In the Yale bubble we tend to think that students will forever be united by our common bond of Eli pride, but David Frum claims in his piece for the National Post,“There’s Yale and then there’s Yale,” as he gives a comparison between a doctor who earns $200,000 a year and an investment banker earning the $200,000 a week.

Frum’s column is about author and columnist Charles Murray’s endeavor to write about class without mentioning money in an article for the Washington Post. “The results make for very, very strange reading,” says Frum.

“One of the easiest ways to make the point is to start with the principal gateway to membership in the New Elite, the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities,” Murray writes. “Those schools were once the bastion of the Northeastern Establishment.” But while Murray believes that America’s elite is characterized by “education credentials and consumption choices,” Frum disagrees:

I’d wager the fee Murray received for his article that the Yale-educated cardiologist mentioned above has never talked to his or her U.S. Senator. The Yale-educated Goldman VP? His senator calls him.

Frum says that Murray’s exclusion of people with money and power who lack education credentials but inclusion of everyone who shops at certain stores “seems an unscientific way of proceeding.”

So what classifies the New Elite – consumerism or education?