Harvard Student: Future leaders we aren’t

Applying to College
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We yielded to irrational pandemic restrictions to get the next credential. Future leaders we aren’t.

Admittedly, a lot of this student’s discontent is a result of Covid restrictions and not necessarily issues that existed at Harvard pre-Covid. I don’t think this thread is a place to get into more C19 bickering. But there is also this…

To get into this university, we chose to detach ourselves from normal human experiences, neglecting our interests, hobbies, robust social lives - anything that couldn’t appear on a college application or be touted in an interview. Almost everything in life was subordinate to whatever was necessary to get into college. Once we arrived on campus, we certainly had more fun than we did in high school, but our tendency to conform hasn’t gone away, especially as we pursue our next goal, whether at G.oldman Sachs or in graduate school.

Our life’s mission has been to please those who can grant or withhold approval: parents, teachers, coaches, admissions officers and job interviewers. As a result, many of us don’t know what we believe or what matters to us.

That part strikes me as true, given the number of threads on CC from students/parents asking, as early as 6th grade, how can they design their lives with the goal of getting into a T20.

For the moment at least, this one student regrets the path she chose (or her parents chose for her.) Or more precisely, she regrets the way they designed the journey.

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I believe that many students do exactly this in the hope of getting into an elite university such as Harvard. I think that this is very unfortunate for multiple reasons.

I am not convinced that this is the right thing to do to get into an elite university. It does not sound consistent with either what the MIT “applying sideways” blog recommends, nor with anything that we did in my family for the purpose of getting into an elite university.

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The author has no potential for future leadership. The demonstrated lack of decision making under uncertainty skills is amazing. Just because some decisions may have been suboptimal doesn’t invalidate other decisions. That “wrong” decision may have been the best one given the available information at the time. This person wants to be a quarterback, but the only type they are qualified to be is the “Monday Morning” type. That isn’t leadership. The one thing the author did get correct from the elite education is the elitism. They are too important to make a sacrifice to help someone else.

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Harvard exists in and is integrated into the city of Cambridge, and those who live there appreciate Harvard’s restrictions. Also, concern for older faculty, as well as students and faculty with health vulnerabilities, is a legitimate and appreciated factor in COVID restrictions.

As for Harvard students’ conformist ambitions, I agree to some extent. Like the family of @DadTwoGirls, my kids followed strong interests in hs without regard to college admissions and did end up attending H and another Ivy. They found their people but would agree the student body is surprisingly conservative in the sense of being focused on conventional success. The big draw for us was financial aid, not the social environment.

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And yet, directly after graduation, she is moving into a prominent position with significant potential to influence (talk show host with Dennis Prager.) Seems she is shooting for Ivy-educated-female-contrarian-Conservative fame a la Bari Weiss.

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And yet, UC-Berkeley claims Harvard as an overlap school.

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I agree 100%

Not saying your family made the wrong call (I made the same one) but you don’t feel that prioritizing financial aid over the social environment is an example of being focused on conventional success? Not being argumentative, just curious how you square that.

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This girl is pathetic. Leaders look inward and ask “What could I have done?” Instead, she blames others.

Leaders are also genuine. But she admits to being fake just to be admitted.

And leaders no longer only come from Harvard. Admission is now a lottery, and she wanted to cash in by buying in to the discriminatory sentiment that the qualified applicants that went elsewhere are shut out of future leadership positions.

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I’ll PM you but no, it is possible to attend a school like Harvard and NOT pursue conventional success! And it is possible to attend a school like this and retain integrity, find like-minded independent friends, and pursue authentic interests after graduation :slight_smile:

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I hear you and I definitely agree about sentence #2. I was only implying that choosing Harvard over alternatives is in and of itself a form of pursuing conventional success.

To bring it back to the article, the author says "we yielded to irrational pandemic restrictions to get the next credential’. She could have organized class boycotts or transferred if she found the Harvard Covid measures so onerous. Many Harvard students in the past have done as much when they’ve disagreed with campus or national policies. Instead, she did nothing, stayed, is getting a degree in June, secured a plum job, and leveraged the brand for a WSJ editorial. In it, she complains about what others did instead of exhibiting much self-reflection on what she didn’t do. She’s trying to have her cake and eat it, too.

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It depends on the cost of the alternatives and ability to pay those costs.

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I doubt it. Harvard earned her the “credentials” to become a commentator on a conservative talk-show in the way a degree from say the University of Iowa would not.

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I agree. I think she’s being disingenuous throughout most of the article. As a senior still in college, landing an article in the WSJ and landing the job she did, she can’t honestly believe it was a bad idea to choose Harvard.

However, I think a part of her truth (not necessarily the truth for everyone) came through in the part I quoted in the first post. She sounds like she questions if it was worth all the sacrifice of self in a misguided choice of path to seek entry to Harvard. I think she regrets falling prey to the assumption of some strivers of the way one has to best position himself/herself to be admitted. As @compmom and @colonelmike64 said, many students get into T20 schools without, while teenagers, abandoning the things they’d rather do so they can cram in activities some feel they must do to gain entry.

I don’t know, to be honest. It was a lifetime ago when I got accepted to a T10, and I didn’t know enough about the process to try to change who I was. And I ended up somewhere else anyway.

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I completely agree with the OP’s post. While she is questioning her own response and that of her peers to Harvard’s handling of the pandemic, I have to say that the university’s management of the situation was disgraceful. In our family, we have a student at Harvard and another at Rice. So. I can compare those 2 schools, or I can simply compare them to Tufts just 2miles away. Harvard was restrictive to the extreme to the detriment of its students.

Protecting its older faculty? Why? Their mission is to meet the needs of students, who are their paying customers and who received no rebates for reduced services. They do not exist to meet the needs of faculty. Students are/have been at much less risk than older faculty. That should have been a factor in their decision making. Faculty should have had their jobs protected by being offered the option to take a leave. There are plenty of younger PhD’s available to step in and fell those spots. Doctors continued to go to work but not professors. Disgraceful.

Things could have been handled differently and better at Harvard. They were at many other prominent universities like Tufts, Rice, Purdue, etc.

PS - I’m not conservative. Far from it.

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About half of the students there come from top 5% SES families (based on non-financial-aid status), so the upper part of “upper middle class” or “semi-rich”, or higher SES. For such students, conservatively focusing on conventional success may be their way to avoid falling down the SES ladder, since there is much more space for downward mobility than upward mobility for them.

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From a NYT times interview published today, with Laurie Santos, Yale’s “Happiness Professor.”
Laurie Santos on Why Her Yale Students Have so Much Anxiety - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

This probably speaks more to my deficiencies as a student than anything else, but when I was in college, which is 20 years ago now, I don’t remember such a pervasive, overwhelming sense of being there solely as the next step on some ladder of achievement. What has changed? It’s surprising how different it feels. I’ll have conversations with first-year students on campus who will ask what fourth class they should take to make sure they get that job at Google by the time they’re 24. They come in planning this set of next steps, in part because that’s how they got here in the first place. They think that’s how you get the carrots. How that change happened is an incredibly interesting cultural puzzle. Some of my favorite guesses about it come from Julie Lythcott- Haims.

A former dean of freshman and undergraduate advising at Stanford. Lythcott-Haims is the author of, among other books, “How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.”

Her argument is that years ago, only certain people, for the most part, were getting into Yale. They were mostly from a small set of prep schools. We opened that up. In theory, anyone on the planet, if they “put in enough work and are smart enough,” can get into Yale — bracketed by the real cultural boundaries, structures of racism and all the other isms, but that’s the idea. There’s also the sense that the spoils of the war are really high: If you go to Yale, that’s going to open up opportunities that won’t happen if you don’t. Lythcott-Haims’s argument is that when the spoils of war get big, there becomes a nuclear-arms race for who gets in, and that parenting has changed to push children to be thinking about this stuff. They develop this implicit belief that there is a path that’s correct, and if you can figure out the Easter eggs, you can be on it. It’s something I feel on campus so much. I assign students this book by the social scientist Alfie Kohn, who does work on how much grades and extrinsic motivations

(The book Santos assigns is “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes.”)

He tells the story of giving this speech to high school students: A student raises their hand and is like, If everything you said is true, and I’m not just working for grades and trying to get into college, then what’s the purpose of life? When I assigned that chapter, I also got that question. They’re not sure what they’re supposed to get out of college other than accolade building.

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The kids I know, lower income Latinos, at top schools do not have this stress or anxiety. I think it is because they are almost guaranteed social mobility just by graduating from college whereas upper middle class kids have a lot more stress and anxiety to just be able to maintain the social economic class they grew up in?

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My kids’ mediocre public school did not have this stress either, though things have apparently changed in recent years with social media (and higher house prices). I like Alfie Kohn’s books, which inspired me to not look at report cards or ask about GPA’s.

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We have to negotiate how to present our own authentic selves all our lives. I laugh when I read colleges asking kids to be authentic. Every elite school I know looks for a 18 year old that acts like a successful 35 year old, preferably with parents that can pay full COA.
I do not discount what the author wrote on the WSJ article. There is a lot of truth to what she said. I also agree that leaders strive to change the status quo, for the better.

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When most adults maintain a neoliberal view of college - that higher education can be reduced to being a component of a larger expected value equation - of course most kids are going to buy into that narrative. We use terms such as “customers” and tell young people that their college & major choices have to maximize personal ROI. Add in the high cost of higher education and this is the end result.

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