Being in the Silicon Valley, lot of us are Berkeley and Stanford grads.  In many circles, that's a badge of honor and a metric of authentication.  If a Stanford grad goes on a pilgrimage, it's somehow more valuable because his opportunity cost is higher.  When a Berkeley grad talks about the gift-economy, she isn't just a free loader who couldn't make it in the real world.  Having society view academic institutions as brands is problematic in the sense that it gives graduates (like myself) a severly misplaced sense of self-worth.  Generations of confusion later, we get wrapped up in that dream while forgetting to ask questions beyond which-college, what-job, which-house.  We excel in exams, but miss out on education.

Malcom Gladwell, in this fantastic speech to Oxonian Society and Getting In article in the New Yorker, offers data to show that elite schools have become like elite brands and like corporations, their choices of who is accepted is very much about maximizing the return on investment.  (And yes, Harvard's endowment of $38B is greater than the Gates Foundation!)

It is no wonder that, more than half a century ago, Gandhi wasn't a big fan of schools as a medium for education. We go through this whole rigamarole and justify an unsatisfying job to dissolve the $100K college debt; by the time we come clean, we already have 2 young kids and are risk-averse; and when life has passed us by, we give commencement speeches without ever having found authentic, personal answers to life's big questions.  As Krishnmurti opens in Education and Significance of Life, "We are turning out, as if through a mould, a type of human being whose chief interest is to find security, to become somebody important, or to have a good time with as little thought as possible."

Neil, having graduated from Cal and now doing his PhD at Stanford (and also volunteering on CF's Tech Team), knows first-hand the powers of a "ruling-class institution."  And this morning, he pointed to an interesting op-ed on the limitations of elite education (which also relates to his recent blog post).   Here are some of Neil's favorite quotes from the (long) article:

"It's not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy."

"The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it 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."

"At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it... 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"

"The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic."

"At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity..."

"Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls "entitled mediocrity." A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It's another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don't worry, we'll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you're good enough... Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it's also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-."

"But if you're afraid to fail, you're afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual... Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions."

"What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, "So are you saying that we're all just, like, really excellent sheep?""

Posted by Nipun Mehta | comments (3) | permalink | more 'Inspiration' |