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From a thoughtful essay by William Deresiewicz:
An elite education … makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely – indeed increasingly – homogeneous. … 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. … Elite universities … select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. … social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. … There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. … Students … get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. ..
An elite education gives you the chance to be rich – which is, after all, what we’re talking about – but it takes away the chance not to be. … [If they] pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation … [elite students] tend to give up more quickly than others. .. a couple of graduate students … were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. …
The final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. … Being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework. … They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. … Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas – and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. … Students at Yale and Columbia … have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. … Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions.
My experience confirms all of this. The sort of risk-taking, soul-searching, and success-sacrifice that is required for (but hardly guarantees) truly great intellectual achievement is not much rewarded in our current elite education system.
Biases of Elite Education
Are you strongly religious?
This article is simply laughable!
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!