David Brooks, via Tyler Cowen:

Our system of higher education is like a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up some of the smartest people from across the country and concentrates them in a few privileged places.

The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. The magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.

This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year. ... Half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not. These other 100 schools don't even want to hire the sort of graduates they themselves produce. They want the elite credential.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

James Suroweicki:

The only way to win the game is simply not to play.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

What is to become of those of us past schooling, who are aware of these planes? Are we to dredge on with pink shades over our blue eyes? What other choice do we have, become hermits and form our own seceded blue colony?