“You can have an education, I guess, but not one as good as mine…”

The Anchoress ^ | April 26, 2013 | Elizabeth Scalia

[2ndDivisionVet]

Here is Yale alum Leah Libresco responding with vigor to Keli Goff’s recent article entitled “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce”:

Goff assumes that women who leave the workforce will cease to use the education that they paid for, but there’s nowhere you can go that learning about beauty and citizenship and character and tradition aren’t relevant. The liberal arts are supposed to have taken up philosophy’s mantle as preparation for death — the study of how we should live.[...] The college grad starting out as a junior staffer or an administrative assistant may not be making much use of the more highfalutin’ skills she picked up, but those ideas and habits aren’t in abeyance until she gets promoted. They shape her choices outside of work and help her decide what organizations and causes she wants to serve, whether in a highly skilled way or not. Someone’s occupation shouldn’t be the only domain they expect to think critically in, and our place of employment isn’t the only space for us to give back.

Modern stay at home mothers might struggle to find ways to connect to their communities, but this isn’t because they’ve withdrawn from the workforce....

---snip---

Goff is, perhaps all unconsciously, communicating an idea that Ivy grads — preferably Ivy law school grads — are the people who are entitled to power. An inferior degree from a lesser school is fine for most; perhaps even on a state level, someone with a degree from a second or third tier school (like, say, Sarah Palin) might be good enough for a governorship of a flyover or largely rural state, but real power — the kind reserved for federal leadership — belongs to the Ivies......

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The irony, I suppose, is that many businesses now discreetly shun Ivy League graduates, labeling them a “corporate cancer”, because of their alleged obsession with self promotion and ambition, seeing their employment not as an end, but a means to an end. Their loyalties end the moment a better offer comes along.

Among their other sins, keeping the analogy, is that they “metastasize”, making efforts to recruit and preferably hire other Ivy Leaguers to the corporation at the expense of qualified and responsible recruits from elsewhere.

Likewise, it is asserted that they are utterly devoid of ethics, and are more than willing to expose the corporation to financial disaster and tremendous litigation, as long as they both benefit in the short term, and will be gone when it happens.

They also often attempt “lateral penetration” of a corporation, by becoming the proxy of another corporation, representing that companies interests on the board of directors. And *that* is comparable to “brain cancer”.

[17th Miss Regt]

I don’t see very many resumes from Ivy leaguers looking for technical positions. Of the few I have seen that are mildly interesting, most have puffed up descriptions of a short summer internship with comments like “increased profits by 17%” and the like. I prefer folks that like to work hard for their pay and take pride in their work.

[MNDude]

I agree. I know of a billion dollar company that hired an arrogant Ivy League graduate as VP. This VP blatantly broke contracts with business partners left and right. Now he’s long gone from this company and they’re still fighting huge lawsuits from what he did.

[Secret Agent Man]

see, your education may not be liberal enough, if you don’t go to an ivy school.

[Katya]

The original article “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce” covered a subject that has always given me a chuckle under my breath whenever I’d meet women with a Harvard or Yale degree, who literally did nothing with it... followed by a “what a waste of money!” also uttered silently.

Literally for me it’s the monetary waste... since some of these women had student loans or parents who footed part of the bill.... and unlike the article states, although they did marry a fellow ivy leaguer... that didn’t necessarily mean they were well off.