Nonetheless, Dr. Weiss's elite credentials, and his initial skepticism, open the door to belief for people who might otherwise stay away.
For a young man in the 1970s with elite credentials, going abroad to work for a private company or getting a posting in the elite Indian Administrative Service were the two most attractive options.
There are now 15 fashion houses with the elite credentials, which carry stringent requirements.
One of the snappier Ealing satires, Alexander Mackendrick's wry, wonderful "White Suit" is built around the expressive comic performance of Guinness, playing a dreamy, obsessive chemist without the means (or the elite credentials) to fund his pet project.
Because of the bitter competition for those premium salaries, elite educational credentials are often a precondition for even landing a job interview.
Minorities, Professor Perrucci added, are far more likely than whites, especially white males, to lack elite educational credentials and social capital.
If they are successful in their ambitions, we may start to see a world where elite and inaccessible credentials are replaced by performance-based reviews, creating a much more meritocratic workforce than we have today.
In a May article about Mr. Obama in The New Republic, Noam Scheiber wrote, "The power of Obama's exotic background to neutralize race as an issue, combined with his elite education and his credential as the first African-American Harvard Law Review president, made him an African-American candidate who was not stereotypically African-American".
MARC AUSLANDER Millwood, N.Y., May 11 , 2012To the Editor: In spite of the elite education and corporate credentials, the "smartest guys in the room" have demonstrated once again that they're not.
But, in a peculiarly Italian way, Mr. Montezemolo's position reflects his unusual status as a member of the gilded elite, the product of credentials honed for more than 30 years as the viceroy of the Agnelli family, Italy's premier industrial dynasty and the leading investors in Fiat.
