An Ivy League education is no guarantee of common sense or even actual intelligence. Someone with a great memory and a good work ethic can do very well in school. But when it comes to actual problem solving, specifically to problems that haven't been solved before, they can be complete failures in spite of all that education. Schools really don't teach problem solving for the most part. They teach tools that can be applied to the process.
When I was in college, we had a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying token Communist in our department (student, not faculty).
THe guy attempted proseletyzing briefly his Marxist babble, and could recite chapter and worse, but when pressed to phrase an answer to a question in his own words (off the beaten script), the guy just could not do it.
While they can parrot the babble they are spewing, they neither understand the theory, nor can they apply it to the real world. One more reason for them to be ensconced in purely artificial constructs such as academia or government, insulated from reality as we know it.