<p>"Today’s top colleges are so selective that incoming students’ resumes burst with seven or eight AP courses and nine or 10 extracurriculars. Kids report cramming so hard that they’re only getting two hours of sleep a night ... They’re bionic hamsters.</p>
<p>William Deresiewicz, who taught at Yale for 10 years until 2008, thinks these students are, in a moral and spiritual sense, lost. They’re accomplished networkers who have no friends. They’re super-intelligent but have no clue." ...</p>
<p>Of course not. This is a version of the old populist “the rich also cry” theme, designed to make the masses feel better. Of course an Ivy League degree does not guarantee a happy or productive life, but it certainly does not guarantee a soulless friendless life either. If you took a Harvard student and made him transfer to East Podunk State U, his life would not necessarily open up like a flower.</p>
<p>Probably because he’s already lost? He doesn’t know what to do with himself if not pushing and pushing.</p>
<p>I agree with the article that it is a cultural problem. </p>
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<p>Just the other day I was seeing a friend whose kid is earning 1-5 million dollars a year. If we reward kids who are good at jumping through hoops and not so much creative kids, I winder where we will end up.</p>
<p>What? OK, first off, it has been possible to make 6 figures (or the inflation-adjusted equivalent) every decade in America since WWII just by grinding.
Secondly, that’s not “rich” in my book.</p>
<p>It’s been possible to grind your way to some amount of wealth in investment banking or medicine for generations now (and in earlier generations, law was another profession where that was possible, so there were even more avenues open), so what the heck is the author lamenting?</p>
<p>I don’t bother to open the article when I see that name. Lots of bs from what I’ve remember with previous article.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Alexis-Tocqueville/dp/0226805360/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1409582513&sr=8-2&keywords=democracy+in+america”>http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Alexis-Tocqueville/dp/0226805360/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1409582513&sr=8-2&keywords=democracy+in+america</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/On-Genealogy-Morals-Ecce-Homo/dp/0679724621”>http://www.amazon.com/On-Genealogy-Morals-Ecce-Homo/dp/0679724621</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://www.amazon.com/On-Liberty-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486421309/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409583840&sr=8-1&keywords=on+liberty+john+stuart+mill”>http://www.amazon.com/On-Liberty-Dover-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486421309/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409583840&sr=8-1&keywords=on+liberty+john+stuart+mill</a></p>
<p>Tocqueville, Nietzche, and Mill on mediocrity and homogeneity, slavish devotion to mores, tyranny of the majority, reliance on groups and associations, and the other inadequacies of democracy. Indeed, I doubt that many would claim that today’s youths are morally and spiritually lost if we still had Aristocratic ideals and institutions to guide us.</p>
<p>(The alternative to aristocracy, as per Marx, is to topple elite institutions and other instruments of the “ruling class,” but that would only make us more sensitive to the inequalities that remain.)</p>
<p>I’ve written far too much about this author’s misdirected claims to no effect. Perhaps better thinkers can speak for me.</p>
<p>P.S. Let’s not romanticize the students at non-top colleges. Not being ceaseless strivers does not make them genuine and passionate. All of them might be Zen slackers. (My caricature for yours.) ;)</p>
<p>P.S.S. If students at “top colleges” are “zombies” and more spiritually and morally “lost” than students at other colleges, why are “second-tier colleges” like Reed, which are presumably havens for intellectual and moral growth, stuffed with faculty and bureaucrats who graduated from top colleges? (Even if the spiritual turpitude of the top universities is a recent development, the LACs are not vindicated: I doubt that they will stop hiring Princeton graduates any time soon.) One might argue that those who graduate from top colleges and work at such schools and Reed and Sewanee have resisted or transcended the evils of their alma maters. If one can so easily sidestep them, the vices of the top schools are not quite as dramatic and pervasive and irresistible as the author would like us to believe. What happens to students who graduate from “elite” elementary and high schools, which is probably even more pernicious and detrimental than graduating from elite colleges, and go to Reed? What about those students who are mentored by top school graduates and faculty? What about Reedies that go to Harvard for graduate school? Are they corrupted too? (Consider: if you were to dispense with the insidious “cognitive bias,” you might decide that flocking to graduate school and the Peace Corps is as sheepish as flocking to investment banking and consulting.) What about those who read books written by Harvard graduates? Needless to say, even if the graduates of elite schools are as desultory and depraved, and the graduates of second-tier colleges as curious and vibrant as he claims, the solution to his problem is far more complicated than not going to an “elite school.”</p>
<p>Not going to college at all seems to be a better compromise (in terms of quality of education) than choosing a non-elite college.</p>
<p>OP: I will let you know as I prospectively follow our 2 kids (K1 in top northeast ivy and K2 in top west coast non-ivy school) in a non-randomized trial whether the hypothesis stated in your thread comes to fruition or not 10/20 years from now…it would be interesting to see if indeed K1 becomes a wealthy “depressive” person and K2 becomes a wealthy “happy” person…because I hear that those graduating and attending the school on the west coast breeds happier alumni…</p>
<p>There are actually a fair number of kids at all these top schools who just happen to go there. They did their thing in HS, sent in some applications and a top school or two said yes. It was never their ultimate goal to go there and they realized all along that they could do their thing, their way at a host of other schools and still end up just fine. My kid absolutely loves her school but she went there realizing that it wasn’t going to be perfect or the solution to all her problems. I think it’s the kids who feel they can only be validated by a top 10 school who are most at risk for disappointment. Maybe some of the kids are bionic hamsters, but some of the kids just like to do well because that’s the way they’re wired.</p>
<p>Yeah…this guy chose to write about elite schools and push an unflattering analysis not because he wants to make a lot of bucks but because he wants to save us from ourselves…yeah…it’s all about the philosophy and not about the money…staying true to his own ethics…so proud!</p>
<p>I’m sure it’s far better to be depressed with an Ivy League diploma on the wall than it is to be depressed dropping baskets of fries or asking customers if they want paper or plastic bags. Sounds like these kids would be depressed and miserable no matter where they ended up. I think this generation looks for things to be down about. Something that the older generations didn’t succumb to. </p>
<p>“In 1971, Deresiewicz notes, 73 percent of incoming college freshmen said it was important to develop a meaningful philosophy and only 37 percent deemed it important to be “very well-off.”
By 2011, those figures were reversed: 47 percent for the former and 80 percent for the latter.”</p>
<p>Right…NATIONWIDE. It’s got nothing to do with what’s going on in the Ivy League. In fact, for all we know, the Ivy students of today might profess more 1971-type values than average college students. That would be a useful statistic if you wanted to critique elite schools. But not surprisingly, we don’t get that useful statistic; we get something that is, at best, uninformative as to what makes the Ivies different, and at worst, undermines the author’s central point that other schools are a better option.</p>
<p>Where would Deresiewcz send his own kids? </p>
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Ha ha ha. Even DS knows better than to try to tell me that. :)) </p>
<p>No friends? Might be true for some, but not in my experience. </p>
<p>Would a graduate education from an Ivy League school lead to wealthy depressives as well? This article focuses perhaps a little too much on the effects of getting an undergraduate education at such schools…</p>
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<p>Those statistics by themselves also neglects historical context. In the early '70s, colleges were much less costly when adjusted for inflation, it was still possible to work one’s way through even some private colleges, and some public colleges were still free. Also, the effects of the mid-late '60s era counterculture with anti-establishment attitudes about materialistic/practical matters were still prevalent in 1971. </p>
<p>In 2011 and now, none of those factors apply. </p>
<p>People who teach at or went to Ivy League schools, bashing them and pointing out all of the bad things about them, are nothing new.</p>
<p>You should make the most of your talents and time, regardless of whether doing so results in a Yale or a State U. acceptance letter, and doing so will give satisfaction sooner or later in life for most people who do so.</p>
<p>The alternative, apparently, is for someone who’s really sharp not to study very hard and/or not make the most of his or her time, resulting in getting into a less-prominent school than the person otherwise could. I did that (for undergrad), and THAT was frustrating and caused unhappiness.</p>
<p>Oh for heavens sake this is the guy who was whining he couldn’t talk to his plumber. Boo hoo.</p>
<p>And for what it’s worth, both my kids got into great schools getting plenty of sleep.</p>
<p>I think public HS tend to push students more into stress than private boarding schools. Only public HS students have 8-16 APs classes. Private HS have very few APs classes. They only way to help students have less stress is HS stop giving extra grade weight for AP classes and make the AP classes more rigorous. But doing this will make public HS teachers and administrators unhappy because many HS teachers think they have the ability to teach AP classes like college professors and administrators usually boast that their schools have the largest number of students taking AP classes. My school district goal is to have every HS student takes at least X number of APs classes (I forgot the exact number X).</p>
<p>Looking at some daily schedules of both public and private HS, I also think public HS coaches tend to ask students practice sports longer (3-4 hours per day vs 2 hours per day). </p>
<p>A part of this is the broken system of valuing grades over learning and just going for GOLD ON PAPER. </p>
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<p>Depends on the boarding school and the individual student. Some private boarding schools can be just as stressful as public schools for academic and/or social reasons. </p>
<p>Other private boarding schools are less stressful. In fact, some such boarding schools sometimes take it too far to the other extreme to their graduates’ detriment as I got to see at my LAC when they had issues with meeting even generous deadlines because their BS were even more lackadaisical when it came to mandating assignment deadlines than many Profs I’ve had. </p>
<p>And those Profs were more generously flexible about deadlines than my HS teachers who were inflexible when I attended. If the assignment’s late at my HS, you lost a lot of points or earned a 0 on the assignment without much recourse. </p>