Going to An Ivy League School Sucks-- Article

^ I don’t think he really says. He seems to have the option of staying at Columbia, so I guess he’s not flunking out.

AFAIK, Zach Schwartz is actually doing pretty well at Columbia - he’s the co-founder of RapChat, an app that even I have heard of. '19s at both Dartmouth and Bowdoin’s admitted students days showed me the app, which had over 300K downloads at the end of March. He was also named one of seven Columbia entrepreneurs to watch for in 2015. This is on top of all the writing he’s done for Vice, Thought Catalog, and other online publications. It should be noted, however, that Zach has had a history of depression.

Who hasn’t had a history of depression? Those who would claim depression to be foreign to them would worry me most. The world, and Life, have some depressing elements. On this score, I agree with the posters noting that higher levels of usage of mental health services in college, and the improved quality of those services, are really good things.

@Oberyn, the rest of your post suggests that Zach is indeed thriving at Columbia (or at least during these years he is at Columbia).

@finalchild, actually, many children of CC parents have stumbled, and many parents have been very open about it.

@Consolation, it was a joke. No worries. The elite college industrial complex is safe and stronger than ever. With demand for the dream higher than ever, despite Zach’s article, this may be the year Stanford or Harvard cracks the 4% admit rate barrier.

… Which is completely irrelevant to the vast majority of parents in this country, who are sending their kids to local schools based primarily upon being close to home, finances, and perhaps a specific desired (employable) major. CC tends to really overvalue the importance that most people place on elite schools.

Plenty of people are able to work hard and achieve their goals without pushing themselves beyond the breaking point.

Well, aren’t you special. Depression is a disease just like diabetes. You wouldn’t scorn someone for having diabetes, so don’t scorn them for depression. And it’s not a failure of will or willpower, either. It’s not something you “prevent” by just bucking-it-up-honey, any more than a diabetic can buck up and will his pancreas to produce insulin.

@finalchild, your post #285 seems to imply that you think my pointing out that plenty of CC parents have kids who stumble is an effort to defend the “elite college industrial complex.”

That is not the case. I simply think that your tone of cynicism about the relationships and conversations among parents here is not reflective of the reality of the community. Parents here have shared and been helped with some of the deepest problems they have, both personal, and having to do with their children. Parents talk about their disabled children, their mentally ill children, their children with autism, their children with all kinds of emotional issues and learning issues. Their children in prison. Each and every one is addressed with care and serious attention by other parents. And yes, there are also innumerable cafe threads on all kinds of things, including the frivolous. That is what makes it a community.

I’m sorry if you find me lacking in sense of humor.

@Consolation, I realize there is tons of helpful info on the site, including what you described. I am very familiar with stumbles and mental health/emotional problems both by personal history and professionally. I’m a psychologist who works with those suffering from schizophrenia and other serious mental disorders in psychiatric facilities, jails, and prisons, and in court settings.

I’ll tell you exactly how I found my way into this thread. A few days before a kid who I have helped emailed me the article and asked me what I thought. He obviously had resonated with the article a lot. He likes the site where the article was published…a site I knew absolutely nothing about. He is a kid whose father was killed in an accident when he was 13 or 14, and he almost flunked out of high school. He’s had some serious issues and “stumbles.” He went to the local community college and came alive when exposed to religion and philosophy courses and he became the editor of the community college paper. What got him turned on was how he identified with some of the stuff Zach talked about in the article…in other words, cynicism, reactions to phoniness and fascination with it, etc were his path to getting to a much better place. He started finding a voice, and himself, really excelled, and now is headed to a well-respected, creative and dynamic college in the Boston area. I clicked on this thread because I had read the article because of this kid. My resonating with the article had nothing to do with Columbia or the Ivies per se, but rather because of themes that I knew the kid (the one I know) resonated with, and themes that strike me as pretty universal (well beyond an Ivy issue). And as I read through the thread, I read what seemed like a good number of parents responding to the article from the perspective of parents who have kids at Ivies who are nothing like Zach and who do none of the things Zach talks about. And all of that may be true, but my reactions was that kids doing great at the Ivies missed the point(s) of the article and indeed sort of preemptively attempted to crush any legitimacy to the article in general. Then all sorts of assumptions were made about the kid. I guess it’s fine to not like the kid or what he wrote, but his article struck me as frankly pretty mainstream stuff for a smart kid who despite apparently thriving has to go through his Holden Caulfield “phase.” I twinge at saying “phase,” because that seems minimizing and demeaning. At any rate, the intensity of the pushback and some of the things said seemed very suggestive in terms of a defensive reaction. And then some of the reactions to my posts seemed too presume that I am anti-Ivy or anti-elite. In truth, for better or worse, I am as much of an elitist about colleges as anyone else here. I say that only to clarify that I am not anti-elite in the least and what resonated for me about the article had nothing to do with disliking Columbia or any other elite school.

Some people are certainly pre-disposed to those diseases, but depression is usually triggered by trauma, excessive stress or hardship. One person may be more sensitive to these things than another person, but generally speaking depression doesn’t just come out of nowhere. The number of people who claim to have depression on CC alone is alarming IMO… I can’t imagine it is ALL being brought about by genetics, without any outside influence.

Maybe I’m living under a rock!

Yes, I think you are. B-)

I don’t think it. I know it.

Another person who speaks in fluent generalizations. That would be bad enough, but it’s the ignorance that truly bothers me. First, depression can be either clinical or situational. If it’s the latter, the chances that someone will encounter, collectively, claims of depression within any given real-life or online community are very high. As someone else said, it is unrelated to willpower. Second, the adolescent years in particular can be more vulnerable to depression because of the emotional volatility during those years. It doesn’t necessarily mean that those depressed periods are permanent, or even that they are caused by excessive external or internal pressure. However, of course pressure can magnify it or trigger it. I think there are some contemporary factors that do make triggers more abundant (widespread) today than in some previous eras. I think that some of those triggers have artificial roots, in that they stem from distorted perceptions of what is necessary to have even a modestly successful future.

In which case, you haven’t been communicating well.

Gross generalizations in reaction to alleged generalizations, combined with very declarative statements offered with certitude strike me as more than a little ironic (and contradictory). But perhaps I am just not as smart and all-knowing as some.

Some of the teen or college issues with depression, stress, balance and choices, whatever manifestation, also relate to the newness of the feelings. They have little or no frame of reference or perspective. There’s a lot of ground between the extremes of, say, some stress and the polar of a crippling inability to function. Kudos to those who work to help others find their balance.

To me, the issue with the article is the delivery. Sure it can help a kid who relates. But it’s also a sweeping indictment. Don’t forget that.

Speaking of generalizations, and like another poster said about different people reading the same thing a different way, I didn’t read the article as a “sweeping indictment.” Perhaps a cautionary tale, as someone else may have described it, but what did he really say?

  1. Elite colleges are really hard to get into and many applicants work really, really hard to get into a “dream” school.

  2. Achieving the “dream” means you are going to be surrounded by really smart people, and perhaps for the first time many will encounter other incredible kids who are even smarter than you.

  3. The competition, as well as the work loads and academic expectations, can be intense (not that surprising).

  4. One can become disillusioned that these places aren’t always just nirvana.

  5. Some kids can seem socially awkward and aren’t immediately facile at smoking weed and talking about the existence of God (again, not particularly surprising).

  6. Notwithstanding everything else said, there are some truly great and outstanding kids at these schools.

  7. The author is still there and apparently thriving in just the kind of ways we might expect of a very smart kid at an elite school.

No. There is no “legitimacy” to the article because the entire point of the article was to state that the pattern the author was whining about is the dominant pattern, and the author stated so several times.

We’re here to tell you that it is NOT the dominant pattern and therefore the piece lacks credibility at its core.

Have a nice day.

MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Well, since I think we’ve exhausted this topic, I’m closing this thread.