William Deresiewicz writes on this topic in The American Scholar. He has some interesting points including:
That just because people don’t go to an Ivy League doesn’t mean they aren’t smart.
My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,†as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. …I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
That being book smart isn’t the end all of intelligence.
I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.†The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best†are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.
Read the whole thing.