<p>This D guy can’t be too smart. He spent 14 of his 24 “Ivy years” undergrad, journalism masters and English Ph.D. studies at Columbia. Of course, he was denied tenure at Yale. Would you expect him to praise the Ivy League after wasting 24 years of his life there?</p>
<p>Besides that, when D went to college in the 1980’s Wesleyan was harder to get into than Columbia. Indeed, Columbia GS was twice the size of CC prior to going coed in 1983. Who is this clown to refer to Wes as second-tier?</p>
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<p>Gag. Deresiewicz should spend a couple of years teaching college composition at a community college or low-ranked regional school and then get back to us about the paradises of learning to be found there. His romantic idealization of non-elite institutions and their students is condescending and ignorant. </p>
<p>I agree with some of his points (i.e. about risk aversion) but I think it’s a function of an increasingly competitive economy with lessening opportunity, where the consequence of mediocrity is to risk falling out of the secure middle class. It’s not a function of the educational system, or prestige-mongering in Chappaqua or Short Hills.</p>
<p>@NJSue:</p>
<p>Well, you can argue that the shape of the educational system and prestige-mongering is due to intensifying intra-elite competition (with fears of falling out of the middle class; even though, if you are in the 90th percentile in smarts or 90th percentile in hustle–50th percentile in the other–you’ll actually do just fine even if that isn’t enough to get you in to an Ivy . . . assuming that you don’t go to law school).</p>
<p>The one thing I take away from it all is that a 12 year old shouldn’t have to be concerned about which Ivy they will go to…They should be a 12 year old. </p>
<p>The parents of 12 year olds may be worried that if they are not tracked into the most advanced course in every subject, their chances of taking the most rigorous high school courses, and therefore their chances of getting into the most selective universities, becomes nil.</p>
<p>I can’t believe the amount of undeserved attention and praise being lavished on this half-argued crap.</p>
<p>Let’s boil down the logic: “I see problems X and Y in the Ivy League. So to avoid problems X and Y, go elsewhere.”</p>
<p>I hope he’d flunk a Yale freshman who thought that kind of reasoning was adequate. Maybe problems X and Y are WORSE elsewhere. Unless you have some evidence about that – or even anecdote! – you have no business stating that going elsewhere is the solution.</p>
<p>Speculating about what students at other institutions are “apt” to be like is laziness. So is painting the category “public schools” with one brush, as though UVA belongs in a cultural category with Southeastern Oklahoma State and not with Princeton. People with actual experience who study the matter say that most college students in this country are only in college to get a better job. More than one third of U.S. college degrees are granted in the pre-professional fields of business, nursing/health, communications, information technology, and education, which are practically nonexistent in the Ivy League. The highly selective schools, and the flagship honors programs that mimic them, are lonely islands where intellectual exploration for its own sake gets any traction at all.</p>
<p>In fact, the data (<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674049578”>http://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674049578</a>, for example) suggest that public flagships often do a much worse job than elite privates at fostering interaction across racial and socioeconomic lines. Schools where privileged kids split off into a Greek system that’s racially and economically stratified, then live and eat in those bubbles for four years, are far less egalitarian than a school like Yale where everyone lives in randomized college housing.</p>
<p>This is particularly frustrating to me because some of the critical issues the author touches on (increasing access to elite schools; underfunding of public universities) deserve thoughtful debate. This drivel is taking up the space that conversation ought to occupy.</p>
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<p>But not all elite privates are like Yale, and not all public flagships are fraternity/sorority-heavy. If you use Dartmouth (instead of Yale) as the elite private and Texas as the public flagship in the fraternity/sorority-bubble example, you might come to the opposite conclusion.</p>
<p>Also note that elite privates generally do not have that many low SES students to begin with. Yes, about half of Yale students receive financial aid, but the financial aid range reaches up into a rather high level of income and wealth.</p>
<p>In terms of student diversity, some of the elite privates are lacking whole sections of diversity. For example, the large number of transfer students at many public flagships represent sections that are absent at school that take no or few transfers – many non-traditional students, low SES recent immigrants, and others whose high school records are flawed at best, but have proven themselves in college before transferring. Granted, many here disdain transfer students, but they do bring a diversity of experience that may be lacking if a school only has well-packaged frosh with stellar high school records.</p>
<p>“But not all elite privates are like Yale, and not all public flagships are fraternity/sorority-heavy.”</p>
<p>Of course. But this is the kind of analysis of actual evidence that’s totally lacking in the article. You’re looking at school policies and patterns instead of broad categories (like public/private) that don’t tell you much. In other words, you’re way ahead of the author. Let’s talk about residential college systems! Great topic!</p>
<p>“For example, the large number of transfer students at many public flagships represent sections that are absent at school that take no or few transfers”</p>
<p>Agreed (you sure won’t find me, of all people, disdaining transfers!). Wouldn’t it be nice if the author had looked at the success of transfer policies as a means of providing broader access to schools? What if he had considered, for example, that Cornell admits over 700 transfer applicants per year and Princeton none at all? Does that play a role in whether the schools produce zombies or not? And how are transfers integrated into the community at these schools? Maybe some programs succeed at giving opportunities to wider groups of students, but not at creating relationships across communities. Another great area for dialogue.</p>
<p>@stanatedj
@ucbalumnus
Yes, but at what point do they begin eating human flesh? There are a lot of suspicious looking 12 year olds in my building. 8-X </p>
<p>@purpletitan
</p>
<p>In the latest “American Leaders” iteration it’s
Swarthmore - 5,
Amherst - 6,
Williams - 13,
Oberlin - 15
Barnard - 16
Wesleyan - 17
Pomona - 19</p>
<p>Then, a big drop among the wealthiest LACs:
<a href=“CollegeLifeHelper.com - Helping College Students Online!”>CollegeLifeHelper.com - Helping College Students Online!;
<p>@circuitrider:</p>
<p>Yep, though Mudd and Reed (off the top of my head) do really well in the academic categories (Student Awards and PhDs).</p>
<p>Also Carleton, Grinnell, and New College of Florida.</p>
<p>Hmmm, let’s get this straight: </p>
<p>William Deresiewicz is educated at Columbia, an elite school, so he turned into a zombie by that school due to his analogy. And he wants everyone to listen to him? This is a very strange type of logic he is engaging himself into.</p>
<p>“That includes the parents making kids take the SAT in 7th grade”
Do colleges see who ask the student to take the test? My child’s teacher asked her to take it not we parents.</p>
<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>Where this opion came from is beyond me… maybe just becasue their stereotype of elite university students came from rumors. </p>
<p>If one go to any elite school forums on CC, they will find current students/parents/admin-related-posters/counselors who have knowledge about a specific top university’s admission process emphansized ‘be yourself and show your passion in your essays/applications’. Apparently elite schools look for talented and passionate kids more than their test scores. And this fits my own impression of kids I know.</p>
<p>The kids in my area who got into top/elite colleges are talented with strong passion in something. The ones who are talented but have no passion on anything built their resume with large amount of different EC’s; and they are the ones who didn’t get admitted to top colleges but forced to stay in state flagships.</p>
<p><a href=“ugtimes.com”>http://ugtimes.com/discussion-the-merits-of-the-ivy-league-zombies-or-intellectuals/</a></p>
<p>Discussion of the article by college students currently at the “zombie” making universities.</p>
<p>“The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar thing” (finance and consulting)</p>
<p>Wonder if this is a regional effect applying to New England elite schools and in particular the Ivies - and less correlated with Stanford, Rice, JHU, Notre Dame, Duke and the elites outside of New England. (I looked at only Southern elite schools when I applied to college - to do something different than the usual New England elite colleges)</p>
<p>He also does assert that the classes are not necessarily rigorous at the Ivies “except in the sciences.” But it is precisely in the STEM fields where, with many state flagship universities having sub 50% graduation rates in Engineering, his argument may break down and Ivies and a subset of the elite schools are doing a great job. Especially given the generous financial aid of the Ivies and high graduation rates for STEM fields, at least for the lower and middle class students it is hard to buy his argument completely.</p>
<p>His arguments about ridiculous pressure on kids and the non-objective admissions process has some truth - but his dismal picture of maladjusted students at elite private schools doesn’t seem to fit the picture at all elites: notably Vanderbilt (apparently the “happiest students”) and Rice (“happiest” last year) but also Stanford and Bowdoin and Claremont-McKenna. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised (based on students and recent graduates that I have met) if his comment below turns out to be supportable by objective evidence: “Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.” (ie “learning how to think” and “deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word.”). Would be interesting to see factors (other than focus on great books, and debate, philosophy etc.) that are helping some of these religious colleges.</p>
<p>@2018RiceParent While I suspect that his comment on the religious colleges is baseless invective, it might not be wrong. Centre and Sewanee, two obscure religious colleges, outperform every other ranked school except West Point and Annapolis, including all of the Ivies, in the experiential metrics of the Alumni Factor rankings, which are based on surveys of alumni about their college experiences. Yale comes very close, but the other “top schools” do not. Davidson and Holy Cross outperform Stanford, Rice, MIT, Chicago, Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, Pomona, and all of the Ivies except Yale. Of course, you could argue that students who attend “top schools” have higher expectations, etc.</p>
<p>Oddly enough, Centre and Sewanee have poor Princeton Review ratings.</p>
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<p>This statement is a Cliff Notes of sorts for the article. It’s an exemplification of the author’s analytic skill: his claims are based in truth, but superficial, perfunctory, and forgettable.</p>
<p>I missed this nugget in the ocean of BS:</p>
<p>“The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar thing…As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell.”</p>
<p>As stated, this is objectively false. About a third of graduates WHO ENTERED FULL-TIME JOBS UPON GRADUATION went into finance and consulting. But at Harvard and most of its peers, that’s only 60% of the class…about 40% go to graduate school, fellowships, or travel, or are unsure. As you might expect, this 40% includes a whole lot of the STEM grads going into MD and PhD programs, as well as the actors/musicians/etc. whose careers aren’t defined by full-time work at all. I know this guy didn’t teach math, but one third of 60% isn’t one third…it’s one fifth. I guess one fifth didn’t sound as good in support of his “they’re all automatons” argument.</p>
<p>Even if the math were right, on what planet is one third of them “most of them”? And what about the fact that these numbers are trending downward?</p>
<p>It’s amazing. We ought to be on the same side – I’d like to see a whole lot fewer HYP grads going into finance. Yet he manages to take a decent idea and wreck it with poor argument.</p>
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<p>Isn’t elite school admissions something where a student typically needs all of the following?</p>
<ul>
<li>Top end high school grades and course rigor.</li>
<li>Top end test scores.</li>
<li>High level of achievement, award, or recognition in some extracurricular.</li>
<li>Essays that interest the admission readers.</li>
</ul>
<p>I.e. any of the above is typically necessary for admission, but none by itself is sufficient. Yes, there are uncommon exceptions, but they do not apply to most applicants.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that interesting essays are really necessary, although they may help some applicants. Perhaps essays that don’t actively repulse the admission readers are necessary.</p>