Glad the author is here, so this doesn't stay one-sided! Some people here apparently think I'm trolling, but I'm simply cutting to the chase and hoping for a spirited and informed debate.

Mr. Guo, your article stands in opposition to itself. On the one hand, you try to state that "given comparable levels of intelligence or skill" and on the other "only the smartest have the highest grades". Your only example is one that does not draw a comparison of comparable persons (or rather, reaches the conclusion that an A student and a B student are not comparable or equivalent). And then you directly relate this situation of grades=intelligence to the world of adults. You don't say, "only smart people get into top schools", but the implication is pretty apparent.

Over the past few decades, largely because of the rise of the Internet, and the equalization of information access this brings about, name brand schools are finding themselves greatly diminished in reputation (it probably didn't help that our last president was mysteriously from Yale). World class research now regularly comes from lesser known schools without ridiculously large endowments. I'm not sure the same could be said 50-100 years ago. Yet an attitude persists in the "adult world" that people from tier-1 schools should start their careers higher and progress faster because they have somehow received a higher quality of education from their esteemed institutions of higher learning.

I think that this attitude is demonstrably false. In 14 years I've worked with a variety of people from a variety of educational backgrounds and I've seen virtually no difference in performance across the board. In fact, in the last two years I've had to take 2 Ivy League grads off of projects because of their failure to perform.

Understandably, many grads from these schools don't turn down these unearned opportunities (when was the last time you heard of a Harvard grad asking for a smaller starting salary because it wasn't fair?). I wouldn't. But to the folks who did not, for whatever reason (grades, opportunity, money, family, immigration, etc.), attend a name brand school, this unfairness smacks of all kinds of bad.

If I choose to ignore the elitist garbage in your post and focus only on your stated central argument, you decry their only avenue of dealing with the situation -- making noise about it. Yet you offer no other alternative except for an unstated "you shoulda gone to a better school then."

You've chosen to define this state of things as elitism, if you can find me a dictionary with a definition of elitism that matches your I'll eat my hat. You do hit the nail on the head with this however,

"Such an attitude is understandable, since alumni from top-tier schools have an implicit symbol of status from the name-recognition of their diploma, but alumni from more obscure universities often get puzzled replies of "hmmm, sorry, never heard of that place" when they mention their alma mater. Thus, in order to prove themselves as worthy colleagues, they must strive to more actively advertise and demonstrate their skills and technical competence, because their peers, superiors, and outside observers are not going to give them the benefit of the doubt."

A person saying "but I'm just as good as that guy from a name branded school!" is not elitism by any possible stretch of the word. It's a desire to seek equality and be given a fair shake. Something that, being a student two name branded schools you will never ever have to deal with. For a salient example, can you guess how immensely hard it is to even get a call back let alone a job from Google if you didn't graduate a top school? Who's elitist? The Stanford grads that don't call back the folks who graduated from xyz State University, or the people who graduated from xyz State University? These people have to make noise just to be seen beyond the brick wall of tier-1 graduated middle level managers in any organization.

But to my reading of the entirety of the article, what you seem most upset about is the declining status of the elite schools, and that people should have the temerity point this out in the real world. Instead of elitism, I think you are trying to turn this state of things into a kind of victimization. It's kind of sad really, the rest of us peons have had to get by on merit, it's time that the elite did also.