College-educated Americans have become devastatingly good at making sure children of other classes can’t join their ranks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining-america.html
The author is sickeningly elitist, with his Insensitively, I led her to a gourmet sandwich shop stuff.
I clicked on this thread expecting to find out how the NY Times was ruining America. I left disappointed at reading more mindless, self-hating pablum.
Wow, while I was tending to the needs of my children (which I thought was OK - maybe not now), I just learned from this that I not only had the power to exclude others from opportunities, I went ahead and acted upon that.
As usual, Brooks goes for the individual responsibility argument rather than the societal structural reasons for inequality. No, educational barriers are not because some people know all the names of the sandwiches at that shop and some don’t (side comment–I live in an historically lower middle class Italian town, and anyone here could identify those terms.)
How about states supporting state colleges for a start?
Brooks always uses supposedly anti-elitest arguments to protect the status quo.
I do agree with some of Brook’s comments. In order to make college entrance less elitist, some considerations need to go: such as rewarding those who have had the opportunity to travel or do unpaid internships. These things should count for little on essays or extracurriculars. Going to a private school should not be considered ‘better’ than going to a public school.
But Brooks himself is being elitist by assuming that his friend didn’t know what the sandwich words meant. Maybe his friend just didn’t like the snobby atmosphere of a place that would call a tomato a ‘pomodoro’.
David Brooks - need I say more?
One of the common understandings on CC is that students do not get much mileage from travel and pricey ECs. My experience is that students are judged on the basis of what’s available to them, not compared to what other have and do.
It’s not like most UMC students are going to “elite” colleges to begin with. I teach at a run of the mill state school, and plenty of my students have pricey backgrounds. Yet here they are, sitting next to the Pell Grant kids. Are there less of the latter? Yup–and that’s more a function of lack of funding for public education, not that Mallory and Aidan went to Hawaii to build quonset huts or whatever last summer.
I found his lack of a Thesaurus devastating.
Legacy preference is another college admission consideration that adds advantage to those who are already more likely to be advantaged to begin with. While private colleges can do what they want, the use of legacy preference at public colleges (e.g. Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina, Penn State, Georgia Tech, Wisconsin) suggests public policy goals in those states that are skewed more toward perpetuating an inherited aristocracy rather than offering opportunity for all to move up based on their own ability and effort.
Of course, in-state tuition and financial aid policy also has its effects here.
Having spent time in Wisconsin, I can say that UW Madison grads are anything but aristocratic.
However, those from upper middle class backgrounds are more likely to go to any college at all, even when comparing students with similar academic measures across class backgrounds.
The zoning comments were unsupported. Yes, keeping apartments out of residential neighborhoods restricts access to the public schools in those residential areas, but people who want to live in a single family home neighborhood will just move to another city or suburb that has single family neighborhoods. Zoning changes that allowed denser housing in single family neighborhoods would only speed up UMC ‘flight’. People want to live in uncrowded areas (at least this person does).
Well, those who do not like zoning can move to Houston…
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Weirdest-images-from-Houston-s-lack-of-zoning-laws-9171688.php
I refuse to give this liar a single click so thank you all for pointing out who wrote this.
That just about made me spit my tea too, because Italian meats are so WASPy, and obviously the hoi polloi are intimidated by them. 
Some very funny comments on this piece. Some of my favorites:
This reminds me of the “I can’t talk to my plumber” lament we eviscerated here a couple of years ago.
It is not necessarily about the graduates of the flagship in general, but about the state’s post-secondary educational policy goals.
I live in a state with more people who are not college educated than people who are. What I’ve witnessed tends to be the exact opposite. The higher one’s education level, the more they are willing to help those without. It’s the people who only have a high-school diploma working in the “advanced blue-collar” type jobs that pay more than the average wages who are the ones trying to keep someone else from getting what they have, whether that’s more education, health care, or a slightly subsidized apartment. And, since they are the ones who rarely leave the state, they wouldn’t know a good educational opportunity if it fell out of the sky and hit them on the head.
America is fine . . . NYT? not so much.
There’s a lot of lameness in Brooks’ column – Starbucks’ insisting on using Italian terms for its drinks is pretentious, but it’s not destroying America – but that doesn’t mean his central point is without merit.
Most of us tend to view America as a place where social and economic mobility is strong, and we are proud of that. But most of the data indicate that social and economic mobility has reduced sharply in the past 20-30 years. Higher education had a central role in promoting upward mobility in the past, but that seems to have stalled significantly, notwithstanding (maybe even because of) the higher percentage of people overall going to college.
It’s an issue worth thinking about, whether you do it at Taco Bell or a $15 pomodoro ciabatta.