> When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? 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. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed.
> Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education?
What a line!
OP doesn't know what it's like to be "smart" but not attend one of these schools.
Attending a low-tier school doesn't teach someone to be comfortable with mediocrity. The feeling of despair at not reaching one's potential occurs regardless of how one got there.
> There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
I'm a self-taught software developer with no university education and I too am socially awkward in front of tradespeople in my house. I don't think this is about Ivy League degrees, just being a nerdy intellectual who's bad at small talk and doesn't have any topics in common with a blue collar worker.
100%. The conversation opener is right there - baseball.
Doesn't matter whether you follow baseball or not. If you do, have a back-and-forth and talk about your respective teams. If you don't, ask questions; fans love talking about their team.
Ironically the ability to make small talk with anyone is considered a sign of good breeding. So this person's education may have failed them?
>just being a nerdy intellectual who's bad at small talk and doesn't have any topics in common with a blue collar worker
I'm an autistic tech nerd and never run out of things to talk to with blue collar people. Blue collar people aren't aliens, they're like you and me, they also watch Netflix, browse the internet, go outside, travel, go shopping, play with their kids, there's a lot we have in common to talk about: the economy, politics, taxes, news, cars, CoL, kids, etc
> 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. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.
That's not an elite education, that's a bad education.
Yeah... I went to an ivy league school and I've never felt remotely that way, nor did any of my friends.
Sure, some of my classmates were snobs, and there was probably a higher concentration of them (snobs are drawn to prestige-granting institutions, after all), but I wouldn't blame the education for that.
You find the same kind of attitude with any exclusive groups, from employees of fancy tech companies to country clubs to religious & political organizations.
Even though this is a now 18 year old article, you still see the same type of elitism in the various metropolitan areas, where these people gather to work in finance/consulting/tech/law.
I've heard people be completely open about only wanting to mingle and network with "peers", where they'll immediately ditch people at networking events / parties / etc. if they're not up to the snuff. They'll ask what school you went to, or where you work(ed), and bow out if its not a target school or top-tier firm.
But people like that are a minority in my experience. I went to a good business school, and many people there had the same background stories - especially the type of undergrad schools they went to.
(With that said, I'm pushing 40, and every now and then I do meet new people that within 2 mins will ask or probe what school I went to. Always feels a bit weird to me to bring up alma mater when it's almost half a lifetime ago...especially if those asking are even older than me.)
There is also that idea of surrounding yourself with "good people" or like minded, people you want to be.
I was friendly to everyone and one guy he just drank all the time, reeked of alcohol, no prospects in life, no ambition. Am I supposed to force myself to be around this person just to be nice/equal terms. I want to be around ambitious people.
I remember getting a C on my economics exam. I asked an upperclassman to look at my answers, and what was wrong with them. He laughed, and said my mistake was not regurgitating the prof's leftist ideas. (At one point in class the prof stated that he believed in the equal distribution of all income.)
I never bothered taking any subjective liberal arts classes after that. After all, I was paying the tuition bill.
you dont need to have a conversation with your plumber. be polite, say something inane about the weather, listen to their advice on plumbing, that's it. no tradesperson is aching to have a conversation with the resident nuclear physicist or whatever. leave them alone to their work, pay promptly, thank them for their time.
this is just neuroticism, and isn't really related to the ivys. it's a very common human dynamic, just follow etiquette when crossing class boundaries. the fact that the author makes it into the particular plight of the ivy grad (oh if only they had kept us humble, woe me!) speaks more to his own insecurities than to anything relating to the nature of elite education.
If you actually did talk to your plumber, or electrician, or mechanic, or anyone else you view as "lower" than you, you might have actually learned something. Interesting paradox, that.
Once upon a time I worked at a famous BB bank in an electronic trading shop. I had joined from a 10 year military career as technology specialist. I had a chummy colleague introduce me in the elevator to a peer in a different but related functional. Upon the introduction, I made eye contact, stated 'Hello it is great to meet you and I am excited to collaborate with you' and extended my hand for a handshake.
He gave me a look, scanned me down-and-up, and then looked forwarded at the elevator door. That concluded the social interaction. He had attended Dartmouth. I had attended a nonIvy.
Reading OPs first paragraph with that experience in my mind, it conjures the question 'has this Ivy grad (multiple times over) possessed the curiosity to know about other lifestyles? If not, why? Did he think himself above? Is it possible to navigate one's entire life without knowing how to empathize with a man who is a tradey? Was he not a Red Sox fan? Did he not celebrate the same rapid fire successive championships that Boston had acquired in the 2010s across football, baseball, and hockey?' And then I posed myself the question 'Why am I reading this random elite author? Why am I not reading about the Plumber? What is the motivation of the author to portray his privilege as a detriment and disadvantage?'
Ultimately, this kind of writing, at least for me, is a reminder to keep grounded and be blind to class to see people for who they are.
> He gave me a look, scanned me down-and-up, and then looked forwarded at the elevator door.
I would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of that experience. And then I might have apologized, because man how awful it must feel to be inside the head of someone like that.
I think we're in a different world from twenty years ago. The upper-middle class kids I know understand that you can get your hands dirty and that a degree isn't a meal ticket to class security anymore. If you want to be a manager you have to understand the jobs of people you manage.
> I think we're in a different world from twenty years ago. The upper-middle class kids I know understand that you can get your hands dirty and that a degree isn't a meal ticket to class security anymore.
This has always been the case throughout my life. I've heard the same thing year after year as long as I can remember. One of the episodes of the Cosby Show had Princeton grads working as plumbers because of the bad job market. What might be different now is comparisons with the job market in the aftermath of the pandemic. New college grads will never see a job market like that again.
> If you want to be a manager you have to understand the jobs of people you manage.
What? No you don’t. You have to know how to identify people you can trust, how to establish and grow that trust with them, and how to maintain that trust.
If you have bidirectional trust, then you can successfully manage people who do things you don’t understand.
During my career the only managers I could trust were the managers who could have some understanding of the work I was meant to do.
It was alright if they didn't knew as much as I did. They just needed to know enough that I could have a meaningful conversation about what was going on in the projects they were trying to manage.
Maybe I’m being too specific in my interpretation of GP’s use of the word “understanding”
I interpreted it to be an understanding derived from experience from having done the job, but now after your message I could see it meaning an understanding of what the output should be, not necessarily how that output was produced.
> Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
The ability to make small talk effortlessly with anyone is a hallmark of good breeding, education, and manners. Maybe this guy is just bad at being an elite.
> You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
He's really overselling the "learning how to think" aspect here.
People select these schools with the pure intent of getting into a social network that gives them more resources than they would otherwise have.
Let's look at three facts here:
1) Access to the limited slots for students at these institutions is controlled by how "intelligent" you seem to be as measured by their entrance exams
2) To a large degree, you can feign "intelligence" as defined by these tests given a large amount of resources
3) Under most conditions, humans who have social networks for accessing resources will keep those social networks active over time and even generations of humans
These three things combined mean that there's a good chance that any "elite" institution will eventually rot from those who use it to climb or maintain their social rank.
Sure, there are some great programs at these institutions, but that's starting to be overshadowed by the damage caused by the above.
I can talk to plumbers. I can talk to electricians, hvac, construction guys, anyone in the trades. Because what they work on are essentially systems and systems are interesting to me.
Trust me, these guys don't really mind talking shop. And they appreciate someone acknowledging that they do have knowledge and skill not everyone has.
Ah yes, the disadvantages of being elite. Just as I am similarly disadvantaged for being too intelligent and good looking. When will we realize as a society these things aren't really an advantage at all?
> Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
This article: William Deresiewicz Complains That Getting Elected (i.e. Being a Good Leader) Is Ridiculously Hard and Not Taught In Schools Nor Achieved By Being Rich.
Social skills (an important part of leadership) are not taught in schools nor achieved by being rich. Except maybe in specific fields like psychology and economics.
I think they should be. Although I’m autistic so I needed to learn them explicitly, it seems nowadays even typical people are struggling and failing to learn proper social skills, probably due to social media.
> Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
And both running against GW Bush, who attended both Harvard and Yale?
This shift is supported by the current government. I am personally seeing lots of ads for fed sponsored HVAC training and things like that. Not that it’s an issue, but I’m always wary of what I’m being sold
A Software Engineering degree typically takes 3+ years to get and then you have internships and onboarding that means it could take a novice ~5 years to actually start contributing in a meaningful way at a company starting from scratch.
To further it, nobody cares until it breaks. Then they still don't care, they just want it fixed as quickly as possible, cost be damned once you get to that point.
college educated “thoughtleaders” charged $300/hour by the plumbing company, HVAC, car service department and thinks the trade jobs make that much. yeah no they more often start at $30/hour
> When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? 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. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed.
> Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education?
What a line!
OP doesn't know what it's like to be "smart" but not attend one of these schools.
Attending a low-tier school doesn't teach someone to be comfortable with mediocrity. The feeling of despair at not reaching one's potential occurs regardless of how one got there.
The difference is whether one can escape.
> There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work.
I'm a self-taught software developer with no university education and I too am socially awkward in front of tradespeople in my house. I don't think this is about Ivy League degrees, just being a nerdy intellectual who's bad at small talk and doesn't have any topics in common with a blue collar worker.
100%. The conversation opener is right there - baseball.
Doesn't matter whether you follow baseball or not. If you do, have a back-and-forth and talk about your respective teams. If you don't, ask questions; fans love talking about their team.
Ironically the ability to make small talk with anyone is considered a sign of good breeding. So this person's education may have failed them?
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
See, the thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in.
>just being a nerdy intellectual who's bad at small talk and doesn't have any topics in common with a blue collar worker
I'm an autistic tech nerd and never run out of things to talk to with blue collar people. Blue collar people aren't aliens, they're like you and me, they also watch Netflix, browse the internet, go outside, travel, go shopping, play with their kids, there's a lot we have in common to talk about: the economy, politics, taxes, news, cars, CoL, kids, etc
> 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. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.
That's not an elite education, that's a bad education.
Yeah... I went to an ivy league school and I've never felt remotely that way, nor did any of my friends.
Sure, some of my classmates were snobs, and there was probably a higher concentration of them (snobs are drawn to prestige-granting institutions, after all), but I wouldn't blame the education for that.
You find the same kind of attitude with any exclusive groups, from employees of fancy tech companies to country clubs to religious & political organizations.
Even though this is a now 18 year old article, you still see the same type of elitism in the various metropolitan areas, where these people gather to work in finance/consulting/tech/law.
I've heard people be completely open about only wanting to mingle and network with "peers", where they'll immediately ditch people at networking events / parties / etc. if they're not up to the snuff. They'll ask what school you went to, or where you work(ed), and bow out if its not a target school or top-tier firm.
But people like that are a minority in my experience. I went to a good business school, and many people there had the same background stories - especially the type of undergrad schools they went to.
(With that said, I'm pushing 40, and every now and then I do meet new people that within 2 mins will ask or probe what school I went to. Always feels a bit weird to me to bring up alma mater when it's almost half a lifetime ago...especially if those asking are even older than me.)
There is also that idea of surrounding yourself with "good people" or like minded, people you want to be.
I was friendly to everyone and one guy he just drank all the time, reeked of alcohol, no prospects in life, no ambition. Am I supposed to force myself to be around this person just to be nice/equal terms. I want to be around ambitious people.
I like being around people who talk about interesting things other than sports. I remain baffled at how people find sports interesting.
> You learn to think, at least in certain ways
I remember getting a C on my economics exam. I asked an upperclassman to look at my answers, and what was wrong with them. He laughed, and said my mistake was not regurgitating the prof's leftist ideas. (At one point in class the prof stated that he believed in the equal distribution of all income.)
I never bothered taking any subjective liberal arts classes after that. After all, I was paying the tuition bill.
Oh, that's what happened to you! I wondered where that came from.
you dont need to have a conversation with your plumber. be polite, say something inane about the weather, listen to their advice on plumbing, that's it. no tradesperson is aching to have a conversation with the resident nuclear physicist or whatever. leave them alone to their work, pay promptly, thank them for their time.
this is just neuroticism, and isn't really related to the ivys. it's a very common human dynamic, just follow etiquette when crossing class boundaries. the fact that the author makes it into the particular plight of the ivy grad (oh if only they had kept us humble, woe me!) speaks more to his own insecurities than to anything relating to the nature of elite education.
If you actually did talk to your plumber, or electrician, or mechanic, or anyone else you view as "lower" than you, you might have actually learned something. Interesting paradox, that.
Once upon a time I worked at a famous BB bank in an electronic trading shop. I had joined from a 10 year military career as technology specialist. I had a chummy colleague introduce me in the elevator to a peer in a different but related functional. Upon the introduction, I made eye contact, stated 'Hello it is great to meet you and I am excited to collaborate with you' and extended my hand for a handshake.
He gave me a look, scanned me down-and-up, and then looked forwarded at the elevator door. That concluded the social interaction. He had attended Dartmouth. I had attended a nonIvy.
Reading OPs first paragraph with that experience in my mind, it conjures the question 'has this Ivy grad (multiple times over) possessed the curiosity to know about other lifestyles? If not, why? Did he think himself above? Is it possible to navigate one's entire life without knowing how to empathize with a man who is a tradey? Was he not a Red Sox fan? Did he not celebrate the same rapid fire successive championships that Boston had acquired in the 2010s across football, baseball, and hockey?' And then I posed myself the question 'Why am I reading this random elite author? Why am I not reading about the Plumber? What is the motivation of the author to portray his privilege as a detriment and disadvantage?'
Ultimately, this kind of writing, at least for me, is a reminder to keep grounded and be blind to class to see people for who they are.
> He gave me a look, scanned me down-and-up, and then looked forwarded at the elevator door. That concluded the social interaction.
Jesus, I think you have to smoke a bit more than ivory to be that condescending.
> He gave me a look, scanned me down-and-up, and then looked forwarded at the elevator door.
I would have burst out laughing at the absurdity of that experience. And then I might have apologized, because man how awful it must feel to be inside the head of someone like that.
I think we're in a different world from twenty years ago. The upper-middle class kids I know understand that you can get your hands dirty and that a degree isn't a meal ticket to class security anymore. If you want to be a manager you have to understand the jobs of people you manage.
> I think we're in a different world from twenty years ago. The upper-middle class kids I know understand that you can get your hands dirty and that a degree isn't a meal ticket to class security anymore.
This has always been the case throughout my life. I've heard the same thing year after year as long as I can remember. One of the episodes of the Cosby Show had Princeton grads working as plumbers because of the bad job market. What might be different now is comparisons with the job market in the aftermath of the pandemic. New college grads will never see a job market like that again.
> If you want to be a manager you have to understand the jobs of people you manage.
What? No you don’t. You have to know how to identify people you can trust, how to establish and grow that trust with them, and how to maintain that trust.
If you have bidirectional trust, then you can successfully manage people who do things you don’t understand.
Edit: read my reply to surgical_fire below
During my career the only managers I could trust were the managers who could have some understanding of the work I was meant to do.
It was alright if they didn't knew as much as I did. They just needed to know enough that I could have a meaningful conversation about what was going on in the projects they were trying to manage.
Maybe I’m being too specific in my interpretation of GP’s use of the word “understanding”
I interpreted it to be an understanding derived from experience from having done the job, but now after your message I could see it meaning an understanding of what the output should be, not necessarily how that output was produced.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13241784
> Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
The ability to make small talk effortlessly with anyone is a hallmark of good breeding, education, and manners. Maybe this guy is just bad at being an elite.
> You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
He's really overselling the "learning how to think" aspect here.
People select these schools with the pure intent of getting into a social network that gives them more resources than they would otherwise have.
Let's look at three facts here:
1) Access to the limited slots for students at these institutions is controlled by how "intelligent" you seem to be as measured by their entrance exams
2) To a large degree, you can feign "intelligence" as defined by these tests given a large amount of resources
3) Under most conditions, humans who have social networks for accessing resources will keep those social networks active over time and even generations of humans
These three things combined mean that there's a good chance that any "elite" institution will eventually rot from those who use it to climb or maintain their social rank.
Sure, there are some great programs at these institutions, but that's starting to be overshadowed by the damage caused by the above.
This is a failure of curiosity.
I can talk to plumbers. I can talk to electricians, hvac, construction guys, anyone in the trades. Because what they work on are essentially systems and systems are interesting to me.
Trust me, these guys don't really mind talking shop. And they appreciate someone acknowledging that they do have knowledge and skill not everyone has.
Ah yes, the disadvantages of being elite. Just as I am similarly disadvantaged for being too intelligent and good looking. When will we realize as a society these things aren't really an advantage at all?
> these things aren't really an advantage at all?
Which things? Intelligence and looks are a well documented advantage, for an individual. A society is made of individuals.
Pretty sure the parent comment is sarcastic.
Your parent commenter must have an ivy league education :)
> Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
This article: William Deresiewicz Complains That Getting Elected (i.e. Being a Good Leader) Is Ridiculously Hard and Not Taught In Schools Nor Achieved By Being Rich.
Social skills (an important part of leadership) are not taught in schools nor achieved by being rich. Except maybe in specific fields like psychology and economics.
I think they should be. Although I’m autistic so I needed to learn them explicitly, it seems nowadays even typical people are struggling and failing to learn proper social skills, probably due to social media.
> Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
And both running against GW Bush, who attended both Harvard and Yale?
Who put on a fake folksy affect, so he clearly can't have been an elitist.
This was gross.
how?
It seems to be a popular subject lately.
Dirty Jobs, leaving software jobs to become a trade. (Update: Electrician, Mechanic, Plumber, etc...)
Lot of articles on this subject, and calls to bring back the old classes like home-econ, shop, etc...
This shift is supported by the current government. I am personally seeing lots of ads for fed sponsored HVAC training and things like that. Not that it’s an issue, but I’m always wary of what I’m being sold
If software isn't a trade what is it? Holy orders?
>If software isn't a trade what is it?
A profession. Trades are things like electrician/plumbing/carpentry that you can typically become resonably competent in 2 or so years of training.
You can't in software development?
A Software Engineering degree typically takes 3+ years to get and then you have internships and onboarding that means it could take a novice ~5 years to actually start contributing in a meaningful way at a company starting from scratch.
Knowledge work, of course, meaning it pays well but is less honest than real work.
But I agree with you. It’s a trade. Just more recent than plumbing.
I often compare software to plumbing. No one else cares how it was done.
To further it, nobody cares until it breaks. Then they still don't care, they just want it fixed as quickly as possible, cost be damned once you get to that point.
Great analogy, I'm going to use this.
I get that sentiment. SE can feel like a trade some days.
But we do sit at a desk and type a lot. That isn't crouching in crap.
Maybe better description "smelly, dirty, uncofortable, jobs, that people generally don't want".
college educated “thoughtleaders” charged $300/hour by the plumbing company, HVAC, car service department and thinks the trade jobs make that much. yeah no they more often start at $30/hour