong in what they are most interested in. This is not to say that such people will be necessarily be a majority at an Ivy, but there will be a lot more of them proportionally at an Ivy than anywhere else, and they will generally be loud and conspicuous in their stepping-stone activities and attitudes (just as their less smart and equally GOODSTUFF-grubbing equivalents are at non-Ivies).

I just don’t think its realistic for “elite schools” to be able to do this. Its probably next to impossible to figure out which type of student is which during admissions. Even if you had a perfect admission filter — the schools would still have a strong incentive to ensure a significant proportion of their graduates go on to hold positions of power in money-grubbing places to keep the endowment growing.

David Smith’s blog feed is made up mainly of his del.icio.us daily links. These are a pretty fabulous digest of interesting stuff. This one caught my eye today: biases of elite education. (And I love the idea of blog called…