This is pretty much the story of my university education. Gautam, Alok, ring any bells?
<http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html> ""The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who arent like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely-indeed increasingly-homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate. But it isnt just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didnt go to an Ivy League or equivalent school werent worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were the best and the brightest, as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic Oh, when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If Id gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say in Boston when I was asked where I went to school-the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who dont go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who dont go to college at all. I also never learned that there are smart people who arent smart. The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for ones advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The best are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this."
