STANFORD ELITE FAÇADE SHATTERED. SILICON VALLEY FAKE SOCIALITES SHOWN UP
Genius Girl, a Harvard-Stanford admissions hoax and elite college mania
In this 2012 photo, a group tours the campus of Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. (Elise Amendola/Associated Press)
By Petula Dvorak Columnist June 22 Follow @petulad
Super-achievers (and your uber-ambitious parents) — take a deep breath, go to the pool, have an ice pop.
Do not take summer research statistics. Do not hire a robotics tutor. Do not start yet another thread on a parenting forum asking for advice on how to get your child into the much-sought-after Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia.
Petula is a columnist for The Washington Post’s local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. View Archive
Because the great Harvard-Stanford admissions hoax of 2015 should tell you all you need to know about where Ivy League insanity can lead. And it’s pretty ugly.
The hoax was concocted by a TJ student who claimed that she was so amazeballs brilliant at one of the country’s best public high schools that Harvard and Stanford universities were totally fighting over her.
She said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg called her to persuade her to pick Harvard. (Um, which he never graduated from.) She waved around a letter from a Stanford dean who wrote (in the exact same, cute handwriting as the dean from Harvard, oddly) “Go Trees!” Then the two schools supposedly offered her dual enrollment — two years at one campus and two years at the other.
She was a media darling back home in South Korea, where she became known as “Genius Girl.”
Ouch when it all came crashing down, right?
[Harvard-Stanford admissions hoax becomes international scandal]
Her elaborate ruse was uncovered last week, and her dad, who has been described as a tech executive with a South Korean company, issued a poignant apology that acknowledged the pressure cooker that his daughter’s life had become.
“I am sincerely sorry for causing trouble with what is not true,” he wrote, according to Yonhap, the South Korean news agency. “I am deeply repentant that I failed to watch properly over how painful and difficult a situation the child has been in so far and that I even aggravated and enlarged her suffering.. . . From now on, the whole family will live a quiet life, devoting ourselves to getting the child cured well and taking good care of her.”
Our college admissions death struggle has been building for years. Kids are taking the SAT a dozen times, applying to two dozen schools and hiring college admissions coaches for their best shot at an Ivy League welcome letter.
Now add to that madness students from an even more competitive culture 7,000 miles away from the Washington suburbs.
In South Korea, TJ — yes, a public high school in an American suburb — gets rock-star status. The Korean Embassy has the admissions requirements for TJ on its Web site. Preschools near Korean churches advertise that they can help kids get into TJ. There is an entire subculture of Korean parents who establish residency in Northern Virginia — one parent comes, while the other usually stays behind — with the sole purpose of getting their kid into TJ.
South Korea’s college admissions mania makes our homegrown version look like amateur hour.
Students there often have 14-hour school days, and the entire nation’s air traffic is grounded — to keep airspace quiet — on the national testing day for the one, big college entrance exam that can determine a student’s future.
The stories of teen suicides are frequent — it is the leading cause of death among teens in South Korea — and 60 percent of teens said they suffer from chronic, school-related stress, according to a government survey,
(The leading causes of death among American teens are, ranked in order: accidents, homicide and suicide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)
TJ is an impressive place, filled with incredibly smart kids. This year, one of its seniors, Pooja Chandrashekar, made national news by getting into all eight Ivies.
[Super student gets 14 college welcome letters, including all 8 Ivies]
Pooja had a 4.57 grade-point average and near-perfect SAT scores. She founded a national nonprofit group that pushes middle school girls to get into STEM programs, and she developed a mobile app that predicts with 96 percent accuracy whether a person has Parkinson’s disease based on speech-pattern analysis.
“We celebrate the accomplishment of students who get into all eight Ivies,” Brandon Kosatka, TJ’s director of student services, told The Washington Post’s T. Rees Shapiro last week. “That’s the bar, and our kids are shooting for that. They don’t like to be the second-best. If that’s the bar, then, yes, that creates anxiety for them.”
That’s the bar? Kids are doomed.
The relentless pressure to achieve may be triggering suicides in some of the nation’s highest-achieving areas.
In the Palo Alto school district in Silicon Valley, there were two waves of suicides in the past five years. Most of the teens stepped in front of trains.
In Northern Virginia, suicide clusters among high-achieving high schoolers prompted an investigation by federal health officials.
[Two teen suicides in two days: Unthinkable until it happened]
I was at one of the memorials last year, and the students I talked to all said they, too, feel the crush of school stress. Most get only four or five hours of sleep every night because they’re so laden with homework and scheduled activities.
Here’s the worst part of it, the part that Genius Girl illustrates so perfectly.
This is not about academics. It is not about a monastic love of learning, the dogged pursuit of discovery, the challenge of exploration or the odyssey of the mind.
This entire, whackadoo college admissions obsession is about status.
Genius Girl would have breezed into just about any university in America. And the truth is, most successful Americans did not graduate from an Ivy League school. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg, if you can get him on the phone.
There is no nobility in driving kids to stress, exhaustion, delusional hoaxes and suicide in a craven race for platinum-plated university credentials.
Parents and kids? Lean back, let go and be honest about what it is you’re really trying to achieve. Maybe have an ice pop while you’re at it.
Twitter: @petulad
THE IVY LEAGUE FAÇADE WILL DESTROY YOUR CHILDREN:
Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
The nation’s top colleges are tur
ning 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.
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These 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.
READ: William Deresiewicz Responds to His Critics
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 s
tigma 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.”
“Return on investment”: that’s the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. What no one seems to ask is what the “return” is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?
The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. That doesn’t simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
Learning how to think is only the beginning, though. There’s something in particular you need to think about: building a self. The notion may sound strange. “We’ve taught them,” David Foster Wallace once said, “that a self is something you just have.” But it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.
MAP: America’s 10 Richest Universities Match These Countries’ GDPs
College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven’t started by the time you finish your B.A., there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted.
Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.
Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect. What an indictment of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word.
At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. There are exceptions, of course, but professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a “nonaggression pact.” Students are regarded by the institution as “customers,” people to be pandered to instead of challenged. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. The profession’s whole incentive structure is biased against teaching, and the more prestigious the school, the stronger the bias is likely to be. The result is higher marks for shoddier work.
It is true that today’s young people appear to be more socially engaged than kids have been for several decades and that they are more apt to harbor creative or entrepreneurial impulses. But it is also true, at least at the most selective schools, that even if those aspirations make it out of college—a big “if”—they tend to be played out within the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, prestige.
READ: Send your kid to the Ivy League! A rebuttal.
Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify. The New York Times reports that there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers, but what strikes one is the superficiality of the activities involved: a month traveling around Italy studying the Renaissance, “a whole day” with a band of renegade artists. A whole day!
I’ve noticed something similar when it comes to service. Why is it that people feel the need to go to places like Guatemala to do their projects of rescue or documentation, instead of Milwaukee or Arkansas? When students do stay in the States, why is it that so many head for New Orleans? Perhaps it’s no surprise, when kids are trained to think of service as something they are ultimately doing for themselves—that is, for their résumés. “Do well by doing good,” goes the slogan. How about just doing good?
If there is one idea, above all, through which the concept of social responsibility is communicated at the most prestigious schools, it is “leadership.” “Harvard is for leaders,” goes the Cambridge cliché. To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society. But what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.
The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science. It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
For the most selective colleges, this system is working very well indeed. Application numbers continue to swell, endowments are robust, tuition hikes bring ritual complaints but no decline in business. Whether it is working for anyone else is a different question.
It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.
The sign of the system’s alleged fairness is the set of policies that travel under the banner of “diversity.” And that diversity does indeed represent nothing less than a social revolution. Princeton, which didn’t even admit its first woman graduatestudent until 1961—a year in which a grand total of one (no doubt very lonely) African American matriculated at its college—is now half female and only about half white. But diversity of sex and race has become a cover for increasing economic resegregation. Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the 1960s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy.
The truth is that the meritocracy was never more than partial. Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan, or if one plays the cello and the other lacrosse. Never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few exceptions, but that is all they are. In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present on selective campuses at all. The only way to think these places are diverse is if that’s all you’ve ever seen.
Let’s not kid ourselves: The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself. In the affluent suburbs and well-heeled urban enclaves where this game is principally played, it is not about whether you go to an elite school. It’s about which one you go to. It is Penn versus Tufts, not Penn versus Penn State. It doesn’t matter that a bright young person can go to Ohio State, become a doctor, settle in Dayton, and make a very good living. Such an outcome is simply too horrible to contemplate.
This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from t
he bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.
The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely. Today, fewer than half of high-scoring students from low-income families even enroll at four-year schools.
The problem isn’t that there aren’t more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.
And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of “service,” and not in the spirit of “making an effort,” either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to “buy them a coffee,” as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to “ask them about themselves.”
Instead of service, how about service work? That’ll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables so that you can see how hard it is, physically and mentally? You really aren’t as smart as everyone has been telling you; you’re only smarter in a certain way. There are smart people who do not go to a prestigious college, or to any college—often precisely for reasons of class. There are smart people who are not “smart.”
I am under no illusion that it doesn’t matter where you go to college. But there are options. There are still very good public universities in every region of the country. The education is often impersonal, but the student body is usually genuinely diverse in terms of socioeconomic background, with all of the invaluable experiential learning that implies.
U.S. News and World Report supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top 20 universities, the number is usually above 90 percent. I’d be wary of attending schools like that. Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.
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. The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others. Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values.
Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else. The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to plot our exit to another kind of society altogether.
The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth. Of course, they have to stop cooperating with U.S. News.
More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they’re going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote. Selecting students by GPA or the number of extracurriculars more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.
The changes must go deeper, though, than reforming the admissions process. That might a
ddress the problem of mediocrity, but it won’t address the greater one of inequality. The problem is the Ivy League itself. We have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act for the common good, they will always place their interests first. The arrangement is great for the schools, but is Harvard’s desire for alumni donations a sufficient reason to perpetuate the class system?
I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.
High-quality public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all: the exact commitment that drove the growth of public higher education in the postwar years. Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them—you know, the American dream. Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides. We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a right of citizenship. We also need to recognize—as we once did and as many countries still do—that the same is true of higher education. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.
William Deresiewicz is the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life, coming out August 19 from Free Press. He taught at Yale from 1998 to 2008.
Don’t send your kids to Ivy League Schools! This means YOU.
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You need to stop sending your kids to Ivy League schools.
In brief, according to a piece in the most recent New Republic by William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale for 20 years, the students who are sent there are conformist, over-privileged overachievers. They emerge from homogeneous backgrounds and grow up to be elitist little twits. (He also went to one, but he is different now.)
They overcame a little diversity, mainly not socioeconomic, to get in.
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Ivy League applicants’ biggest hardship was having so little hardship in their lives that they had to hire people to take them on bus trips during the summer so they would have things to write college essays about.
Need to overcome adversity to get in? Not to worry. Your parents will get you the finest adversity that money can buy! And one for your sister, too, when she’s old enough.
They walked out of their separate housing entrances for the well-heeled and got onto planes to their enrichment summers. “Spend An Entire Three Hours on a Greyhound Bus!” the brochures proclaimed. “Understand enough about diversity in broad, oversimplified strokes to write either a single college essay of five paragraphs or the entire movie ‘Crash’!”
They get in and learn nothing because they are too terrified of failure to study things they do not already know. (The only thing Ivy Leagues are good for, Deresiewicz admits, is if you need people to memorize 30 lines of Alexander Pope with absolute precision. They excel at that.)
They develop the firm conviction that if you march to the beat of a different drummer, you are doing something wrong. We are all listening to this drummer for a reason. Your drummer must be screwing up.
When they get out, they are obsessed with status and give society less than they might have. Or something. The point is that the education is not value-added. If anything, it is value-subtracted. It produces conformist, unimaginative people who are desperate for outside approval.
And, well, I don’t disagree. Of course I don’t. I don’t know how. Besides, if I disagreed, you might not like me, and I want you to like me! That means more than anything in the world! PLEASE LIKE ME! I can fax you some of my high school report cards if that would sway you!
If you cannot tell from the foregoing, I went to an Ivy League school. I didn’t learn very much, but I drank a lot.
I remember freshman year, sitting around with a group of my peers, talking about our deepest fears. “I’m afraid,” someone said, “that I won’t ever be able to become a great writer because my childhood was too happy.”
Everyone nodded. There was a silence.
“My mom died,” said someone else.
“LUCKY!” we said. “That must have made a great application essay! I had to fly all the way to Bhutan and build houses for half an hour.”
Later we all became ibankers. There was a moral in that somewhere.
So the question becomes: if we’re serious about this, how do we go about fixing it?
The simplest way is not to send your kids to Ivy League schools. Not — note — that “we” stop sending kids to Ivy League schools. Or that “one” stops sending them there. Or that “you” (everyone else) stops sending them. It is that you — you in particular — do that.
And that’s the problem.
Of course everyone agrees that the most efficient way of producing good human beings who aren’t elitist turds is to break down the system.
But for every person who has read this article and knows that the Ivy League schools are elitist twit factories — that you must seek elsewhere for the truly well-educated, and that state schools, while “impersonal,” give you a real chance to get to know your fellow man on an equal basis, that work in the service industry is the best kind and that second-tier schools let you exercise true curiosity — there are thousands upon thousands who haven’t. If everyone would just read this article (or one like it) and agree what to do, we could proceed. Not even everyone! Just all the Concerned Parents who are currently embroiled in the helicopter derby whose only conclusion is admission into an elite institution, the parents who hover over their children, shredding stray seagulls in their rotor blades.
“You thought the way to guarantee that little Preston IV was successful, well-rounded and a productive member of society was to send him to Harvard? Nonsense. He needs to overcome adversity and expand his scholastic horizons, and avoid all those elitist twerps who just sit there reciting Pope. If you send him to an Ivy, you are stunting him for life!”
The trick is that you have to get everyone to agree. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma of sorts, and the stakes are your children’s prospects. If some people don’t get the memo about Massive Structural Shifts in How We Are Educated, their kids will get into Ivy League schools in your kids’ place, and all the employers who did not read the article will keep assuming that going to an Ivy League school is a mark of quality and hire them instead. It is no use enclosing copies of the New Republic with your child’s ibanking applications and scrawling “HE DIDN’T GO TO YALE BECAUSE YALE WOULD HAVE DONE HIM A DISSERVICE!” at the bottom of his resume. First off, that is creepy. Second off, it is unconvincing.
Besides, it seems so unfair, as Mitt Romney’s dad probably used to lament a lot. I worked my whole life to overcome adversity and earn a comfortable place for my children, and now you tell me that is the worst thing I could have done? That my children will be out-of-touch elitists who don’t know the value of good honest labor and strive only to conform? If I’d known I was just supposed to dunk them straight back into adversity, I wouldn’t have bothered with this American Dream business in the first place.
Still, if that’s what we’ve agreed to do, it’s fine. We just have to make sure we’re all on board.
Soon the conversation from Suburban to Suburban will be much different. “Hello, Gail,” Florence will say, at the country club. “Trip is working at McDonald’s this summer and reading Emerson to himself. What’s your daughter doing?”
Gail will shrink a little into her Adirondack chair. “Well,” she will hedge, “Campbell is — she’s going to Columbia, actually.”
Florence will nod in sympathy. “Some kids take longer to find themselves,” she says. “But we all have to march to our own drummer.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Gail will say. “I only hope you’re right.”
But, fortunately, there are still a few people who haven’t read the article.
The point is: You need to stop sending your kids to Ivy League schools. You first. I’ll watch and see what happens.
Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog, offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences”.