<p>Link to an article that appeared in last Sunday's NY Times:</p>
<p>I feel somewhat too biased about this article (i.e. I know the writer) so I have a hard time separating who he is a person from what he has written about the school. I will sit this discussion out (or try to), but I'll provide a link to a discussion about this very article on the UChicago Livejournal community:</p>
<p>Isn't Perlstein a little young to be playing the role of an old man grousing about the loss of the good ol' days? </p>
<p>I was a college student back in the days he calls the "real college days". If things had been so great, they wouldn't have changed. </p>
<p>I have less and less tolerance for these newspaper features that string so many words together but don't say anything.</p>
<p>I'm nostalgic for the good ol' days when newspapers were worth reading.</p>
<p>Huh, I thought it repersented a very interesting viewpont.</p>
<p>I thought it represented a dumb, solipsistic viewpoint that bore no resemblance to any real life college experience in my generation, my children's generation, or anyone in between. He's (as I understand it) in his 30s, and he never saw a foreign film before college? Give me a break! (That's not a substantive objection, just an indication of how atypical the experience he generalized must have been.)</p>
<p>My daughter knows most of the students quoted in the article. Her comments about them shouldn't be repeated, because they are potentially libellous, but suffice it to say she thinks they are a specific clique, and hardly representative of the student community at Chicago.</p>
<p>Like your daughter, I know many of the people quoted and referenced in the article, and I also know other people who were interviewed for this article whose interviews were not used. I know more people interviewed than referenced, which leads me to think that Perlstein was choosing his examples and his targets very carefully. And I quite resent his highlighting one girl as an Organization Kid whose opinions and experiences "don't count."</p>
<p>I think Perlstein is saying something valuable, though he sort of digs his own grave into it. He laments that colleges are a business and no longer a four-year suspension of reality. I can't tell you how many times people ask me what I'm going to "do" with my major. The answer is: nothing. I'm doing my major to do my major, because I like what I'm studying and I want to learn. That I can afford to spend these four years creating opportunities fitted to my interests is another issue.</p>
<p>To make another limited observation: it seems to me that business schools have become all the rage. Many of my relatives went to Penn in the 60s and 70s, and one of the things they all remember about the school was how "dumb" Wharton kids were in comparison to the rest of the school. Now, of course, Wharton leads the school. Why all this interest in studying business?</p>
<p>Lousy article, badly researched and poorly written. A lazy effort done for the paycheck if you ask me. </p>
<p>And it's too bad, because it's an interesting topic: what is college life like for this generation of students, who've had to work so hard to get into the elite colleges. Is it more of the same high pressure and overscheduling with no time for contemplation or is it still possible simply explore and discover oneself? Does it depend on the individual student or the college environment they select? This could have been a compelling, insightful article detailing an honest debate about where we are in American higher education. Alas, it was not. </p>
<p>First, I don't see how students who choose the pursuits that interest them --- the young woman researching ethnic foods in Chicago for example --- are supposed to be unknowing victims of "infantilization." Someone will have to explain that to me a lot better than this author did. That there are some students at Chicago, as at all the top colleges, who are working toward the next step --- grad school, business school, law school, medical school --- rather than being purely devoted to intellectual growth and the life of the mind is not a surprise, not noteworthy enough to wrap a magazine article around. </p>
<p>BTW, I've been coming on the Chicago forum trying to determine if it would be a good fit for S2, a chemistry buff who plays jazz saxophone, loves cities and is sick of sunny CA (boring!) He is, though, one of those boys who hasn't quite bought into the notion that AP English should be as high a priority for him as windsurfing. Have to wait and see.</p>
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loves cities and is sick of sunny CA (boring!)
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<p>He won't be bored by the weather in Chicago. My son visited on accepted student days in April, wearing shorts and sandals, as is his habit. It was in the 20s, I think. Evidently he was the only person in the city wearing shorts, since several strangers walked up to him, shook his hand and exclaimed "brave man, wearing shorts!"</p>
<p>old people are so funny sometimes</p>
<p>UChicago is a really poor case study for how selective colleges may have changed over the last 15 years, because during that time, U of C has deliberately set out to recruit and admit a different subset of students than it attracted in the past (not to mention expand the college and change campus life drastically). If you wanted to look at a school like Yale - whose admissions strategy/philosophy has remained constant over that period - you could maybe draw some conclusions about how the student population has changed. But the fact that there's been a change in the student body of a school that publicly and conhtroversially changed its admissions philosophy should not surprise anyone...least of all someone with a U of C education.</p>
<p>I know current Chicago students and alumni in their 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, and 20s. If there is a significant difference in who is going there now vs. 20 years ago or 40 years ago, it's lost on me. It is somewhat more popular now, due to a variety of factors including a lot of sprucing up, decent marketing, and increased popularity of urban schools generally, but it's just not true that there has been some sort of sea change in the character of the students.</p>
<p>At a prep school I know well in my city, Chicago is the #2 destination for its students cumulatively over the last 20 years. (A distant #2 to the local Ivy, but #2 nonetheless.) Basically, it has sent about 3 kids per year there for that whole period. Believe me, that school has not changed its tools and dies a whit. It is stamping out the same kids as always, and they keep going to Chicago.</p>
<p>A longtime professor made a similar observation-- the caliber and the intellectual excitement of the students has not changed, according to him, but what has changed is the quality of life and extracurricular interests that students have coming in.</p>
<p>And, jazzymom, while these boards may be helpful, you'll know that you and son will have to make a trip to Chicago to really determine if it's a good place for him or not.</p>
<p>It's easy for him to talk about suspending reality for four years, after having written two profitable books, as well as income writing articles like this for the NYT. When you grow up in not-as-favourable economic circumstances, you tend to look at the world from a more economic perspective. And besides, is it really a surprise that the average UChicago student has a good understanding of the utility of economics and appropriately applies it to the world? Isn't that the point - application of concepts learned to real life scenarios?</p>
<p>His book on Goldwater was great, though.</p>
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And besides, is it really a surprise that the average UChicago student has a good understanding of the utility of economics and appropriately applies it to the world?
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<p>Or it's more like, "Shoot, I'm going into thousands of dollars of debt for this dream education, and I have to think about making that money back a little bit, whether I want to or not."</p>
<p>Perlstein, like me, probably came from a privileged family in which getting the dream education will not be at opposition with getting the dream job. (My dream job(s) are low-paying, go figure).</p>
<p>Had I had to choose between the dream education and the dream job, I would have chosen the dream job and would have pursued a dream education at state school.</p>
<p>As usual, I agree with JHS (I really am going to have to check to make sure I'm not writing under a split personality, here).</p>
<p>First off, never trust a writer who uses the world "incentivizing" instead of "incentiing." Secondly, never trust an opinion piece in any newspaper. They don't write those pieces until they have an angle, then they seek quotes and information to bolster that angle. </p>
<p>As for the issue with economic arguments, it's supposed to be a bad thing that today's students, instead of posing ill-informed and unrealistic arguments based on few data and less learning, are now posing more complex and useful arguments?</p>
<p>OK.</p>