<p>Haha my first thread! But this is a very interesting article does does raise some valid points about our nation's education system. I'm a prospective applicant of about three of the Ivies but the arguments in this article have got me doubting my future decisions and whether all this Ivy-craziness we all go through is worth it in the long run?</p>
<p>Author speaks from personal experience:
"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."</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>Thoughts on this? Please share your opinions. I'd really love to hear different perspectives!</p>
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<li><p>I am really tired of William Deresiewicz (hope I spelled that right), who seems to have turned himself into a professional crank. I understand it helps his brand, and gets him into high-profile magazines, and will probably sell books, so I can’t criticize too much, but it turns me off. </p></li>
<li><p>What he describes is almost the complete opposite of my own experience at Yale nearly 40 years ago. (“Almost” because the class aspects were certainly there.) It is also unrecognizable as a description of my children’s recent undergraduate education at the University of Chicago. That’s a college he would clearly define as “elite,” but it has (or at least had) a reputation for intellectualism. If Deresiewicz’s description of other elite colleges is accurate, Chicago fully deserves its reputation. My children’s experience there was in fact very close to the experience my wife and I had at Yale – which is to say, lots and lots of excitement about ideas and intellectual growth, no matter what you were doing, and very little professionalism or anxiety about the future.</p></li>
<li><p>So how accurate is Deresiewicz? Maybe not completely – I can’t believe things are as bad as he describes – but I suspect he’s a lot more accurate than I would like. Some of what he reports really rings true, especially the mounting anxiety of children who have never really experienced any kind of failure. I have seen that, for sure. But I think, as a pervasive problem, that is probably limited to a very, very small number of colleges; it’s not typical of most institutions Deresiewicz calls elite. At the very least, large numbers – maybe the majority – of students at many of those colleges have “failed” at getting accepted at slightly more prestigious colleges. There aren’t THAT many “perfect” students, at least outside of four or five particular zip codes.</p></li>
<li><p>I agree 100% with Deresiewicz that more attention and respect should be given to public universities. The broad range of students they admit and educate ought to be seen as a positive, not some indication of lower quality. A Harvard-quality student can get a Harvard-quality education at Michigan or Berkeley, and the fact that he may have to share the campus and some classrooms with students who are not all Harvard-quality (but not by much) is a good thing, not an indication that he will learn less. Nevertheless – and understanding that few if any public universities have anything like a monolithic institutional culture – if you want an atmosphere in which education is seen as instrumental, not a good in its own right, and ideas are secondary to employment prospects, you are much more likely to find it at a public university’s student union than in the common room of one of Harvard’s houses.</p></li>
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<p>@JHS: That was 40 years ago…I don’t think this person who wrote this got it right, but instead backwards. The Ivies and Top Leagues are fine on their own (and so are many places “far below”), it is more of the students and “clients”(IE, can include parents) who matriculate and their desires. Often the curriculum will bend to their desires. If their desires are the pre-professions, then courses will be specifically geared toward getting students a background to attain admission to the professional schools. In other words, the mid-level physics course at Harvard will not be physics 15/16 or physics 11 (now defunct), it will be transformed into the “integrated” Physical Sciences 1/2 sequence. Organic chemistry 2 was transformed into a bio-organic course. To me, this is all fine. There are no real problems at the top league schools in terms of teaching critical thinking in the way the person desires and there is no ulterior motive behind the current state of elite education. Perhaps standards could be higher at many top 20-25 schools outside of the very top, but that is an issue of standards, not motive. The only motive at the schools with low(or lowish for their talented crowd of students) is to keep students happy (I mean high self-esteem via high grades and lots more time to spend on EC’s as opposed to academics). And even then, often not even that reflects the motive of those institutions so much as the motives of the students who perhaps do not even seek rigor, which usually reflects how much an individual instructor is willing to invest in a course (IE, if I am much more focused on research and like teaching grad. students, I may water down my undergraduate course to make less demands on me and the students). If students don’t want rigor now-a-days, they know which courses and instructors to go to. Not ingraining critical thinking should not really be blamed on research institutions as a whole. The intellectual climate on many such campuses reflects the “customers” and how difficult it is to keep a research career (getting grant money, writing books, or running a lab isn’t easy) going. The two end up reinforcing each other unfortunately. It has nothing to do with how schools are “training” students for specific things and are thus intentionally teaching in certain ways. Hell, I almost wish there was more intent. Right now, there isn’t much. </p>
<p>As for failure: students may have failed to gain admission to a school, but they have hardly ever struggled academically, and many elite colleges (except for in the sciences I guess, and even those are relatively inflated at some elites) make sure they hardly struggle once there. To struggle or fail remains more like getting a B grade or something (I know…people like to refer how this was a fail because in HS they got all A-/A’s, but college at an elite schools is probably supposed to be substantially more challenging than HS. To make B a fail is simply preserving self-esteem. The fact that some elites “curve” some science classes to B+ or higher is just weird. I could understand if it was just relatively easy content, but the fact that it is curved up to such values or that assessments are designed to yield such averages, is weird) under truly challenging conditions probably should not be the case (a B is still salvageable, if in the right class, at even the most inflated schools such as Brown, Yale, and Stanford). </p>