We Need to Distinguish Between Elites and Experts

When people ask me about the value of a fancy degree—I went to Harvard for undergrad and Wharton for my MBA—I don’t demur. There’s no question my education helped my career: a college friend and I raised venture capital without any startup experience. I lined up a job in Taipei despite having only rudimentary Mandarin. Back in the States, I was put at the helm of a company that was completely different from any business I’d run before.

The alchemy in my case was this: 

• At a few pivotal moments, my shiny degrees gave “deciders” in low-information situations something (however misguided!) to bank on. 
• As importantly, my schooling also gave me some much-needed confidence—having cracked these elite spaces and found them to be filled for the most part with mere mortals like me, I tried more things than I otherwise would have.

That said, I don’t proselytize for elite schools, or even for four-year colleges more generally.

In my business career, I rarely looked at where—or if—candidates went to university. When I considered creatives (writers, designers, video producers, etc.), I scoured their portfolios. When I evaluated people in sales or operations, I asked them to walk me through their results. For the biggest investment I’ve ever made—nurturing next-generation leadership for the company I own—I zeroed in on the two most capable people I’ve ever worked with, and, as it happens, neither has a college degree.

The fact is, many degree programs have become silly expensive—two to three times what they cost when I went. And, especially now, there are a lot of ways to learn. Given how quickly AI is re-shaping both education and work, I’m increasingly clear that my own kids (currently in high school) will likely take paths very different from mine.

This is all to say: while I myself am an elite (coastal, no less), I get why so much of America came into the last election mad as hell. The privileges enjoyed by elites are real—and they’ve never been allocated in a strictly meritocratic way. Moreover, these inequities aren’t acknowledged nearly enough.

At the same time, it feels like some weird combination of urgent and obvious to point out to anyone still cheering on the Trump administration that elites and experts are not the same thing. And that we should definitely stop purging the latter.

Aside from masked men disappearing people from the street, few things have been more worrying to me this time around than the lopping off of experts—via budget cuts, firings, buyouts, principled resignations, and what I imagine is an alarming amount of self-censorship. 

Departing CDC official Dr. Daskalakis described wiping “glass dust” from his desk—remnants of a gunman’s August 8th attack on the CDC—before packing up his office last week. It was perhaps our most vivid image to date, but ‘expertise under fire’ has been a relentless theme for eight solid months now.

I’ve been trying to figure out how quashing expertise is “owning the libs” when in reality it’s owning us all. Perhaps libs, elites, and experts are being conflated? There is some overlap between elites and experts; Dr. Daskalakis, for example, studied at Columbia, NYU, and Harvard. But the thing is: while he was at those places, he not only picked up degrees that were useful to him; he acquired knowledge that is useful to other people. Millions and millions of other people. 

In other words: grads from fancy universities aren’t all dingdongs obsessed with Virginia Woolf and a good, clean font. Some are invaluable experts in critical domains like public health, scientific research, national security, and economic policy. Others in those same fields didn’t attend especially prestigious schools but are just as indispensable—because they, too, really know their stuff, and that stuff matters to us all.

I have to think—at least if we workshop this a little more—that we could eventually get most Americans to agree they’re pro expertise. Let’s try, shall we? 

Thanks for reading,
Kate

September Zoom: After surveying interested participants, it turns out the best time for WHAT NOW's re-scheduled September Zoom is this coming Monday, September 8th at 6pmPT/9pmET. Here is the link: 
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84631837185

A couple scheduling notes:

• This is a make-up gathering since our usual time fell on a holiday (Labor Day) this month.
• The later start is a one-time departure to accommodate a few committed attendees. Next month, we'll revert to the recurring Zoom link, the usual time (5pmPT/8pmET), and the usual day (the first Monday of the month, so Monday, October 6th).

In case you missed what these monthly Zooms are all about, please read Faces and Voices.