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This is an interesting essay and one that recalls Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (. Bourdieu discusses how education helps make up for the lack of economic class by conveying a sort of cultural capital. In academia, the PhD is akin to admission to an aristocracy of the intelligentsia. For convenience I post the link to the Wikipedia article on Bourdieu's text. Bourdieu, Distinction
There does, however, seem to be a socio-economic inertia that acts as a drag upon advancement in that even with elite education, students from humble backgrounds have trouble keeping up with their classmates who attended upper middle class college preparatory schools. It's interesting to see how these dynamics play out in China as there are clear echoes of this phenomenon in the U.S.
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