The number of articles and editorials I've read in the last 5 years, written by people from tier-1 schools, decrying the tyranny and ill-manners of the unwashed masses, and the unfairness towards graduates of these so-called "top" schools, is enough to convince me that the reputation that grads from these schools have for being pompous windbags who went to these schools not for the education, but for the name brand, is well deserved.
This article (hosted not insignificantly at standford.edu) is an absolutely textbook example of this phenomenon.
Articles like this one, and numerous professional interactions with people who introduce themselves as "Suzy Sue, I went to Yale" or "Marcus Markk, I went to Harvard"...and then repeatedly fail to perform up to the expectations I'd have for community college dropouts...I've never heard somebody from a tier-2 or 3 school introduce themselves in this way.
After so many of these kinds of experiences, when I hire people, a degree from a tier-1 school is an automatic mark against, not a mark for.
>What's the motivation for writing the article?
Well, he managed to name-drop Stanford, MIT and Google in a short article with the nutritional value of cardboard. Everyone knows that after the first job or two flashing a ivy-league CV around it starts to matter what you have achieved not where you went.
To me, there's always some way to feel superior by pointing fingers. I think he's driving his own brand of elitism.
(Somebody please accuse me of the same thing, and let's see if we can recursively create a singularity)