When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed.

From the archive:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Also:

As much as I think engineering is a dysfunctional profession, I am often shocked at how other professions seem to work.

All the [law] professors, all the judges, and most of the top lawyers all come from a handful of schools. Those schools are expensive. Astronomically expensive. Because they can be.

Law students have to assume hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to attend one of these top notch schools, and in fact many of the not so top notch schools are similarly expensive and offer the added benefit that its really difficult to get a job when you graduate because everyone is afraid to have you defending them. That debt becomes an indenture. You have to pay it off. The only way to pay it off is the get a job at a big firm.

RE: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education