<p>@Hunt , It does seem a little unfair to single out people who probably ARE dressed for interviews as harbingers of a quotidian future. I know that at Wesleyan, you can always spot who the rising seniors are because they seem to be perpetually in dark blue suits.</p>
<p>I’ve been on the Yale campus numerous times during the last five years, and the students are, for the most part, dressed very casually. They don’t dress up for class. This is just one detail, of course.</p>
<p>It occurs to me that D’s approach is to throw out a lot of criticisms, and since there is some truth to some of them, everybody has something to agree with in his argument.</p>
<p>@Hunt
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<p>I agree with you.</p>
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<p>I don’t necessarily believe that striving to get into a college that is selective/exclusive is a bad thing. Obviously people take satisfaction in seeing the fruits of their labor, and by managing to get into a highly selective school, people feel accomplished. I get all of that. I’ve been there before. The issue here is not about discouraging people from choosing highly selective schools - it’s not some anti-elitism movement - but rather having these people question the logic that goes into choosing these schools, and how that logic affects everyone else who didn’t go to a highly selective school. It’s how we associate selectivity/exclusivity with college quality, when in fact many schools have little control over the quality of students they let in due to the reality of supply and demand. </p>
<p>What’s stopping a school from providing high quality academics to less than perfect students? What do we think about the student with an otherwise excellent academic background who willingly chose not to go to an elite school (maybe to save money? experience some place different? etc.)</p>
<p>I’ve mentioned it before on here, but the analogy I like to use is this: It’s like judging the quality of a toaster by the quality of bread going into it. I mean really, who buys a toaster based on the type of bread going into it? Nobody. We buy toasters based on the properties of the toaster itself: cost, heating quality, style, how well the knobs turn, reliability…</p>
<p>Newsweek just clowned that story…</p>
<p><a href=“Here Are All the Ivy-Educated Zombies on the New Republic's Masthead”>http://www.newsweek.com/here-are-all-ivy-educated-zombies-new-republics-masthead-260984</a></p>
<p>3togo, re #6. The article being discussed was written by “the plumber guy.” </p>
<p>I actually agree with some of WD’s points in this article. However, I’ m trying to figure out how working a service job develops thinking skills or why training students in analytic and rhetorical skills is wholly unrelated to thinking. ( As an aside, I actually waded through “A Jane Austen Education,” and I was underwhelmed by WD’s analytic skills. ) Just exactly HOW does WD propose to teach students to “think?” And, why does he think third-tier religious schools do this better than the Ivies? </p>
<p>Always dressed for an interview? What? That’s just not true. And how did WD know the ones who were weren’t students at the law school or SOM?</p>
<p>The idea that Yalies have no passions and spent all 4 years of high school doing things just to get into a top college is false. What do I base that conclusion upon? The fact that so many Yalies spend so much time on their college ECs. I doubt all the people who play sports at Ivies think they are going to go on to fence or play squash or basketball professionally. They don’t get athletic scholarships. If they quit the team, their fin aid won’t be reduced. Yet, they continue to play.And some play for club teams or even in intramurals. The students who work on something like 50 different student publications don’t all want to be professional journalists. The members of the gazillion a cappela groups don’t all think they are going to be professional singers.The students who aren’t good enough to get into the Yale Symphony Orchestra but continue to play in one of the dozens of other musical performance groups aren’t doing it to pad a resume. The kids who spend hours working in local elementary schools and high schools don’t all want to be teachers. The students who help those with mental limitations through organizations like Best Buddies aren’t all doing it because of career goals. </p>
<p>We have WD acknowledging that in an admissions session, Yale was looking for applicants with “personal qualities.” That’s a bad thing?!!</p>
<p>But, WD apparently thinks that these kids with “passion” are found at big public Us and smaller, less prestigious LACs. I fully acknowledge that there are MANY such kids at these types of schools–but more of them percentage wise than there are at Harvard or Yale or Swarthmore? !!! </p>
<p>I probably know more Ivy grads than most people on this board. The idea that Harvard grads and Yalies are more insecure than Kenyon or Wesleyan grads is just plain hilarious. I’ll grant you that Yale has a good office of career advising and, from what I’m heard from Wes grads, Wes doesn’t. (I know zilch about Kenyon’s.) And, yes, Yale lets its undergrads “shadow’” and do other things at Yale Hospital and that sort of opportunity is rarely offered by LACs. I know a fair number of Yalies who did so and decided that they did not, after all, want to be doctors. And some Yale UGs sit in on Yale Law classes or sometimes serve on juries for mock trials at the law school. I don’t see that as 4 years of career preparation.I think it HELPS students figure out what they want to do with their lives, which is something WD advocates. </p>
<p>I didn’t send my offspring off to college to learn to talk to a plumber. The ability to talk to all sorts of people is something that should be learned long before kids leave for college. There aren’t many plumbers at any college.</p>
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<p>I agree with this. My problem is with those who move too far in the opposite direction, suggesting that selectivity must come with a lack of quality. They are the ones who might view your post as the basis of a worthwhile anti-elitist shtick. We don’t see too many articles named “Carleton is overrated. Send your children elsewhere.” It’s not because Carleton is perfect. Few people would read such articles, because Carleton is not thought to be Über-selective and renowned. (A note: I’m not sure how the Professor’s experiences at Columbia and Yale qualify him to speak for the rest of the Ivy League… Actually, they don’t even qualify him to make general statements about those schools. He’s like the Thomas Aquinas of modern-day writers on elite higher education. As Hunt noted, he throws out a bunch of claims, many of which are stale and banal, and hopes that some of them stick.) </p>
<p>The people from “second-tier schools” who jump on Deresiewicz’s palanquin are not helping the case that their schools offer superior educations…</p>
<p>@circuitrider Yes, that was the point: my anecdotes versus the Professor’s anecdotes and theories. I cannot make theories and universal maxims of my experience. Like the eponymous character of Melville’s Benito Cereno (and much unlike Captain Delano, who might be the Deresiewicz of this scenario), I am much preoccupied with exceptions, leftovers, and mistakes. I don’t think I could ever be an academic. (Dr. Samuel Johnson, Enlightenment thinker and critic, might be the prototypical academic, or at least the prototypical literary critic–however, Johnson’s claims and generalities are palatable, trenchant, even charming. Austen began her novel about the rarefied and stuffy world of 19th-century English manners, Pride and Prejudice, with one such claim. The claims we are discussing are not so pleasant.) </p>
<p>I’m not interested in defending the hegemony of the elite schools from the Big Bad RevoIutionary. (For one thing, Mr. Deresiewicz is not a Big Bad Revolutionary.) I have often mocked those who aspire to Harvard because it’s Harvard. I’m saying that the elite schools are not monolithic; they are different from one another like any other set of schools, and their students are different from one another like any set of students. I’m saying that people who criticize the elite schools should not fall into the same traps as the elite school proponents, or their criticism will become pointless. At length, people should think before they act and support pieces because of their arguments rather than their conclusions. </p>
<p>Am I missing something? I thought he was indicting the system that so many people feel they have to follow to attend an Ivy rather than the Ivies themselves. Well, maybe he was doing both.</p>
<p>BTW, @jonri, college extracurriculars can definitely help you post-grad. Being an athlete at a top school gives you a bump on Wall Street and b-schools look at extracurriculars as well.</p>
<p>@barron
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<p>LOL. And it was written by two recent Wesleyan grads.
:-c </p>
<p>Speaking of which, how did Wesleyan, a Little Three member, ever become part of the underclass? It’s as hard to get in to many Ivies these days.</p>
<p>When Newsweek can destroy your argument, your argument is whack.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
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<p>The secret is threefold:
- Careful Branding - Wesleyan has traditionally seen itself as the least preppy of The Little Three, even while demographically it probably has just as many private school graduates as Amherst and Swarthmore combined.</p>
<p>2) Expansion of Market - Wesleyan expanded its academic offerings in the 1970s, way before many of them became fashionable, earning it the disdain of many snobs who still persist in believing subjects like Film are inferior art forms,
and,
3) Assiduously Ignoring Its USNews Ranking - It’s been a while since Wesleyan’s endowment per student assured it a top ten ranking in the incredibly condescending National Liberal Arts College category that the now defunct magazine has carved out for the richest LACs in the country. It will probably finish around #25 this year. The tone of Deresiewicz’s article seems to suggest a direct correlation between a college’s USNews rank and its attraction for a certain type of student.</p>
<p>@circuitrider: You meant Williams? Swat isn’t nearly as preppy as Williams (and also isn’t Little Three like Williams). By alumni accomplishments, some combination of Swat/Amherst/Williams top the list, though (Wesleyan and some other LACs are just a little bit behind).</p>
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<p>Depends on the service job. Service jobs like college professor, teacher, physician, dentist, lawyer, engineer, researcher, mechanic, plumber, electrician, fire fighter, police officer, military servicemember, etc. are all those where thinking skills are used and continuously developed (or should be).</p>
<p>However, it does appear that people commonly use “service job” to describe only low skilled service jobs where use of thinking skills is limited.</p>
<p>@PurpleTitan
Is that really true or is it mostly a matter of past laurels? Right now, Wesleyan has two sitting governors to Amherst and Williams’ none, a senator to match Swarthmore’s, and an NFL coach. Amherst and Williams may have the edge on Wall Street bankers, but, if they ever came to Hollywood, a Wesleyan grad would have to show them around.</p>
<p>Yeah, outside the entertainment industry (which does have some Wessers, for sure–but don’t sleep: a Williams alum wrote “Let It Go”…).</p>
<p>@circuitrider:
I looked at stuff like elite professional school admissions as well as the “American Leaders” and “Student Awards” subcategories of the Forbes ranking. </p>
<p>The differences are slim (they’re like the difference between YP and the other Ivies outside HYP; or the different between Stanford & Duke). Not a big deal.</p>
<p>I’ll paste my reaction to this essay from Facebook here:</p>
<p>The niche Deresiewicz has carved out for himself in the thinkpiece market demands an unending stream of voyeuristic socio-cultural critique of America’s upper classes to keep him relevant. He is only too happy to supply the goods, though he never goes as far as to make any meaningful statements about the social or economic forces that structure the phenomenon–his work is not varied enough for me to say ‘phenomena’ here–he discusses.</p>
<p>One may say, well, whatever, he studies literature and writes essays for Salon. It is not his job to provide empirical analysis of structural inequality. However, the scope of Deresiewicz’s articles about education reveals not the limits of his competence as much as the pleasure he takes in criticizing from within what passes for aristocracy in America. That he loves his role as Yale’s lone voice of reason is evident from the obscene number of texts he’s written in this capacity. He could unfold larger narratives of broader social or cultural significance from his vantage point, or at least address his subject matter with the insight and humaneness of the truly observant. (Since you ask for specific examples, contrast the haughtiness of, “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,” with the empathetic quote that precedes these words, from the concerned girlfriend of a Yale student: incidentally the best part of the entire essay. Deresiewicz never treats anyone other than himself as a human being. That’s his whole thing.) He doesn’t do that. The fact he seems forever stuck in the tiny, self-referential, self-obsessed discourse he created with “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”–the fact he chooses to recount the same banal interactions with the same overachieving undergrads again and again and again, couching them in hyperbolic language and placing himself at their center as some sort of all-knowing but powerless Romantic hero–is very telling.</p>
<p>What it tells me, at least, is that Deresiewicz has bought into the very myth he’s supposed to dismantle. He claims to disdain elitism, but he can’t stop talking about it. He can’t stop using its language. ("…the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others." What sort of person makes a meaningful distinction between ‘second-tier’ and ‘second-rate’ in this context? What sort of person is so conscious of the exact taxonomy of prestige in higher education that he keeps sorting colleges into “prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams,” “elite colleges” like Pomona, “second-tier” but not “second-rate” colleges like the ones listed above, and presumably second-rate, third-rate, third-tier, almost elite, etc. schools as well? The very term ‘elite education’ remains unexamined, on the assumption that the reader already knows what it means. Honestly, the whole essay marinates in the vocabulary of an anxious high-school valedictorian.) When he nominates “high-quality public education,” whatever ‘high-quality’ means to him, as the solution to America’s ills, he clearly does so from a great experiential distance, like a British colonel suggesting his men might try wearing native dress to combat the heat.</p>
<p>I get the strong impression that Yale is Deresiewicz’s entire world. He thinks it’s flawed, even pernicious, but it’s the only frame of reference he has. He gossips about the inner sanctum of the Ivy League with the same enthusiasm with which suburban social climbers seek out such material. He doesn’t write like someone who has transcended the self-congratulatory delusions of the Ivy League; he writes with the resentment of someone whom these delusions have left out.</p>
<p>Lastly, as someone who knows a lot of really lovely people at the institutions he claims to critique, I have to say his sweeping generalizations about the emotional well-being and intellectual curiosity of <em>all</em> of his students only undermine his claims about the system as a whole. Which brings me back to my point about his inability to treat the people he writes about as real human beings. His tendency to use his students and colleagues as mindless mouthpieces for whatever point he wants to make has nothing to do with his educational background, really–it simply makes him a bad writer.</p>
<p>Ghostt, great post, written with more care than I’d ever want to lavish on the article.</p>
<p>Those who take D.'s pieces at face value should note that his “phenomenon” extends far beyond the so-called elite institutions and afflicts most if not all colleges to some degree.</p>
<p>If you don’t go to college at all:</p>
<ol>
<li>You won’t become an “entitled little s–t.” If you do, you can blame that vice on poor parenting, middle school, high school, or “affluenza.”</li>
<li>You won’t live in a college bubble. You will get more than your fair share of diversity by walking up and down the street. With the money you save from not having to fill some Faceless Bureaucrat’s coffers, you might travel the world, do something good for someone.</li>
<li>You can get an education on your terms. No mediation, no faking hobbies to look good for college applications, no professorial agenda, no bureaucracy, no sordid consumption and obscene wealth, no need to converse with the lowlife vocational types, no worries about prestige and branding, no phony networking and conjuring up drivel for cocktail parties, and your pockets are four years and up to two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars heavier.</li>
</ol>
<p>(I can understand why the academic would transform the religious college into his Romantic Dream. Presumably, the strictures of religion prevent people with incessantly active minds from rolling off the cliffside. But those are colleges like any other.) </p>
<p>Ask Shakespeare, Webster, Plato, Middleton, Montaigne, Democritus, Sophocles, Ben Jonson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Cavendish, Confucius, Ferdowsi, Attar, Ibn Khaldun, Laozi, Xunzi, Zhuangzi, Lady Murasaki, Vimalakirti, Matsuō Basho, Lu Ji, Li Po, Kim Manjung, Ueda Akinari, Alexander Pushkin, and Wu Ch’engen what they think of college. Their silence is your answer. </p>
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<p>That claim might be an overreach, as there are large numbers of community colleges with large numbers of enrolled students; these colleges tend not do exude any kind of elitist phenomena.</p>