I think it’s more about the devaluation of education, rather than resentment. The internet gives the illusion of knowledge. A five minute google search is sufficient ammunition to debate a PhD. Combine that with epistemic closure and confirmation bias and you land where we are.
I agree 100% with this, emphasis mine.
The system is rigged to allow the rich to buy influence and thus more wealth. They happily keep the rest of us distracted through manufactured tribalism.
Nay. IMO, it’s the other way around. Focus of academic elitism is the result of economic divergence. Dwindling middle class means if you don’t belong to elites, you will be pushed down to lower class. One way to escape? Academic elitism.
Off topic: I can attest that engineers do make good husbands. They also make great patients.
I think a lot of our ills derive from a scarcity mindset that is being pushed by some corners.
It’s nice to be an engineer married to an engineer, too! 
And yes, we make good clients and patients, I think. We appreciate good advice and also can work with numbers - my CPA loves me.
I think this is one of those times that most of the College Confidential community has a consensus opinion on something: Nay!
Numeracy in a patient is a real joy.
Typical patient knee pain visit:
Me- “So how long has your knee been hurting you?”
Patient- “Too long!!!”
Me- “Oh wow, that sounds terrible, too long! Too long like a day, or like a week, or like a month or like a year?”
Patient- “Since at least before the Swanson girl’s wedding.”
Me- “Oh wow, so when was the Swanson girl’s wedding?”
Patient- “Oh before Memorial Day”
Me- “Ok, so your knee has been hurting you maybe almost 2 months.”
Engineer patient knee pain visit:
Me- “So how long has your knee been hurting you?”
Engineer- “7 weeks.”
As a scientist, if I think some health data/info might be useful in the future, I type it into my notes app. Docs can be surprised when I answer questions with precision, lol.
Here’s a somewhat related piece on how turning away from summer jobs to focus on academic college prep might have widened the divisions in society (though I’m sure some will disagree that the way to solve this is by stopping immigration):
I’m a firm believer in this quote.
It found that “industriousness in childhood—as indicated by such things as whether boys had part-time jobs, took on chores, or joined school clubs or sports teams—predicted adult mental health better than any other factor.”
Yes, although the stats quoted in the article about who actually has summer jobs, seem to suggest that in some cases these jobs might be something that wealthy white parents are more inclined to push their kids into (or as the article puts it “teen jobs are actually the luxury”).
I guess the question is what the rich kids take away from that, is it empathy for the working classes or a determination to get a college degree and become a member of the elite who never has to do manual labor again?
Only 20% of Asians aged 16 to 19 have one, compared to 40% of whites and approximately 30% of blacks and Hispanic.
The Department of Labor found that in 2023 households earning $100,000 to $150,000 per year had teen summer employment rates of 46%. For households earning less than $60,000, it was below 30%.
Could that have to do with connections that the higher income parents are more likely to have, and/or higher income parents just living in places with more available jobs?
Or that children from lower-income families often have other household responsibilities like caring for a younger sibling or a disabled grandparent, or preparing meals, etc. while their parents are working outside the home, which prevents them from taking a job themselves?
It could also be that the boys who did these things had fewer mental health issues to begin with.
I think that there’s a lot of stereotyping in how most people perceive anybody who is different from them in some way. Too many people have had the experience of a know-it-all with an advanced or elite degree telling everybody what to do or steadfastly standing by some wrong statement with their credentials to bolster their confidence. We might ignore a public figure, writing it off as ‘all of them are like that’, but many people have encountered it in person - the doctor who won’t listen, the principal who has a PhD and knows everything… Similar things happen in reverse, with incompetence from an uneducated individual - perhaps a receptionist or tech support at a call center - being used to reinforce the idea that all of ‘those people’ don’t know anything about anything. There is truth, wrongness, and a lot of confirmation bias in both.
My anecdote - I hang in homeschool circles, where I see everything from parents with PhDs and MDs to parents with GEDs trying to spare their child whatever educational malpractice (typically ignored dyslexia or bullying) caused them to drop out and get a GED. In our co-op, teachers are usually called ‘Mr/Mrs/Ms Lastname’ although some prefer the southern ‘Miss Firstname’. One of our teachers earned a PhD in education and required all students to start calling her Dr. Lastname. She would fuss at anybody who forgot, including elementary kids who had never used that terminology outside of a doctors office. Her paper format for middle schoolers had a heading where they wrote the teachers name, and she took off points if they didn’t include Dr. Meanwhile, I’d earned a PhD years before I started teaching there, and while it’s not a secret and my students know, the only time I use Dr is when writing recommendations. Interactions with the other teacher left many families with a bad feeling towards anybody with an advanced degree. It made them feel that educated people want to set themselves apart. If they find out that I have the same level of degree, they think that I’m unusual. It could just as easily go the other way, since I know plenty of people who don’t introduce themselves by stating their degrees, but confirmation bias is a beast.
I have also had experience with the ( extended) family know-it-all who has a high school diploma and no further education but made a lot of money.
This is one reason I joined our volunteer fire dept. I already knew that the mostly working class, mostly male members were great people. I wanted them to see a highly educated strong Democrat also wasn’t bad.we need less silo-ing and more mixing in our society.
In one of those random happenstance of timing things, this came up at our house last night. S25 is working with an excavation crew for the summer. They are doing the lowest of the low manual labor - basically installing those silt fences that keep mud and dirt from flowing, and they shovel out drainage ditches on sites that gotten clogged. It’s all the easiest and least skilled labor. He’s doing this because his planned college major is construction management, and he wants to be able to say he’s done all (or at least many) of the different jobs on site when he’s the manager. Excavation laborer is the only one he’s qualified to do this summer.
Most of the guys on his crew do not speak English (or not well) and do not appear to be be academic or income “elites”. (And based on the fact that S25 is heading to a good college in the fall, and that he grew up with two parents who make good salaries, you could say that he is.) But there is one other kid - this one just finished his sophomore year at Wake Forest, so we’ll call him an academic elite. Knowing approximately where he lives I’d guess his family is reasonably financially well off. S25 asked him why he’s working on the excavation crew. His answer was that he plans to apply to law school, and he thinks it will be a hook for his law school applications because it’s something different from other applicants and he’ll be able to talk about working construction.
And that just struck me as so… performative. Like he’s only doing this so he can exploit the fact that he worked construction and act like he’s somehow not-elite and therefore different and more deserving than other law school applicants who are working white collar summer internships. Maybe, hopefully, I’m reading too much into this. But while my kid is also exploiting this summer opportunity to some extent, the point was more the first part of your statement - to be the “rich kid” who learns some empathy that he can take with him as he progresses in a career focused on working with manual laborers. Whereas the other kid is the opposite, using this as a tool to make sure he never has to do something like this again.
So that spawned last night’s dinner conversation - about how we talk about our experiences and how to do it in a way that it doesn’t feel like coopting someone else’s life experiences for your benefit, how to be a good partner and support other people without overstepping and, maybe most important, why it’s important to just pay attention to some of this stuff so as to not create more division or hostility but rather to figure out how to work together better.
I’m prepared to give the future law school kid a break. Even if he’s doing it for performative reasons- the likelihood that he’ll be blogging about immigrants sponging off the federal government, sitting home watching TV while hard-working Americans pay the taxes that give those immigrants housing, food, medical care- is lower than someone who has never worked side by side with anyone who did not grow up affluent.
So excavation labor for the win. I worked in two different restaurants in HS-- it taught me more than my BA and MBA about the workforce, society, organizational design, humanity, etc.
This kid can coopt all he wants in my book. It’s going to be hard for him to claim that immigrants are eating people’s pets once he’s worked with them upclose…
The bigger challenge to me is the loss of respect for/belief in expertise and science. Vaccine hesitancy comes to mind of course. But in other areas as well. As someone said above, that a google search is as good as a PhD. That scientists are not experts in their fields and that peer-reviewed studies have no relevance. That facts are fungible. That teachers do not have their students best interests at heart. Of course there are frauds/bad actors in every field and questioning or looking for proof is not a bad thing. But when people refuse to believe facts or experts because they, with no evidence or data, know better with no basis, that is a huge problem.
i had a disagreement with a friend who was also a PhD scientist. He refuted the data I quoted by citing someone else. But that person was a blogger who presented no facts or studies to support his position.
Experts don’t have to come from only elite institutions, as defined in the most narrow way by the top 20 universities in the US.