Don't Go to an Ivy League School?

Found this article and thought it was an interesting read. Can't say I agree with all of it, but there are some decent thoughts.

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
The nation's top colleges are turning our kids into zombies

In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee. We—that is, three admissions staff, a member of the college dean’s office, and me, the faculty representative—were going through submissions from eastern Pennsylvania. The applicants had been assigned a score from one to four, calculated from a string of figures and codes—SATs, GPA, class rank, numerical scores to which the letters of recommendation had been converted, special notations for legacies and diversity cases. The ones had already been admitted, and the threes and fours could get in only under special conditions—if they were a nationally ranked athlete, for instance, or a “DevA,” (an applicant in the highest category of “development” cases, which means a child of very rich donors). Our task for the day was to adjudicate among the twos. Huge bowls of junk food were stationed at the side of the room to keep our energy up.

The junior officer in charge, a young man who looked to be about 30, presented each case, rat-a-tat-tat, in a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough. We listened, asked questions, dove into a letter or two, then voted up or down.

With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.” On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.

“Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize 30 lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Nearly every single kid got every single line correct. It was a thing of wonder, she said, like watching thoroughbreds circle a track.

hese enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

MAP: America's 10 Richest Universities Match These Countries' GDPs
When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

I should say that this subject is very personal for me. Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth—“success.” What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one—all this was off the table. It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.

A young woman from another school wrote me this about her boyfriend at Yale:

Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he’s painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don’t give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he’s “networking” enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he’s incurious, but because there’s a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.

I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.

There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”

Full article: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overra…

 

Interesting read, thanks for sharing!

I didn't attend an Ivy, or even one of the few highly ranked public schools, so it's difficult for me to add much in terms of the mindset of their student populations. Would be interested in hearing from others with the backgrounds mentioned regarding their experiences and how they can relate to the article.

 
If there is anywhere that college is still college—anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place—it is the liberal arts college. Such places are small, which is not for everyone, and they’re often fairly isolated, which is also not for everyone

I go to one of those "isolated liberal arts colleges." It looks as though the author of the piece is trying to paint everything in black and white. Competition for grad school, med school, and yes, even IB, is rampant on campus. The isolation only exacerbates the stress, and within these competitive circles, friendships are sustained on finding out information (e.g. "How did Marsha get into Johns Hopkins med school/GS TMT/Harvard Law with only a 3.5?"). Academic pretension is also noticeable and comparisons to the Ivy League are oft thrown around. Quite simply, sitting in college for the sake of learning is dead on a large scale. There are some individuals, granted, who seek that route, but they are few and far between, even at liberal arts schools.

 

I don't know if I agree with the final conclusion (or title for that matter). but I don't think what the article is actually as inflammatory or controversial as they're trying to make it seem with the burning flag. There's a lot of truth in it, and a lot of existential angst under the surface at these schools and maybe even moreso afterwards, when people are out in the real world and suddenly the stupid manufactured pressure disappears.

Maybe I'm especially disillusioned or whatever, but I'll go to shows and these producers are my age or younger and living the life. Talent is talent, even if it doesn't fit within the upper middle class narrative of what "smart" and "talent" means, and an Ivy League degree or stint at GS shouldn't (doesn't) validate you as a person. No doubt that some people really enjoy finance, but there are a lot of miserable people working "prestigious" jobs.

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It's pretty egregious and the black-and-white portrayal of the student bodies of these schools is widely inaccurate. Seems like he's a bitter academic lambasting any individual who has even the smallest desire to go to a "top school".

 
fearandloathinginca:

It's pretty egregious and the black-and-white portrayal of the student bodies of these schools is widely inaccurate. Seems like he's a bitter academic lambasting any individual who has even the smallest desire to go to a "top school".

What reason does he have to be bitter though? I re-read the article more carefully (skimmed it earlier today when it showed up repeatedly on my feed) and there are more points I disagree with, but a lot of his arguments are the things people might share with their close friends but avoid speaking about in polite company. Of course it overgeneralizes, but that's the nature of the beast.

I don't think it's crazy to suggest that:

  1. A lot of students at top schools are very smart and high achieving but don't know what to do once they get there.
  2. The schools are hyper-competitive and pre-professional (full disclosure: went to Penn).
  3. Most people are extremely risk-averse.
  4. All of the above factor into the disproportionate number of students interested in banking and consulting (or even more telling in my opinion: TFA). These companies and programs are also masters at exploiting these insecurities.
  5. These schools are still bastions of wealth.
  6. The upper middle class student from the Chicago burbs and the Pakistani international school student probably share more in common than the same student from Chicago and a black kid from the South Side.
  7. People can be smart in a number of different ways, but these schools tend to herd students in a few limited directions.

And the only reason I'm confident about the above facts is because people would bitch about it all the time. Yes, a lot of people go in with a clear sense of direction and kill it. Yes, some people genuinely enjoy finance and happily launch their fulfilling careers at BX. Yes, some people thrive in an extremely competitive atmosphere. I don't blame Wall Street or MBB or TFA for figuring out the system; a contract requires two consenting parties.

I don't think Ivy League students are mindless sheep, but those four years were definitely spent in a bubble of privilege, and the unique pressures in that bubble probably lead to sub-optimal decision-making for a lot of people.

Array
 

Mixed thoughts. I went to UT-Austin, and often wish I went to an East Coast school or Vanderbilt or whatever. But then, if I'm perfectly honest, I'm pretty happy w/ what's unfolded. No debt, work for myself (where I went is largely immaterial etc.), and at the end of the day I don't need a Penn bumper sticker on my car or dinner party bragging rights. And top notch recruiting/alumni network wasn't as big a deal in my case.

But I realize from a recruiting standpoint, and MBA-wise, accruing some private school debt mathematically pays off (in the long run) for many on this site in finance. Not discounting it, at all, and Ivy's are incredible-- I just didn't go that route.

And education is largely overrated as far as actual learning goes. But that's also a lazy concept thrown around by C students. I see both sides.

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I don't go to an ivy league school, but I do go to a USNWR top 25 school and I think the author is right. It's crazy competitive. I totally agree with the part where the author talks about how when the professor gives 30 lines of poem to memorize and everyone in your class memorizes it. In my bioche classes our professor gives us like 30 reactions to memorize for a quiz next section and like 90% of the class ends up getting a perfect.

My parents aren't bankers or doctors; they work dead end jobs for the government, but a lot of my friends are rich. One parent is a C-level exec at a major Chinese corporation and another's parent owns the largest manufacturing company in his country. It kind of sucks that I'm working my ass off during the summers while they're travelling the world, and are just going to be groomed to take over the business after they graduate.

But unlike the author, I think going to an elite college from a disadvantaged background is a humbling experience. While they may be rich and connected, at the end of the day, you guys are at the same place, and that says something about you. Also, one of my wealthy friends told me this the other day. He said that he will never know how it feels to start from nothing and achieve something in life.

 

I appreciate the gist of the article but I think it's a bit altruistic and utopian and very much comes from someone who, as far as I can tell from the article, has been in academia his entire life. I planned to enter college (and this is more than 20 years ago) as a philosophy major but my mom convinced me it would be a good idea to get accepted at the business school also so I did but just to appease her. I was altruistic and loved learning for learning's sake, as I still do. I wish I could have sat around and espoused philosophy, discussed the great books and completed mastering something absolutely useless like ancient Greek just for the intellectual challenge for not only my entire scholastic career but my life. But thank god I picked up a finance major as well because I needed something to actually pay back the tens of thousands in loans that I accrued while doing so. The ROI of an education investment becomes somewhat essential because private schools (and even state schools) are now 3x more expensive than when I entered 20 years ago, and they were expensive 20 years ago. In a Platonic ideal it would be great if the best minds could concentrate on wisdom and not enter commerce: in ancient Greece that was philosophy as philosophy basically encompassed science and mathematics (philo sophia). Today it would be great if it we lived in some Star Trek utopia where self enrichment and the advancement of society as a whole could be the goal because we had eradicated poverty, malnutrition and disease (yes, geek), but we haven't and at the end of the day, you have to feed and shelter you and your family. And even more important than that you have to repay your unforgivable student loans that you're indebted to because you learned purely for the sake of learning.

 

The world isn't a utopia so you have to play the game. At all Ivies, the student body is competitive just like any elite and exclusive club.

Finance is competitive, high tech is as well. Asinine to think otherwise and point your child to an environment that doesn't foster competition.

 

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