Peter De Vries Quotes

Access to high-quality education is way too limited. The United States has the world's most admirable higher education system, and yet it is very restrictive. It's so hard to get into. I never got into it as a student.

Less than one percent of U.S. college students attend Ivy League schools, and these students don't necessarily reflect the world's brightest and most capable thought leaders but, rather, the people who've been afforded the most opportunities to succeed.

As the only class distinction available in a democracy, the college degree has created a caste society as rigid as ancient India's. Condemning elitism and simultaneously quaking in fear that our children won't become members of the elite, we send them to college, not to learn, but to "be" college graduates, rationalizing our snobbery with the cliché that high technology has eliminated the need for the manual labor that we secretly hold in contempt.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

I don't come from an Ivy League school or anywhere else.

Only 28 percent of American adults have a college degree, but most of us in this group find ourselves in workplaces in social milieus where almost everybody has been to college. A social chasm is opening up between those in educated society and those in non-educated society, and you are beginning to see vast behavioral differences between the two groups.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.

Surrounded by the evidence of their success, the wealthy come to believe that they are fundamentally better than other Americans and that working people deserve their declining fortunes. They trumpet meritocracy while ensuring that their children enjoy crushing advantages from birth. They have unprecedented access to politicians and use it to push policies that swell their wealth while defunding institutions, such as public education, that sustain opportunities for less-fortunate Americans.

It cannot be Pakistan of Quaid and Iqbal where children of the elite study in prestigious educational institutions while those of resourceless segments deprived of education due to difficulties.

The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.

You know I went to the Hunt Schools, a boarding school in Princeton, and I've heard so many Rhodes scholars have gone to the Ivys.

I ended up going to Harvard College, which was about as likely in my neighborhood as going to the moon.

I didn't want to go to any school but Duke: the best of the best.

Arendt did have a certain snobbishness, though in some of her writing she expressed more democratic attitudes.

Grammar schools are about stigmatising children, not on the grounds of their ability, but on their background.

If the traditional British elite had made a great success of running my country, as successful, say, as the elites of Germany, Japan and America, then maybe it would be a club worth joining.

Everybody in my family is very well educated. I'm probably the only one who is not a double post graduate.

One could argue that our national university system has become a de facto talent drain for much of the country. Many states and communities send their top students away to great schools, never to hear from them again.

Class and the snobbery it provokes still matter far too much in Britain, but we are a far more mobile society than we used to be.

I think that in the past there has been a kind of cultural resistance to Latin because it's associated with elitism.

Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

Let me make something clear: There are very few things Hollywood is right about. This is a very corrupt, elitist industry that breeds favoritism and fails people up the career ladder.

There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.

Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.