Elites

 I have been busy this week with family stuff and things at our retirement community. I wanted to remark though on a Washington Post article about first-generation academics – people from a background that included parents who did not have an academic background. In economics, the trend has been toward Ph.D. economists increasingly coming from an elite background, i.e. one where the parents were doctoral-level academics.

Elite here means privileged. I was not an academic, but I came from a household with the highest degree held by my parents was a high school diploma (mother) and a father who left school in the eighth grade to help support his family in the 1920s. I grew up in a small Pennsylvania city in the mid-20th century, educated in public schools and universities. I had scholarships in addition to low tuition in college and medical school. I certainly cannot claim I came from any sort of elite background but instead lived the American dream. A 3rd-generation American who made good.

We made sure the children were college educated but after that they were on their own. Two of them have master’s degrees and one has a Ph.D. I am ultra-proud of each of them. I have no idea what our three grandsons, the oldest 12, will do.

Elites seem to be people in this country who are educated. Some people seem to believe they are evil. No, they are just educated. If we bring back the times when education was attainable by children of modest means, instead of the Reaganist-Trumpist era where riches flowed only to the already wealthy, we could lift so many more children into educated adulthood. Think about it.