People who look down on less prestigious jobs or educations

Originally Posted by bellisaurius

Sorry,as a member of a science field, I do look down on a lot of the nontechnical/less rigorous humanity degrees. The school involved can matter at first, and matters less after the person opens their mouth. It's not that a harvard degree means something itself, it's that it shows you can put your nose to the grindstone to the point that you outcompeted a huge portion of the country. It takes out a lot of chaffe that may show up in other institutions.

So, let's say there is someone who went to Harvard for her undergrad and Ph.D. in a science field.
I don't know about your qualifications, but let's say they are "less prestigious" than hers.
Are you saying it's acceptable for her to dismiss or look down on you because she went to a better school then you?

Originally Posted by etre

So, let's say there is someone who went to Harvard for her undergrad and Ph.D. in a science field.
I don't know about your qualifications, but let's say they are "less prestigious" than hers.
Are you saying it's acceptable for her to dismiss or look down on you because she went to a better school then you?

My credentials are probably middleweight. U of Illinois, chemE.

With the harvard gal, I'd expect her to be on top of her stuff, yes. As soon as she said something, I'd start to get a better feel for it, and judge accordingly. There'd be a lot of intellectual challenging, as I like to test and probe people that are in an otherwise superior position to mine, so this isn't necessarily a place someone would want to be. It's like having a target on the back.

I just did a quantitative research where orderliness was shown to be the most liked variable (among 15 others like music, color, material). This means that a person who cleans for a living will give greater satisfaction than a person that repaint walls. :)

I think that the people who looks down on people with less "good" jobs, are just not educated enough. They don't see the whole picture. If I come across people like that, I'll simply just tell them what those "less good" jobs are highly needed in order for the society to work, in order for tourists to come visit our town, etc. These people usually get a little angry since they did not think of this themselves, but they accept that these jobs are needed, which is good.

Yes, this bothers me. I can understand being a little more judgmental about GPA, but I don't understand why people place such a high value on prestige. Tuition costs just keep rising and rising, and it's only worse at prestigious schools. And I think some of these prestigious schools have a dangerous "follow our philosophy without questioning the debt you're going into" mentality.

It makes me sad that community colleges get such a bad reputation for being unprestigious (that's not a word, says Google Chrome...but was is the antonym of 'prestigious' then? :O). Getting your GEs done at a community college is a great way to save yourself money!

And if you graduate from a school debt free, what differences does it make if you graduate from a prestigious school 100,000 dollars in debt? I can understand that for some careers, prestige matters, but for most of them, I don't think it really does.

Blimey, and here I was thinking college is overrated and some people simply shouldn't be here, because I still hold onto the traditional view that college is the home of intellectual exploration, not pre-professional training, and many people forced into "liberal arts" education simply don't want to be there and their presence disrupts the classroom experience of those who actually do. But they're still in college even though they don't want to be because it's not acceptable to do anything else after high school. They end up majoring in a trade and going into that trade anyway, so why not go to trade schools? Many complain that "they're making us read Homer. What use is Homer to me? I'm not going to do anything with it, so I'll read it and Sparknotes everything to pass the class". And so Homer becomes a classic everyone hates.

Everyone should have a high school education which is enough to be an informed citizen, but sending kids to college by the truckloads defeats the purposes and makes colleges rich. If the demand for college simply isn't as high as it is, tuition would fall, and those who don't like to go to school can go to trade schools which are cheaper anyway. University should go back to what it used to be: a congregation of people who meet to explore intellectual subjects because they want to.

In the scientific community, there's a lot of snobbery, so academic pedigree becomes very important if you're interested in obtaining funding, etc.. I actually don't fault it considering that usually that the gross filter works well to filter out people who don't deliver much in the end (due to whatever reason ... reasons are not useful products). It is somewhat self-perpetuating system because people from less prestigious places don't deliver because of resources constraints due to their less prestigious background and so on.

In my experience, people from less prestigious places and under-achievers from prestigious places have been a bane. Many times students from less prestigious schools have high GPAs but their work is unoriginal and it would appear they depended on their professor for everything (so they end up delivering a substandard product that you have to fix). On the other hand, some underachievers from prestigious universities feel entitled and do not deliver on time or sometimes not at all (but they usually understand the delivery requirements). I usually see people from somewhat prestigious universities, e.g., not necessarily Ivy-league but highly-ranked, as ideal. They work hard and deliver on time. There are exceptions to every rule, and so every now and then we encounter hard-working people from community colleges that happen to be late-bloomers. It is quite uncommon.

Originally Posted by bellisaurius

My credentials are probably middleweight. U of Illinois, chemE.

With the harvard gal, I'd expect her to be on top of her stuff, yes. As soon as she said something, I'd start to get a better feel for it, and judge accordingly. There'd be a lot of intellectual challenging, as I like to test and probe people that are in an otherwise superior position to mine, so this isn't necessarily a place someone would want to be. It's like having a target on the back.

My class valedictorian and salutatorian could both have gotten into Harvard (Both got into Princeton and Stanford). One went to P, one went to S, and they're seriously unimpressive people. And coming from an elite LAC, our physics major is famously tough, but so is our humanities majors. Our professors here are real professors and it's well nigh impossible to BS a humanities paper and not expect a C or D. They actually grade your stuff. You get a lot of reading and only insightful comments are noted. It's one reason I elected not to take many humanities in my top ranked even though I'm probably one of the best, it's because I have a harder time doing well in humanities than sciences. Humanities is bullshit in some colleges because they need some level of insightful thinking to understand, but it's certainly not bullshit here.

I've taken 6 courses with grades (3 courses each trimester. I'm on my last trimester) and my only non A courses are the philosophy (A-) and Greek Novels (B), but I submit the latter course was bullshit and she wasn't a real professor- everyone in my class agreed :) In math, even if I didn't do well I can be confident it was a circumstantial mistake rather than any conceptual difficulties on my part (because I'm great at concepts), but in humanities, it's like: "what on Earth?"

I went to a somewhat prestigious business school for undergrad. I got my first job working retail in a bank, and honestly, I felt like I was working with mostly a flock of idiots, many of whom thought they were smart and acted like such. I had become accustomed to being around intelligent people at school, and was quite surprised. I find that those with prestigious or semi-prestigious degrees are usually very clearly more intelligent.

I've also met a lot of very intelligent people who have no post secondary education. Overall, I would say that a prestigious or semi-prestigious degree is an indication that the person has a baseline of aptitude. Lack of an education, though, isn't an indication of anything.

I'd also like to say to those who seem to be denigrating the aptitude required to attain certain educational credentials, that although you may be correct that elitist types unfairly judge, you are incorrect to surmize that a significant portion of those with prestigious educational credentials attained such without a high level of aptitude. Ironically, you are unfairly judging those who do have prestigious educational credentials. Hypocritical much?

Originally Posted by Persephone

My class valedictorian and salutatorian could both have gotten into Harvard (Both got into Princeton and Stanford). One went to P, one went to S, and they're seriously unimpressive people. And coming from an elite LAC, our physics major is famously tough, but so is our humanities majors. Our professors here are real professors and it's well nigh impossible to BS a humanities paper and not expect a C or D. They actually grade your stuff. You get a lot of reading and only insightful comments are noted. It's one reason I elected not to take many humanities in my top ranked even though I'm probably one of the best, it's because I have a harder time doing well in humanities than sciences. Humanities is bullshit in some colleges because they need some level of insightful thinking to understand, but it's certainly not bullshit here.

I've taken 6 courses with grades (3 courses each trimester. I'm on my last trimester) and my only non A courses are the philosophy (A-) and Greek Novels (B), but I submit the latter course was bullshit and she wasn't a real professor- everyone in my class agreed :) In math, even if I didn't do well I can be confident it was a circumstantial mistake rather than any conceptual difficulties on my part (because I'm great at concepts), but in humanities, it's like: "what on Earth?"

Firstly, I wanted to say that I feel a twinge of sadness because of my agreement about your other comment, that college, ideally, is a place for intellectual exploration. Currently, it's more of an extended vocational school with some human spirituality growth add-ons.

Otherwise, a return to some kind of grading standard would be nice. Perhaps even national testing so an A at one place doesn't mean much more or less than an A at another.

I have to admit I dislike people who have a higher GPA than me at an easier school and brag about it. For example, my mother went to the easiest school I've ever seen and got almost a 4.0. I went to a very demanding small liberal arts college and got a 3.4. She's constantly talking about how she got a higher GPA than I did, even though when she writes she can't even use proper capitalization and I had to practically do her basic algebra homework for her. And the saddest part is that a potential employer will look at her degree and look at my degree and since he probably hasn't heard of either college, will assume her degree is worth more because of her higher GPA. I think we just need more standardization in American education period. A high school diploma or a bachelor's degree should mean the same thing no matter where you got it.