Yep, definitely Dunning-Kruger Effect and reinforcement of the status quo; many people feel that if you've finished college and done well on tests, you are automatically a Cultured Intellectual Person, so their insensitivity/lack of perception is never visible to them.
The other thing is that it was my experience that my fancy college aspired to admit people from all over the world and from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and from all socioeconomic strata, and did, but that the campus culture was so strongly flavored by white, middle- and upper-middle-class, native-English-speaking, mainline Protestant/Catholic/very assimilated Reform Jewish, US Northeast, post-graduate-degree-required profession having people that it was more of a melting pot than a mosaic. You came in with a bunch of people with wildly different life experiences and you left with a bunch of people who subscribed to The New Yorker and listened to NPR.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-09-19 12:06 am (UTC)The other thing is that it was my experience that my fancy college aspired to admit people from all over the world and from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and from all socioeconomic strata, and did, but that the campus culture was so strongly flavored by white, middle- and upper-middle-class, native-English-speaking, mainline Protestant/Catholic/very assimilated Reform Jewish, US Northeast, post-graduate-degree-required profession having people that it was more of a melting pot than a mosaic. You came in with a bunch of people with wildly different life experiences and you left with a bunch of people who subscribed to The New Yorker and listened to NPR.