You need to get past the obnoxious beginning (“It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me…”) and skip the odd tacked-on ending (“There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.”), but this article about just what you get and don’t get from an elite education has some good points.
How racial diversity isn’t the problem (at least not Yale):
Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.
People who succeed are only smart in one way:
I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.
The attitudes that can develop:
The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
How never failing means that you’re afraid of it and leads to less risk-taking:
Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.
There’s more, too…
But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time.
I don’t know how caricatured this is — even at U of M those kids were there, but only to some degree. I don’t know any kid who had every feature the author describes. I certainly never saw a whole class of people who fit that description. And yet… I only know a few people who ever studied whatever they wanted to. Most people were there to get the education so they could have a good career. I was certainly guilty of that. And who doesn’t know people who did a few things just to look good on their application or resume?
The problem is (and maybe the problem with the article?) is that once you’re in the real world, you can tell the people who are doing it (whatever *it* is) because they think they should, not because they want to. People who aren’t passionate are never going to be as successful as the people who care.
The author proves his own point by only being able to reference the world of academia. He doesn’t have stories from the business world, nothing terribly concrete from the political world, nothing from the non-profit world. How do students from elite universities do compared to someone from Cleveland University? In terms of making money? In terms of being happy? He doesn’t have anecdotal evidence, let alone data, to show that the elite universities produce people who are only narrowly successful and flawed in some fatal way.
In my experience, people are generally happy and will do what makes them happy. Their ability to get themselves into situations they enjoy, doing things they’re good at (that being building up their mind or making lots of money or being the best stay-at-home mom they can be or whatever) are the people who are the most successful, and you can’t describe them as fatally flawed.
But then, there I go being all analytical and stuff. And rambling. It’s way past the time that I should be back at work.
this weekend and later started thinking: could it be made with the same ending today?
