<p>Or Memphis, where they could maybe pick up a few football players in the deal.</p>
<p>theGFG - I think your friend is missing a key ingredient. It must be those kids’ safety job or they are practicing their interview skills. They are plenty prepared when they want the job.</p>
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<p>TheGFG, so it’s OK to use the word “stupidity” to describe kids at lesser schools but it’s not OK to suggest that some brainiac, head-in-the-clouds kids at top schools lack common sense? Do you see what you continue to do here?</p>
<p>Face it. Nobody is ever going to feel sorry for kids who go to the Ivies, except of course the ones stuck in New Haven or Hanover (Hangover). Nowhere to go but up from there.</p>
<p>Sally, give it a rest already. So in that other thread I was criticized for being too passive in taking these remarks. So now when I exercise more assertiveness to counter the nasty anti-Ivy comments, as advised, you want to act like I’m the one with the problem. Look, this person kept talking about how stupid and lacking in common sense Ivy League candidates were for showing up unprepared for interviews, and then performing poorly once there. She was generalizing from a few individuals. So I just pointed out to her that you can find stupidity in all kinds of people, including in non-Ivy students. Your post shows once again how you feel elite school kids are fair game for all kinds of stereotyping (pretty awful stuff too, like the recent implication right here that they’ve been abused into abnormal childhoods in order to gain admission), but heaven forbid one suggest that non-elite school kids have imperfections too.</p>
<p>People are set on believing that if someone is super smart, they must lack some other important quality, like common sense. It just ain’t so.</p>
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Just to make clear, I went here to see what Bennett was saying and listen to his interview-</p>
<p>[Only</a> 150 of 3500 U.S. Colleges Are Worth the Investment: Former Secretary of Education | Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance](<a href=“Only 150 of 3500 U.S. Colleges Are Worth the Investment: Former Secretary of Education”>Only 150 of 3500 U.S. Colleges Are Worth the Investment: Former Secretary of Education)</p>
<p>first off, according to this</p>
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<p>he used the Payscale list to come up with his 150. My alma maters are in there - pretty far up - and they are state schools. So I have no bone to pick with him.</p>
<p>But his 150 would exclude Middlebury and Bowdoin. If you don’t think Middlebury and Bowdoin are worth an investment, then I guess you agree with him. I know nothing about either of these schools except people on CC seem to like them.</p>
<p>He also said this -
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<p>Since we’ve been hiring people, some from lower ranked state schools, this is certainly true where I work. But is it universal? I have no idea.</p>
<p>So it appears that basically he’s just like any other CC poster, forming his opinion from the same sources we see on this thread. So bear that in mind when listening to his opinion. </p>
<p>And although I have no problem with him, I’m sure some folks around here don’t like Bennett anyway. I mean, he is a talk show host. But people should give him credit for not bashing good schools as liberal Guantanamos.</p>
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<p>Thread after thread on here shows how many people think that the ivies and the elite schools are just filled with kids who were pushed heavily by their parents, who are socially awkward, and who cared only about doing the required activities to get into these schools.</p>
<p>In my experience that couldn’t be further from the truth. My two older kids went to ivies and my third will be starting at one this fall. They were not pushed at all. They were bright, highly motivated kids. Most of their college friends I met were also the same type. Normal teenagers with some exceptional skills and a good work ethic. </p>
<p>And, yes, I do think these schools open doors out in the professional world.</p>
<p>And the anecdotes of cruel parents who were too obviously disappointed over their children’s Ivy rejection such that it damaged the students emotionally, plus the horrific hypothetical question on this thread about whether you’d abort a low-IQ fetus seemed to me a veiled suggestion that parents of Ivy-caliber students are the type to be so hung-up on intelligence and the status it brings to the extent that they wouldn’t value as much a child who was less intelligent, and indeed might would prefer s/he not be born. That is really, really sick and over the top. Regrettably, this idea is out there too, and rears its ugly head every now and then.</p>
<p>Poor, poor ivy students and their parents. So sad.</p>
<p>^^^
Maybe some enterprising 16 year old can start a charity for them. :)</p>
<p>Or a support group to help with their self esteem issues. That might be good.</p>
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<p>Actually, I feel very, very lucky.</p>
<p>I know it has been a while, but I just have to call BeeeS on all these posts about having to “modify” your vocabulary to speak to your high school acquaintances. Maybe it is true now, though I doubt it is common. And maybe it was true for some remarkable folks back in my day (mid-70s) but not many. </p>
<p>Case in point. In my trusty Cass and Birnbaum, it notes that in 1974, 35% of the students at Stanford had Verbal SATs over 700. Well, I had a verbal SAT over 700 at that time, and although that is sort of a rough-cut on vocabulary and comprehension skills it does sort of indicate that I would have been likely to have had a better vocabulary than many of my high school classmates at the time. I was never teased or maligned for using “big words” and I don’t recall a conscious effort to modify my vocabulary.</p>
<p>I think in most cases people tend to use more words and more obscure words when fewer and simpler words would do just as well. I distinctly remember a period when I was reading the kid’s side of this website and posters were obviously straining to use "fatuous"and “puerile” when “silly” or “goofy” would have worked just as well, maybe better. Maybe there are subtle differences between those words, but none that really matter much AFAIC. Not that it isn’t nice to know all the words you can and vary the way you phrase things(especially if you do a lot of writing). I just don’t think it is essential in day to day life. </p>
<p>And on the engineer board I participate on I am often the subject of ridicule for my “pedantry” wrt vocabulary. Most of the folks over there are as smart or far smarter than I am.</p>
<p>Even Shelly Cooper communicates reasonably well with Penny.</p>
<p>Oh, I know. I couldn’t even chime in on that one yesterday. Such complete balderdash. If this were the case, my education would have certainly precluded me from speaking with the barista at starbucks or the guy who fixes my car or … Well, I suppose there is a Dershowitz or two in any crowd. (and yes I know I misspelled his name.)</p>
<p>Well if we are going to base opinions on N of 1 anecdotes (such as the story about the Brown interviewee), my sib went to an Ivy and he is a social clod. And not a very nice person. But that means nothing. Plenty of others who attended ivies are smart, nice, fun, interesting people. Oh, and my sib would have been a jerk no matter where he matriculated. Has nada to do with the school. </p>
<p>Wonder if the students at the ivies utilize the career placement services that may offer practice with interviews, resume writing, etc. Dunno. While some have naturally more common sense or better social skills, many of these skills truly need to be learned.</p>
<p>It’s amazing to me how many people are willing to feast on the Deresiewicz garbage and accept and promote the claim that the elite schools are superior at transforming 18-22 year olds into elitist SOBs. </p>
<p>I mean, when your kid gets accepted into the honors college at your state flagship, gets thrown all sorts of money to attend, gets special privileges like the honors dorm, honors classes and early registration that set him/her apart from the rest of the student body, gets special research opportunities, is groomed to apply to prestigious scholarships like the Rhodes or the Marshall, this isn’t screaming ‘your the best of the best’???</p>
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<p>You know? Sitting here at age 48, I can say that – and I know that if I were magically placed at (say) U of Washington as opposed to Wash U, I could figure out ways to find like-minded peers. I don’t know that I had that same skill at age 17/18 when I went off to college. Like many of the others on here, I felt somewhat awkward in high school – because I was a smart kid and found academics fun and took my studies seriously – and we know what that gets you in high school – basically social suicide. So no, I did not want to wind up at Mizzou like half of my high school class. I wished them well, but I wasn’t interested.</p>
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<p>I attended the same school as sally305, and around the same time. I’d be lying if I portrayed it as Shakespeare before breakfast, Plato before lunch and Socrates before dinner – of course there were a lot of ordinary, everyday interactions and of course there were jerks, like everywhere. There’s no place in life guaranteed to be free from jerks. </p>
<p>The difference was – I found it incredibly, incredibly liberating that it was finally cool to be smart, cool to get excited about something you’d learned about in class, cool to say “I can’t do that because I have to study, but you’re welcome to come hang out with me in the library and we can chat at study break.” And that pretty much everyone around me held to those values.</p>
<p>When I was in high school, I didn’t fit in – because I was smart and blah-blah-blah, but I also liked typical teenage girly things – clothes, and dating, and cute guys, and music, and makeup, and so forth. It was wonderful for me to get to college where it was ok to be both smart AND to care about those things. To be invited to parties and participate in social events in a way that I was too much of a brainiac to have been invited to in high school.</p>
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<p>No one is saying that there aren’t smart kids anywhere, even Arizona State (or pick whatever). But the density of the smart kids at Arizona State isn’t the same as the density of the smart kids at Yale (or pick whatever other comparison you like). Sorry, I do think the density makes a difference. That’s what the whole state-flagship-honors-program craze is trying to mimic – what it’s like when you concentrate those kids together.</p>
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<p>It’s fascinating how, at a state flagship, it’s great to cluster all the smart kids together in honors-dorms and ensure that they take classes with one another in honors-classes, because there’s clearly a benefit there (and go you!), but extend that to an entire university and it’s uppity, bad and snotty.</p>
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<p>Your friend’s hiring criteria includes what kind of pen the candidate brings? Not sure if someone with such odd hiring criteria would necessarily be representative of what you are trying to point out.</p>
<p>^^ Good point, Pizzagirl.</p>