Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Hahvahd

Here's an interesting article about academic elitism.

The author talks about how big a deal the name of the university is in the US. Sort of like the difference between a Hundai and a Lexus- little more than the name really, but people really sweat over where they went to University in the states. He also talks a bit about the history of Ivy League admisions requirements, many of which were intended to keep Jews out. Actually, the SATs were originally designed to keep Jews out of the Ivies; it's no wonder why a Brooklyn Jew named Bernie Kaplan worked so hard to train the neighbor kids to take the SATs, before going nationwide with the Kaplan courses.

But, what I've found is that the students at the "elite" schools are different than our state kids in only two ways:
1) They're more diligent,
2) They speak and write much more correctly.

Neither has anything to do with intelligence, and so, I suspect that there are still guards in place to make sure that the prep school sons of senator's sons get first dibs. The irony of the Ivy League anti-semitism (admittedly, a product of the 1920s) is that I've found a striking intellectualism to all the jewish professors or students I've ever worked with- almost as if there is an innate intellectual advantage. But, of course, we shouldn't talk about such things...

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