I also enjoyed the article. Having an interest in education, it is always enlightening to hear different perspectives. What I did not understand about Zach was his surprise at some of the student body he described that annoyed him, the pressure, the competition, the stress, the wealth, etc. Did he not have ANY idea? He said: “I couldn’t have imagined the world I was stepping into…” Again, people make mistakes, and he is discussing his. When my daughter applies to college next year, I will have her do extra exercises in “imagining” her future college, armed with lots of information. So, thank you, Zach, for your article.
We all share “completely unnecessary” details, so what?
Touche…and on cue. And no doubt good reason to dismiss everything else.
I have found that many posters find a way to get in some key personal details. Go to the threads for most top 50 schools and you’ll find at least a couple camped out defending the school from every post that comes down the Pike, while managing to sneak in their kid’s stellar GPA and latest award and/or phenomenal internship experience.
@inspiration12 I agree that a lot of the problems he had are about fit, but I go to school fifty blocks south of Columbia and have a good amount of friends there and I’d say most are interesting and not just mindless zombies who study all day (trust me, I really don’t enjoy people like that either). I’ve gone to basement shows all around Brooklyn, even played music with them without ever having played an instrument, gone to museums, talked about cool stuff, etc. They also dabble in drugs which Zach sees as a plus (I don’t do drugs but have no issue with them).
I really doubt my friends are the only people in Columbia like this, so maybe he just isn’t looking in the right places?
I kinda sympathize with Zach because I was also a good high school student that just doesn’t enjoy being around people who are stressed about school and work/study all day. I am very much about enjoying life and taking it easy while doing my best. I don’t care about prestige or salary as long as I am living comfortably. However, I don’t berate people who choose a different lifestyle and can (and do) befriend them, so that’s where I differ with Zach.
Look, this is College Confidential, where there is always someone to play Devil’s Advocate for pretty much any school, and public intellectuals of every stripe (Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell among recent targets) are regularly savaged. 
I appreciate your thoughts, @finalchild, and hope you come back often.
I thought it was interesting too–although I thought it was about 90% BS. There may have been a few undigested kernels of truth in there, but that isn’t enough, in my book, to justify taking an article like this seriously. Showing yourself to be a malcontent is not much of an indictment of whatever institution you’re part of.
THIS:
During an episode in the Sopranos Meadow brings home some classmates or associates from Columbia, where she is studying. I believe it’s her mother who, after the visit, registers dismay at their arrogance or elitist attitudes. Meadow replies something like this, “What kind of students did you think would be attending an Ivy League University?”
Again, as I said earlier, generalizations and stereotypes are not helpful. Because such people exist in various “elite” environments does not mean that they dominate the campus experience for any particular student, or that it’s even inevitable that a student encounter even one drugged, entitled, unhealthfully privileged student. Plenty of us parents have sons and daughters who graduated from Ivies with no such encounters. Like attracts like. My daughter, and I’m sure many more CC offspring, attracted to herself friends who were psychologically normal, who had admirable personal values, were not substance abusers, and who were humble despite their enormous accomplishments.
“It’s like, yes, you might have had a good time at your alma mater. But please don’t project your experience onto others and assert that if they didn’t experience things the same way you did, the problem must have been on their end.”
My personal trainer went to my alma mater (she took a path through a traditional business world and then decided to pursue personal training as a career). She was only kind of “eh” on the place and doesn’t have the rosy memories I have. Oh well! We’ve talked and laughed about it - esp as she knows my son is currently there. That means nothing other than different people like different things. Not everyone is going to like the same TV shows, movies, books, leisure time activities, fashion, travel destinations, home styles, political figures, etc. that I do - so why would a college be any different? There’s no place that’s soooooo wonderful that everyone is going to fall in love.
It’s also human nature that if 99 people say that something is good, and one person says it is bad, then folks will assume only the one person is brave enough to reveal the secret bad truth.
Zach could have encountered the people HE disliked at any institution. He just happened to be at Columbia and decided to write about it.
People from one or two generations ago simply cannot understand the pressure that kids are under today. The population of the US has grown by almost 100m since 1980, that’s 100m in just 35 years, or 1/3 of our total population. Meanwhile, the number of freshman slots at these Ivy League schools remain largely the same. Add to that 2.5 Billion people in China and India who are getting richer and finding US colleges more and more affordable, and are increasingly competing for these slots. Thanks to an open immigration policy, they are also immigrating here in large numbers and all wanting their children to go to one of these schools. Since 1980 the Chinese population in the US has grown 5 fold and the Indian population has grown 7 fold. The 5-7% admission rates will only get worse. All of which suit these colleges just fine. Their numbers look better than ever. But the pressure for these kids is hell. Most people who went to one of these schools before 1980 probably have no shot of getting in today.
This may well be true. But those of us with kids at these schools now understand that the writer’s experience (if it’s even true, which I doubt) is far from the norm at these schools.
How did we decide the kid is a “malcontent”? Maybe he really got into Kierkegaard and Nietzsche 2nd semester of freshmen year. Are depressive and/or social critiques off-limits? Do they necessarily imply someone is a depressive, or that being a depressive is bad? Seems like he is a very typical (or certainly not bizarrely atypical) bright college student from my vantage point. Maybe we could go beyond defensiveness (and I don’t mean CC but more broadly) and make things better in an environment where deciding soph year in high school you are going to choose a straight line to becoming an engineer increasingly is the norm. Is it possible something has been lost along the way? Again, it’s not the fault of any institution or any specific person. It’s a cultural phenomenon, and it’s rolling over us to the extent that asking if we’re being rolled is considered off limits. And now, for the “completely unnecessary details,” perhaps this doesn’t apply to Yale and Dartmouth families.
I decided he was a malcontent when I read his article. I didn’t find that a difficult determination to make.
Really. When did Kierkegaard or Nietzsche mock out their colleagues for social awkwardness while blazing? And I missed the part where they told you to tune out anyone who was teaching you because you had trouble distinguishing them from your parents.
"People from one or two generations ago simply cannot understand the pressure that kids are under today. The population of the US has grown by almost 100m since 1980, that’s 100m in just 35 years, or 1/3 of our total population. Meanwhile, the number of freshman slots at these Ivy League schools remain largely the same.
That’s only a “problem” if one believes that the 8 Ivy schools offer some magical route to success that is not available at a whole host of other schools. I’m really sorry that there’s a growth in the number of people who are unsophisticated enough to think that way, but that doesn’t make it truth.
"Maybe we could go beyond defensiveness (and I don’t mean CC but more broadly) and make things better in an environment where deciding soph year in high school you are going to choose a straight line to becoming an engineer increasingly is the norm. "
Except it’s NOT the norm. Many, many kids in the schools still come in thinking they have only a vague idea of what they want to study / major in, and come out with something entirely different - which is great. The presence of the person who has known from day one he wants to be a doctor or an engineer is of no relevance to the person who wants to explore the wide world of learning.
It doesn’t matter how much you “make things better,” Harvard et al still only have X number of beds at the end of the day. You can gnash your teeth at that all you like, but that’s what it is. So, you can obsess about a select handful of schools, or you can realize that you’re in America where it’s not a zero-sum game and there are lots of opportunities everywhere.
I don’t think most of us who are interested in elite schools and posting about them confine ourselves to the 8 Ivies. Decreasing admit rates have kind of been a thing in recent years, or so I’ve been told. And ignoring that there are pressures and dubbing 20 year olds malcontents who apparently are doing fine at Columbia don’t seem especially helpful.
“I see that much of the knee-jerk defensiveness, defenses of elitism, riffs on what classes of people suffer more, etc carry on per usual.”
Defense of elitism is an interesting choice of words. Should there not be elite colleges - that represent the very best in academic excellence? (as well as other dimensions of excellence - artistic, personal potential, etc.) Is there something wrong in the abstract with valuing those things?
“Is it a surprise to hear in the lottery-like environment of elite college admissions that kids (and their parents) can become obsessed with resume-building, EC-building, GPA and SAT worrying, etc?”
I really wish we’d make up our collective minds. On one hand it’s a sharp-elbowed race to build one’s resume, etc. and on the other hand, these elite colleges just let in any poor slob if he’s a URM with a sob story. On one hand, there’s too much emphasis on “the pure numbers” of SAT/GPA/etc rewarding those who grind, and on the other hand, it’s wildly unfair that Susie one town over got in over my kid because she had a 2100 and was class treasurer and my kid had a 2300 and was class president and what’s wrong with this picture.
"Doesn’t it make sense that we’ve evolved into a culture where, and very much because of the astronomical costs and trend towards concrete, measurable production in general, the end-product trumps all? Where the ultimate [career] goal trumps any nostalgic exploring and discovering “who you are” sidetracks along the way? "
That’s a personal / familial choice to live that way. Without getting into too much specifics, one of my children is following a somewhat standard “typical business” path – the other is super idealistic and pursuing a relatively low paying job that feeds into personal goals that are far more compelling than size of paycheck. You don’t HAVE to play the game of “what will my starting salary be, and it needs to be the highest possible,” unless you CHOOSE to.