Classic CC thread: Child picked MSU over elites. People freak out.

[blue147]

@ Beaudreau: Good luck to your sons. I have a good feeling their careers will turn out alright.

Also, thanks for the link. A wonderful and informative writeup. Did you see the comment section? Yikes.

Here’s one with some sanity -

The whole obsession with Ivy League, Oxbridge or “Honors Colleges” is utter nonsense and the system tends to be self-perpetuating.

Two of the most distinguished people in my field, a medical subspecialty, took their undergraduate degrees at Wyoming State and the University of Puerto Rico, respectively. They then went to state medical schools and residency programs and were ultimately recruited by “prestigious” universities as research clinicians.

Their prowess had less to do with where they studied than their own individual passion and focus on their discipline.

This is probably something that prestigious institutions will never admit. It just isn’t good for business or your own self-image as an institution.

Here are the ‘gems’ -

Poor Mr. Nelson. This is a mistake he’ll regret for the rest of his life. He’ll always be explaining that he went to the University of Alabama, not for its football or campus fun but for its honors program and he will expect people to understand that his intellectual capacities and academic accomplishments. But mostly people will hear the University of Alabama. When one word Harvard, Princeton or Yale would have explained his talents to the world.

Ronald Nelson’s determination to attend his local university’s honors program instead of Harvard, Yale or Princeton was a stupid decision, and saddening. He clearly did not receive shrewd academic academic advising, knowledgeable about how the university/world works, and it will be a loss to him. That trio of universities is not just of elite expensive schools otherwise like many others – they attract better, more adventurous and intellectually creative faculty as well as ditto students. The academic community is RICHER, and I don’t mean fiscally, thus enriching, and after all, a college education, I tell my community college students, IS an investment into ONESELF. Why not swim in the finest waters? An honors program at a southern college is simply not going to draw the caliber of faculty and students that one would find at major research universities. And students don’t realize that the faculty may be good, but they, as well as the better students, are held back if most in the classroom are not used to excelling. College pals are the ones you will be inspired by now, and in the future will hire you, you will hire, and will trade info with. Non-academics think that B.A.s are approximately the same and carry the same weight. Actually, the college’s milieu and intellectual identity makes a BIG difference. Nelson was smart enough to get into those schools, but he doesn’t display long-term ambitiousness, or he wouldn’t have chosen short-term expediency.

Mr Bruni uses the same kind of poor reasoning that is critiqued in the accompanying article by Mr Kristof. That is, he finds an exception to a rule, and then makes a case that the exception is the way forward. Yes, some factory workers’ sons will go to England on a Rhodes. Most won’t. Most will probably never get to England in their lifetimes. And most are likely not even to be able to work at a factory like their fathers. And in any case, what’s wrong with working at a factory, if it provides security? The whole reasoning here is so skewed by middle class bias that it doesn’t even see how it argues in favour of middle class values – and marginalizes all the rest who will never be able to make it there.

And by the way, I agree Josh Hill. It was nuts for him not to go to an Ivy. If anyone thinks for a minute that the U of Alabama experience is equivalent to an Ivy experience – well, you haven’t been to an Ivy, and you haven’t been to U of Alabama. Sounds to me like the kid wanted to ‘stay in the South’ above all. A lot of southerners, there in the land of Bibles and poverty (Alabama being what, the second poorest state in the country?) and much much bigotry (I know, I have been there in m nay places) is a place where some kids need to stay out of fear of the future. The brave ones leave. The best ones leave and go back to try to make a difference.