Harvard student not so smart

[Anonymous]

Or this?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-george-w-bushs-greatest-legacy--his-battle-against-aids/2012/07/26/gJQAumGKCX_story.html

[Anonymous]

Please, I am not an Ivy alum, nor will my kids be going to an Ivy college.

Getting into an Ivy depends on a number of factor and smarts is not the only prerequisite.

When we have school and college kids competing in quiz shows etc,. have some compassion. It is just so sad that grown up people on DCUM want to pick on them.

I think it is commendable when they try out and more commendable when they can make it to the actual broadcast event.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Please, I am not an Ivy alum, nor will my kids be going to an Ivy college.

Getting into an Ivy depends on a number of factor and smarts is not the only prerequisite.

When we have school and college kids competing in quiz shows etc,. have some compassion. It is just so sad that grown up people on DCUM want to pick on them.

I think it is commendable when they try out and more commendable when they can make it to the actual broadcast event.

Agreed.

But Ivy envy is REAL. It makes adults want to pick on college students who are studying their hearts out to be something in life instead of coach surfing, smoking weed and relying on their parents well into their 30's.

[Anonymous]

My non-legacy, non-hooked kid is heading off to an ivy in the fall. DC feels incredibly fortunate to have been admitted against the odds, and knows full well many equally or arguably smarter kids were turned away. During school visits, we found the students we met down to earth. My DC isn't turning into an A -hole because DC will attend an ivy league school, and just looks forward to meeting many interesting other classmates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Ivies are not about changing the world, but reinforcing the establishment.

Huh, so true. It always seemed weird that Zuckerberg became a billionaire from an internet company. I guess it wasn't really ingenious since facebooks have been around for a long time and he allegedly stole the idea to put it online from others. Gates, well, he is from the Left Coast.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivies are not about changing the world, but reinforcing the establishment.

Huh, so true. It always seemed weird that Zuckerberg became a billionaire from an internet company. I guess it wasn't really ingenious since facebooks have been around for a long time and he allegedly stole the idea to put it online from others. Gates, well, he is from the Left Coast.

Oh so true, PP given that most of our Presidents have come from the Ivies.

And anyone who thinks the Ivies are about reinforcing the establishment has never even stepped their small toe on an Ivy campus.

The Ivies, more than anything else, are about independent thought and the ability to make one's own way in the world and enjoy doing so--despite what others think you should be doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My non-legacy, non-hooked kid is heading off to an ivy in the fall. DC feels incredibly fortunate to have been admitted against the odds, and knows full well many equally or arguably smarter kids were turned away. During school visits, we found the students we met down to earth. My DC isn't turning into an A -hole because DC will attend an ivy league school, and just looks forward to meeting many interesting other classmates.

Your DC will be thinking and working too hard in that competitive environment to even think about becoming an A-hole.

It's always the Others--those who couldn't make it into the Ivies and knew enough to not even try-who project what they think their Ivy personality would be like onto those who actually attended.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivies are not about changing the world, but reinforcing the establishment.

Huh, so true. It always seemed weird that Zuckerberg became a billionaire from an internet company. I guess it wasn't really ingenious since facebooks have been around for a long time and he allegedly stole the idea to put it online from others. Gates, well, he is from the Left Coast.

Oh so true, PP given that most of our Presidents have come from the Ivies.

And anyone who thinks the Ivies are about reinforcing the establishment has never even stepped their small toe on an Ivy campus.

The Ivies, more than anything else, are about independent thought and the ability to make one's own way in the world and enjoy doing so--despite what others think you should be doing.

I have no issues with Ivy schools but everyone who attends does not make their own way in the world. Some are bank rolled and connections are powerful.

[Anonymous]

08:27-- that was funny

[Anonymous]

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. 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. 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.

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. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. 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.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

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. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. ...

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The Ivies are not about changing the world, but reinforcing the establishment.

Huh, so true. It always seemed weird that Zuckerberg became a billionaire from an internet company. I guess it wasn't really ingenious since facebooks have been around for a long time and he allegedly stole the idea to put it online from others. Gates, well, he is from the Left Coast.

Oh so true, PP given that most of our Presidents have come from the Ivies.

And anyone who thinks the Ivies are about reinforcing the establishment has never even stepped their small toe on an Ivy campus.

The Ivies, more than anything else, are about independent thought and the ability to make one's own way in the world and enjoy doing so--despite what others think you should be doing.

I have no issues with Ivy schools but everyone who attends does not make their own way in the world. Some are bank rolled and connections are powerful.

THIS is true. I meant to add that the connections are also what makes the ivies so much more advantageous.

Bottom line is that even with those connections, those grads are "making their own way in the world", which in my opinion means that you're living YOUR life, doing what makes YOU happy instead of sitting on the coach sulking at those who are. If you use your connections to help move you from Point A to B, good for you. Isn't that what alumn connections are all about? And all schools have those.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. 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. 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.

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. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. 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.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

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. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. ...

http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

Are you trying to suggest that because this one author struggled to make small talk with a plumber that there may be something wrong with an Ivy education?

That's about as smart as the suggestion that because the girl didn't win there must be something wrong with Harvard.

Who the hell makes small talk with "the help"? I let them in, direct them to the problem, then get out of their way and let them work. The main problem I see with this article is that the author felt some sort of obligation to engage the guy in some type of spirited discussion before he fixed her pipes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I really hate the antagonism people express toward groups of people just because they . . . have membership in that group. If you're going to be antagonistic toward someone, at least have a specific reason based on verifiable proof that person did something that was hurtful and wrong. To hate someone just because they went to a certain school or belong to a certain group is ridiculous.

I didn't even sniff an Ivy school coming out of HS, but this is obviously just insecurity and jealousy.

[Anonymous]

Since when is being good at trivia an indication of being smart?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Since when is being good at trivia an indication of being smart?

Never. But jealousy towards ivy students and grads runs so deep it leads to irrational comments like that which reveals the insecurity of the speaker.