Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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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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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

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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

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If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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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

:::

Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way.
~ David Brooks

via How the Ivy League Broke America
published by The Atlantic

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