An 'elite' school? Should be more like an 'elitist' school

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, was a piece of human excrement. But he had a keen knowledge of psychology and communication. He knew how to sell a lie by constant repetition.

And that brings us to the present.

There is a widespread pernicious myth that a relative handful of U.S. colleges — almost all private companies — provide a superior educational product. This is unadulterated nonsense, but the fiction persists that going to a name-brand school is the nirvana of higher education.

There are approximately 4,000 degree-granting schools in the United States, yet the (mis)perception is so prevalent that only about 2.5 percent of them are seen to be the pinnacle of the education hierarchy. And of those, only one-fifth are at the summit.

The marketing of these places is so good that they can boast of rejecting up to 96 percent of their applicants.

Who are the hucksters behind this evil crap? Aside from the schools themselves, the purveyors are elitist entities in media, professions, business and government. They go by names such as The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, College Board, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — but the message is the same: You can go to a Haagen- Dazs university for a bright future, or you can enroll in generic community college, get an imitation education, and be relegated to an inferior career and future commensurate with your third-rate education and ability.

Many of the peddlers of this snake oil at elitist schools actually eschew the English language — a subject that presumably is taught at their institutions. Schools in Cambridge and New Haven have what is euphemistically — and laughingly — referred to as “admissions committees.” When you turn down 90 percent of applicants to your private company, the correct English words are “rejection committee.”

When you rig the system to exclude the bulk of applicants, the correct term is “elitist,” not “elite.”

When one pretends that an irrelevant test that measures only the ability to answer those questions and others of a similar type is a valid yardstick of scholastic proficiency, then you are engaged in educational sophistry. Another — and better term — is academic fraud.

Several repulsive — and misleading — value judgments, masquerading as facts, are often applied to certain schools. The expressions include such terms as “selective,” “more selective,” “academically selective,” “highly selective,” “more elite,” “most selective,” “Ivy plus,” “Ivy League,” “very most selective,” “good colleges,” “best colleges,” “highest-rated colleges” and “top liberal arts.”

A name-brand publication recently had a published author write a long article where all of these opinions were repeated more than 40 times. Mr. Goebbels’ line was if you repeat a lie often enough, many people will believe it.

The correct English word for many of these schools is not “selective,” but rather “exclusionary.”

The same article quoted, approvingly, an educational parasite from a name-brand school who had the raw chutzpah to say, “many high-achieving, low-income students were making self-destructive decisions as high school seniors, applying to local community colleges or nearby public universities, rather than the highly selective institutions where their academic records would likely win them admission.”

Another silly — and vicious — canard is that the higher ed door is closed off to lower economic class blacks and Hispanics, the system is segregated, and we need greater “diversity.” While de jure segregation is reprehensible — and illegal — the skin color, sex, or ethnicity of one’s classmates is irrelevant.

My white daughter — half-Jewish, half-Italian American — took 29 courses at the Borough of Manhattan Community College where, as demographics go, less than one student in 10 was a non-Hispanic white. It didn’t stop her from becoming the youngest graduate in the history of her law school, and with the highest GPA in her graduating class.

This writer sat in classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology where he was the only male student in class. It didn’t’ stop him from teaching communications at three community colleges.

The bottom line? The public needs to learn the educational scams that powerful interests perpetuate, and destroy the stranglehold these folks have on the system.

If that is done, we’ll have a fairer, more humane society.

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