Comment by Mz
9 years ago
The 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 think I understand the impetus behind the writing of this article.
In a nutshell, if education is empowering, but pursuing that education actually narrows your life choices, then perhaps there is some flaw somewhere. For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder and this may come at great personal cost.
I was in my late 40s before I really understood how incredibly upper class my mother's values are. We didn't have much money when I was a kid -- or so I thought, though it turns out that is not as accurate as I believed at the time -- and I never thought of myself as upper class.
It took me a lot of years of intentionally walking away from this deeply rooted expectation in order to really reclaim my life for myself in a way that allows me to get what I want, not for me to become what society expects me to be.
So while I get that most people are not going to understand that there is a genuine cost involved and will simply sneer at the idea that there is any down side, as someone who recognized that downside at a young age and walked away, I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people and it does harm them and it does definitely harm their ability to be good leaders for the common man.
Your last paragraph is most crucial to being sympathetic towards this article, as most of the comments here have fallen into "damn the man" raving.
If you're in the position of having elite status thrust upon you, it's generally in everyone's interest that you actually be good at that, and not just told that you're good at it because you followed the rules.
We must assume that most people, most of the time, regardless of their apparent status or agency, are not strong-willed philosophers, but prisoners to scripted expectations and obligations. We will all try to avoid struggle and have it easy, and in doing so condemn ourselves to the life of the living dead by staying in an ever-diminishing comfort zone. And for someone who is in this state to step into a role with great power and then coast along without vision or direction - well, that sure does describe a lot of people!
I studied engineering at Cornell. We had a diverse student body, and this article is just one person's experience. For me, I had a great conversation with my plumber. Clever trick: he stores the snaker in an old tire so he can just roll it around.
For my business, the advantage is initial credibility to customers, but there's so much work beyond that. The software has to be useful, the sales process has to be navigated, and the customer has to be trained and supported.
I've realized life is what I make of it. If I want to converse with my plumber, then we will have a great conversation. If I find building a business fulfilling, then I will build a business. Cornell didn't teach me to do these things; Cornell also didn't teach me not to do these things. We had a diverse student body: this is how I think, and it's different from the author.
I've had several friends study at Cornell, undergrad and grad level. They all have seemed to be pretty open and approachable. Based on personal anecdotes it'd seem Cornell is one of the better Ivy Leagues for not completely falling into the mentality mentioned in the article. Good to hear there are more sensible Ivy League engineering folks, much less just engineering folks, who can have a conversation with a non-tech person.
Engineering is much more of a blue collar profession than say, private equity. Many of my classmates, like myself, came from the midwest, and we studied engineering because we love what we do, not for the money.
"the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice"
Yeah but thats a choice, whereas being poor is enforced.
Thats why an elite education is an advantage.
The article is horrible self indulgent drivel ... "you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you". They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
> Thats why an elite education is an advantage.
The author isn't saying that an elite education offers no advantage. He's saying that it has downsides as well. It's not 100% advantageous, and yet we tend to think of it as so.
> They think going to a shitty school teaches you how to talk to everyone?
It certainly does a better job than isolating yourself within a very narrow band of culture. In my experience, that's just how cultural experience works.
If you spend all your time hanging out with rich, smart, successful people, it's only going to make it harder for you to identify with people who aren't. If you spend all of your time hanging out with white people, you're more likely to feel awkward when you go to the black part of town. Etc. And the opposites are also true.
Any school will have a culture. Those that pride themselves on diversity tend to have one narrow kind of variety, and extreme monoculture on other axes - or else have a bunch of subcultural groups that don't really talk to each other. There's a kind of fundamental conservation: for people to be able to communicate and work together requires a certain level of cultural commonality.
So whichever school you went to, you end up finding it easy to talk with some number of people and hard to talk with some number of people. It all averages out. The questions that matter are a) how good or bad that culture is and b) how good or bad the non-cultural aspects of your education are.
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> a choice not psychologically available
I feel like you missed his argument by about 3 words.
Its a difference between possibly not seeing a choice and not having a choice.
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Well said... sometimes choosing to be poor brings more wealth: the world-class, millionaire skateboarder comes to mind. I would have preferred the "narrowing" of an elite Stanford education myself. Still trying to escape my State Schoolitis.
The remarks here on HN dissing this article piqued my curiosity
The other day I read a comment observing that commenters here have an almost Pavlovian response that compels them to disagree with the article. That seems right to me. A while ago I wrote this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300542, which touches on similar themes.
People who agree don't post. It's why online communities tend towards contrarian, which tends towards crackpot.
I'd rather see remarks disagreeing rather then bobbing heads at every topic.
The problem is that broadly the disagreements are so shallow.
People bounce off a word choice or something in the first paragraph then either stop reading or skim.... then post about it.
Meaty discussion is not really served by either approach.
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.
That's exactly what she said though:
> I will say that the ability "to not be rich" is, in fact, a choice not psychologically available to many upper class people
(emphasis mine)
That is not the same thing at all. There's a vast chasm between not possible because you don't have the money and not phychologically available because you can't imagine lowering your standards. For one, the argument that rich people can't bring themselves to do it might be true, but is a broad generalization that is speculating about the mental state of other people. The argument that when you don't have the money, you don't get to choose to not have the money, that is a tautology, it's 100% guaranteed.
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It seems like the real problem is: For people who go to Ivy League schools, most of them can only imagine rabidly pursuing the next rung on the career ladder
The key to me, is that they have a choice then and have choices later in life... you can learn to be not_rich=middle_class at a lot of different times in your life. Many of them will make you unhappy.
Perhaps it's a bit worse going to an Ivy League where everyone else is the same, but you could say that about staying in the same state, or joining the military (which has many different people, but an enforced culture).
This is a stupid reply that has nothing to do with the topic: I had the NMS myself, and I'm assuming some college was going to give you an extra kicker since it's portable. Do you mind sharing which colleges? I'm weirdly curious because while I didn't go to an known elite school, I turned down a full ride to an out-of-state state school (for NMS winners) to go to a private school. So like, kind of the opposite of you. But I also probably didn't fully understand the options.
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 year) not to attend. He lost the $8k in scholarship money that he could have gotten from the school he attended—which he could have gotten had he responded "undecided".
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If you didn't know you were 'upper class' then you were definitely not, although I grasp what you are saying.
'Upper class' means generational wealth and status, your grandfather was wealthy, a diplomat, and admiral, head of a large multinational, and you can trace your lineage back at least 8 generations, and likely back to before you were even Americans ... your family has had status for that long.
But yes - some people have 'high standards of behaviour', are genteel, polite, articulate, conscientious, well mannered etc. but don't have a lot of money. Many upper-middle class, even middle class types were like this just a generation and a half ago. I suggest fewer people are exactly that now, as the mores of society have shifted quite a lot in many ways.
My mother's mother was from a low level noble family. The family sold the title. Or so I have been told.
Um ... my family has been tracked back to John "Tuscarora Jack" Barnwell (came to the colonies in 1701---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnwell_(colonist)) but I'm not "upper class" my any means. I'm not sure what you meant by that.
That you can trace your lineage, does not mean you are 'upper class'. But 'upper class' people can usually trace their lineage quite far back.
Everybody in the upper class definitely knows they are in the upper class. It's not a 'revelation' you get when you are an adult.
Likely quite a few people think they are in the upper class and really are not.
I'm going by classical definition here, not the 'new world' American version of upper class, which is usually just economic.
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