Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong or boring about any of the things you mentioned? What would you do differently?
It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
People don't exist to serve society.
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
101–110 of 228 posts
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fear of recognizing a caste system is that once you use words to describe something, the words themselves become a tool to reinforce and then codify that system. I mean, India itself seems to be a prototypical example of that.
On the contrary, without the words to describe such structures, they remain hidden from discourse and direct criticism. This protects the implicit structures by rendering them unassailable by democratic processes.
I am half remembering an issue with feminism and hierarchies; groups would naturally form hierarchies anyway, but without any formalism or recognition of them, the effects were made far more insidious
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#103Brits figured this shit out a long time ago: you talk about the weather.
Brits also are much more okay with embracing the idea that there are separate classes. Americans like to think we are better than that and (like to imagine that we) treat all people in some idealized egalitarian fashion. In practice, it is a lot, lot harder to treat everyone equally well and try to ignore class divides than to have protocols in place for bridging the gap between people explicitly of different classes…
European class system is a hack around wealth in a society not always being distributed to the "right" people. Modern American class system simply assumes it has been distributed correctly and works around that.
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#104The remarks here on HN dissing this article piqued my curiosity, so I began to read the article. It's been a long ..year...and I am super tired, so I am not going to manage to actually read the whole thing. But, I was one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and I turned down a National Merit Scholarship to one of the top two universities of my home state. I think I made the right call and I t…
The ability to not be rich strikes me as the position of someone who is very privileged to start with. Po' folk don't have to opportunity to choose to not be rich, they just have to do the best they can with the hand they are dealt.
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#105TL;DR: Going to an elite school 1. denies you the opportunity to empathize with anyone beyond a narrow spectrum of socioeconomics and culture 2. anoints you with a sense of self-worth and entitlement that is, if earned at all, only founded on a narrow set of skills: analytic ability and hard work 3. admits you into the class of seductive "entitled mediocrity", which allows you to fail spectacularly with essentially n…
That's a great list of positive benefits. Is there a corresponding list of negatives?
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, my scholarship was not portable. It was specifically for one university and when I failed to attend, no, I did not get to keep my scholarship. No one gave me an extra kicker. I turned my scholarship down for personal reasons, not because I was bought out by some competing school.
At the time when I was in the NMS pipeline, if you listed a school that you wanted to attend when you took the PSAT/NMSQT, that school would give you the scholarship if you became a finalist. The best idea was to say "undecided" and to maintain the ability to designate any school once committed. My older brother learned this the hard way—he listed a school (October of junior year) that he decided (April of senior yea…
8 grand is, sadly, almost become insignificant in the long run with most colleges.
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society.
> It's a shame to waste an elite education on people who do not serve society. Have you considered that you may not be as good as you think at predicting the needs of society? Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think. The upside is that there is lots of cheap soviet surplu…
> Based on past experiments, it seems that the market does a pretty good job of predicting what society actually wants and needs, whereas enlightened do-gooders aren't as good as they think.
I would love to see those studies! I'm struggling to imagine how you'd even find a random sample of do-gooders, let alone measure their effect on their communities.
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#108One thing about some of those elite institutions, Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Yale, teh area south of UC-Berkeley, are that they find themselves in the middle of not well doing urban centers. You could call them ghettos. You have a lot of privileged kids who have their first contact with unprivileged or people who have fallen out of the middle class. Most of them choose to ignore it, but a few take notable action to improve the situation.
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of human trafficking in Oakland, a short BART ride away from SF. With so much problem-solving ability in nearby SF, why is this still a problem? So are homelessness, childhood hunger, etc And why do we crowd around in the Bay Area, pushing out artists and other people? Why don't we spread out across the U.S., spreading ideas and doing good?
Humans are bad at multiplying utilities. Building a service that gives $100 of utility to ten million people is probably better for society than improving the nutrition of a few hundred children in SF. People tend to over-value charitable endeavors that fall into certain categories, like helping the homeless or feeding the children. I suspect it's a societal mechanism for encouraging practical charity that was a lot…
Humans also have a bad habit of double counting contributions. Facebook is "connecting the world" but how many of those connections would've happened over the phone or in person without them? I'm not saying Facebook is net negative, just that a lot of those $100 contributions you are adding up are just shifted from another business that went under.
Re: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it not "just" ending up at Facebook or Google when you could've BS'd your way through high school, gone to a mediocre state school, and landed a new-grad position at one of those companies? Stanford or X State University, suddenly all of those years mean nothing and new graduates of both schools come to the same starting blocks, only this time at a massive software company where tens of thousands of others fol…
Arguably it doesn't matter whether you went to Stanford or your state university, the institution where you graduated matters little in the professional world once you have that first gig.
That's exactly the point I'm trying to make. I completely agree.
I want to know, how does it feel to have gone to a place like Stanford, only to end up in the same position as someone who went to a state university?