The nation's top colleges are turning our kids into zombies

<p>Here is an interesting New Republic article by former Yale Professor, William Deresiewicz: </p>

<p><a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere"&gt;http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>nah, if a college can both kill me and resurrect me into a functioning, articulate moving body, I would certainly trust them to teach me elementary calculus</p>

<p>I just came here to see if anyone had posted this article yet! Interesting perspective from the inside.</p>

<p>A “can’t see the forest for the trees” perspective. I agree with a lot of what he says.</p>

<p>I like his suggestions of Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, and Mount Holyoke. All really great schools.</p>

<p>But, I must say the handful of people I do know from Yale are genuinely nice, engaging and gracious. </p>

<p>While I agree with much of what he says (or observes) I also disagree with much of his message. </p>

<p>I like that he has pointed out several excellent LAC’s and he really speaks to me when he says “an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted.” But c’mon, the Ivy League schools aren’t generating zombies at any greater pace than other schools, or at least the Ivies seem to generate a lot of damn successful zombies. </p>

<p>The inequality of admissions prep based on wealth has been hashed over a thousand times, and so I agree that “life isn’t fair”, but that’s life and you better deal with it and stop blaming the system for your woes. Quality private education is expensive. It isn’t free. Money doesn’t grow on trees. These schools have budgets to meet. You need to admit some full-payers if you are going to also admit the “genuine hardship case” the author points out earlier.</p>

<p>At least the American Dream still offers anybody the chance the become wealthy, and as Churchill once famously said: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” I think the same for capitalism. The author’s concluding paragraph sounds more to me like socialism. Another Churchill quote that I appreciate is: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” </p>

<p>So, the successful author, whom I believe attended Columbia for his bachelors, masters, and PhD, taught at Yale, now generates his fame with the shock & awe message of “don’t send your kid to Ivies - those schools generate zombies”. I’m not buying it. It seems more like the author feels guilty about his privilege and now advocates that others “do as I say not as I do”.</p>

<p>OK … let me get this straight.</p>

<p>We have this article and the article from the Yale (?) professor who blames all his social ills (the guy who can’t talk to a plumber) on his highly selective school background. The premise of both is how going to a top school is bad for many and that many other lesser rank schools do a better job education people and shaping good people. Don’t agree but OK.</p>

<p>Then we also have numerous article’s, various studies, and 1,450,485 threads on CC that claim where a student goes to school does not matter at all … .it is the student not the school that determines outcomes. Calculus is calculus everywhere, the overall quality of the peer group does not matter, students will find their peer social group, etc</p>

<p>My brain is exploding with the cognitive dissonance.</p>

<p>So the best I can figure … it goes something like this …</p>

<p>A) If you went to a top school you’re more likely to turn into an idiot</p>

<p>B) However if you didn’t go to top school it does not change your life outcome in anyway and you get the added benefit of not turning into a idiot (because while we said schools don’t matter there really are differences … negative stuff about the “top” schools)</p>

<p>I’m pretty fed up with the bashing of top schools.</p>

<p>Best part:

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<p>Diresciewicz is not saying that the elite colleges are generating zombies, but that the system of elite education (“everything that leads up to and away from” the elite colleges) is generating zombies. That includes the parents making kids take the SAT in 7th grade, and the “build a resume or else” culture at many high schools that turns what should be creative and wonder-filled teen years into years of stress and depression. It also includes an increasing percentage of grads who reflexively head to Wall St. office buildings as their life’s “dream.”</p>

<p>Him again? Don’t you think, just to understand his position, he should explain why he is no longer a college professor at Yale (or at any other college)?</p>

<p>I think his overall evaluation of students at Yale is nonsense. He has some valid points–students there do feel pressure to perform at a high level in all aspects of their lives, and that can be pretty daunting. But the idea that they aren’t interested in ideas, that the classes aren’t challenging, that they aren’t actually getting an education–well, let’s just say that my experience as a Yale graduate myself and as the parent of two Yale undergrads, is to the contrary. I’m also bemused by the fact that he seemed amazed that students at another college had to memorize likes from Pope. Doesn’t he know that all English majors at Yale have to memorize the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English? I can still remember it (mostly).</p>

<p>I do agree that it’s too bad that so many graduates of the Ivies are going into finance. I don’t think that has much to do with the schools, though, as it does with the economy.</p>

<p>Added: Also, what’s he talking about in terms of students only learning job-related skills? If he thinks that’s what’s going on at Yale, he must not know much about the distribution requirements, what majors are offered and taken, and what students actually do. There are no “finance” or “consulting” majors–the people who go into those fields take all sorts of majors. Except for engineering (still fairly small at Yale), there just aren’t that many truly preprofessional courses at Yale. Is he maybe really talking about Wharton?</p>

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<p>Hmm… Could you find some new material? You know, turning the “disillusioned” professor into your idol (or four idols, all four Baconian idols at once) is not unlike the idolatry of the Ivy League. Much like the other posters who have cited Deresiewicz lately, you didn’t even comment on the article. Just accepted it word-for-word, it looks like.</p>

<p>Humm, this opus is all over the place. I read the article with the stated purpose of DISAGREEING with the authot… I remembered his name from a previous discussion on CC, and I am pretty sure I must have been in the camp who pillored him, as it is my usual stance when one decides to criticizes our higher education, and especially the CC darlings that are mostly the private schools that grab its students from the highest levels of HS, if not the highest SES. </p>

<p>Suprisingly, I found myself agreeing with the overall tone and only disagreeing with details such as listing the “second tier” schools and intimating such schools would be a better option than the schools listed a dozen spots ahead. Why he’d think that Mt Holyoke or Reed would be better than Wellesley and Amherst or Harvey Mudd is baffling, but to each his or her own! </p>

<p>I probably should have read the piece with closer attention and in one sitting instead of paying more attention justifiying my salary! While it works to peruse posts on CC, it does not work well with lengthy articles that are supposed to be provocative and, perhaps, well-reasoned behind a surface of academic grenades. </p>

<p>I admit that I jumped to the conclusion and read the last paragraph before digesting the corpus of the article. And I got to read this:</p>

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<p>And there the good author lost me! That conclusion is so pathetically expected from someone who actually learned very little from his own life of grandeur and his years in circulating in the highest academic circles. He could not be MORE wrong as what he proposes is simply the reinvent the exact reasons who brought us where we are today … and that is a public system of education that actually delivers millions of children who are exactly what the author seems to “despise” for their lack of academic brilliance or simply the lack of individuality. </p>

<p>Learning how to think is the domain of colleges, But it should be the domain of K-12 even more. The equal chance the author advocates is nothing else than a path to the mediocrity that affflicts our public system of education. How does one learn to think if taught by a teacher who cannot begin to do it! How does one think it is important to … think if the rewards are given for the instant regurgitation of facts and rote learning. </p>

<p>We have reached a reasonable level of democracy in education, and our version has been a colossal failure because we trusted the wrong service providers. We tried democracy and it failed us! </p>

<p>Although he makes interesting points what he vastly underestimates is how smart and savvy 18-22 (mostly) year olds are. They do not get brainwashed. They draw their own opinions. And if indeed top schools such as Yale have an agenda it’s hard to believe that it resonates with their students.</p>

<p>I think this quote really highlights the problem…

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<p>What we have here are a group of talented students with no genuine passion for what they are doing. Most are driven relentlessly by their parents to succeed above all else, which works fine during the pre-college years, and maybe a year or two into college. </p>

<p>However, what happens when you remove the parents from the equation? Many of these poor kids who likely sacrificed their entire childhoods trying to look absolutely perfect on paper end up in an emotional collapse. I know of a few kids personally who are in this boat, and it’s quite sad… they have no real hobbies, no emotional attachment to anything outside of career or academia. Any sort of setback in their progress towards ultimate perfection and they end up with full blown depression.
Anything they “like” is really just a facade to try and look good to colleges, which leads to the question: who are these kids, really?? </p>

<p>I think there is too much emphasis placed on rankings and pedigree, and students seem to be attracted to certain colleges for the wrong reasons (i.e. exclusivity/selectivity). This creates an artificial need for competitiveness which isn’t necessarily rooted in reality (e.g. do you really need a 2400 SAT score to be a music major?).</p>

<p>As someone who has been teaching 20 somethings for 10 years, I have seen a change in the students – it is rare to get the student who cares about the material, grappling with ideas – instead I get questions about “what do I need to do to get an A.” Very disheartening. </p>

<p>@fractalmstr‌
Nailed it on the head in your first two paragraphs. As a soon to be college student who’s seen several students, especially those that will go to top colleges, that describes them pretty darn accurately. I will say this though, not too many of them are depressed (believe it or not), especially the more mercantile ones, they know how to battle through little problems for their ultimate goals of money/success.</p>

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<p>You’ll understand if, as a quintessential counterexample to these claims, I try particularly hard to dispel them. I valued my hobbies above grades and laundry lists; my parents hardly drove me at all; I did not want to look perfect on paper; I understood that exclusivity, at best, is a double-edged spear. (If the worshipers at the Altar of Deresiewicz are any indication, selectivity is a bad thing. It draws undesirable attention.) I am somewhat fastidious, but I had that problem long before I started thinking about college. I am not the only such student at my school, nor is everyone like me. All colleges have students like me, and all colleges have “grinders and strivers.” You can’t even prove that different colleges have this problem to different extents, and you would have to rely on self-serving anecdotes and theories to support it.</p>

<p>The “top colleges” are not the only schools that have become more selective in the last decades. Reed is more selective than it was. Centre is more selective than it was. Kenyon is more selective than it was. Have the top schools attracted more zombies more quickly? How do you know? At what point does a Reed or Wesleyan become a Swarthmore or Pomona, filled (as the claim goes) with reanimated corpses? You can’t call the distinction between the “second-tier LACs” and the “elite LACs” a dichotomy – as much as partisans of schools like Reed would like to do so, as a neat “divide-and-conquer” tactic. I thought that Reed (and Swarthmore and Chicago) encouraged free and rigorous inquiry and debate.</p>

<p>“Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.” – This perceived problem is not unique to the elite schools, and the author (seems to) realize that. He did not even show that the problem is worse at elite schools.</p>

<p>“I think there is too much emphasis placed on rankings and pedigree, and students seem to be attracted to certain colleges for the wrong reasons (i.e. exclusivity/selectivity).” – I don’t disagree with this, but I am not acquainted with everyone in the world, or even everyone in the U.S., so I cannot accept it so easily. I’d expect most people sensible enough to get into Harvard or Amherst to know that pedigree is not always a good thing: pedigree attracts “haters.” They might not care, in which case you might chalk their ambivalence to a perception that the world is brand-driven. (Are you claiming that the world is too preoccupied with pedigree? Or that to-be college students are too preoccupied with pedigree?) I’m not afraid to say that my reasons for choosing my schools are more substantial than the reasons most students at each college in the U.S. claim for choosing it. Unfortunately, I can’t prove it.</p>

<p>“Anything they “like” is really just a facade to try and look good to colleges, which leads to the question: who are these kids, really??” – A good question. I’ll not try to answer it, just refer you to the likes of Montaigne (Essais), Marlowe (esp. Jew of Malta), Jonson (esp. Volpone and the Alchemist), and Dr. Johnson, who have written much pleasant literature about who we are and what we stand for.</p>

<p>Much like the article itself, your post is a scintillating piece of oratory for the future elitists, who call themselves and will call themselves the anti-elitists, or egalitarians.</p>

<p>My apologies: I wrote this post in a hurry, and as a student at an “elite school,” I could not escape the moral and intellectual bankruptcy that you decry. My arguments should be easy for you to vivisect.</p>

<p>@Exodius‌

Well, yes and no. You’ve offered yourself as anecdotal evidence. I respect that as far as it goes, but it’s not dispositive of the argument, and, let’s face it - all we really know about you is whatever we can divine from your CC posts. I’m sure you’re a very nice fellow. But, if Deresiewicz is even fractally to be believed, you’re only one tree in the forest.</p>

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This is the kind of detail that just makes D. hard to take seriously, because it isn’t remotely true, at least at Yale. My best guess is that the guy just didn’t really have contact with that many students while he was teaching, and he’s now made a career of bashing the Ivies after he failed to get tenure. I suppose everybody has to make a living somehow.</p>

<p>He does make some valid points mixed in–but he’s just wrong on so many of his supposed observations, why should we listen to him?</p>

<p>“Vivisect” is so much better than “dissect” there, isn’t it? And the punctuation, my word, for such a hastily written post. Pure Ivy. Well done @Exodius.</p>