The advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. Affluent, well-educated parents marry each other and confer their advantages on their kids, who then go to fancy colleges and marry people like themselves. As in all caste societies, the segregation benefits the segregators. And as in all caste societies, the inequalities involve inequalities not just of wealth but of status and respect.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
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The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.
~ John Ruskin
Little things comfort us because little things distress us.
~ Blaise Pascal
In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
We have now, for better or worse, entered the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI is already good at regurgitating information from a lecture. AI is already good at standardized tests. AI can already write papers that would get A’s at Harvard. If you’re hiring the students who are good at those things, you’re hiring people whose talents might soon be obsolete.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.
~ Adam Grant
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. University administrators in the James Conant mold assumed that people who could earn high grades would continue to excel later in their career.
~ David Brooks
via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic
:::
There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
~ John Ruskin