In The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz writes
The
world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our
next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses
junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring,
the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one
wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe,
let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution
or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience,
great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is
that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.
He writes that elites who have been funneled through these Ivy League schools are not exposed to normal people and freeze up when forced to have a conversation with a normal people. They are so accustomed to success that they fear taking risks or experimenting. Once they make it through the test preps, honors classes, student government nonsense in high school, they coast through colleges that give them chance after chance.
I grew up in a town that was a feeder for Ivy League schools. The top 20% of my high school class attended Ivy League schools — some because of merit, some because of family pedigree. My best friend got into Harvard early admission, despite her best intentions of sabotaging her parent’s pressure to attend the family school. Instead of writing the college admission essay, she drew a lovely cartoon of astronauts jumping in and out of craters on the moon carrying flags with question marks on it. A Harvard admissions counselor misunderstood and thought this was deep stuff and admitted her. Then she spent the next four years doing her best to flunk out. Drugs and boys. Still, she graduated. Another friend did get tossed out of Harvard, but it took some major drug use for that to happen.
Deresiewicz compares the treatment of students at Cleveland State v. Yale.
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the
social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like
Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the
middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or
another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances,
no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of
subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not
guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite
like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s
true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult,
but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked
out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of
plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve
heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh,
it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the
old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture
excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I
know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is
the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors,
not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take
care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.
Steve and I are in frequent talks about whether or not we should move to a town with an Ivy League feeder school. I worry that he’s not getting polished or groomed for excellence. But then a lot of kids I knew burned out early or hit major league depression at not achieving all they were supposed to. (We had a good chat about all this here.) I have to say that I was very assured when I learned that our town’s high school produced Tyler Cowen and David Remnick, but I’m probably the only person in town who knows who they are.
(Thanks to Melissa for the link!)
Apt. 11d 
We worry all the time that we’re shortchanging our kids by not sending them to private school, which are abundant here, and which feed into Ivy Leagues and Swarthmore and their ilk. But then again, I see kids here who’ve been through that ringer and they aren’t all shallow and unthinking but many of them land here, are asked to start working hard and they kind of freak out. My impression is that you can’t coast here the way you can at some Ivy Leagues, but it’s still pretty hard to completely flunk out.
It’s a shame that the elite system works the way it does. At the two state schools I’ve taught at, I’ve seen lots of intelligent, dynamic students who would make excellent leaders, but because they lack the connections, probably won’t be. And many of those students come to that realization at some point and settle in for whatever life throws at them. Whatever they do, they do well, but they give up aiming for the really plumb positions. Some would argue that that’s why they didn’t make it into the Ivy Leagues in the first place, but I that that’s b-s. For many kids and their families, even with a substantial financial aid package, an Ivy League is out of reach and for some, the culture shock might prove too much to last. It’d be nice if the regular/normal folks could make it, but I’m afraid the elites won’t let that happen.
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My Ivy League experience is 20 years out of date, but does Deresiewiczs consider at all that some of us are from families of normal people, and work with normal people at our work study jobs or summer jobs?
I teach at a state university, and I see a lot more extensions and second chances than I did as a student (again, part of that may be the twenty years’ difference).
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As a West Coaster, the big Ivy League schools don’t loom nearly so large for me as they seem to for a lot of people. I look forward to sending the kids in-state in Texas, to a school that my husband’s college has a relationship with, or to a fancy-pants school if the price is right. I loved going to a bigger private university with cozy small class sizes, but my first three years were essentially free and I escaped with minimal student loans. There is no way, no how that we are going to spend more than $10-15K (OK, maybe $20K at the outside) a year (inflation adjusted).
All that said, I’ve recently noticed how smart Yalies are. Smart, quirky, very original conservatives seem to flourish there. (I’m a long-time admirer of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com.)
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Um. I mentioned coming back last week from my Harvard reunion? I don’t know what recent grads are like, but I now have an excellent overview of my classmates, and I can tell you that an amazing number of them are involved in public interest sorts of work. Union organizer, starting a school for disadvantaged kids, practicing medicine at a no-cost clinic, founding City Year… the list goes on and on and on. A truly impressive amount of genuine and active philanthropy and understanding. A classmate who’s a judge is teaching junior colleagues about domestic violence. A magazine editor classmate famously came down hard on an employee who violated journalistic ethics. The list goes on. Seriously. These are not people taking the easy road, not people making conservative choices in their lives. IMO, Harvard did a good job with us.
And for the record, I didn’t go to an Ivy feeder school.
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You live in *[bleeped]*? Wow. What street?
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OK, Tamar. This blog is supposed to be about good debate, so thanks for giving the other point of view. This guy might respond by saying that your friends sound extremely successful, but not risk takers who are accustomed to failure. Of course, the kids in non-elite colleges aren’t risk takers either. They can’t afford to take risks, because they have huge student loans.
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heh. I don’t want to put that on this blog. In fact, I’m going to bleep out my town name from your comment. I’m walking distance from downtown, near D*rie Motors. What street did you live on?
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Um, D*rie Motors is probably too distinctive.
Another 20+ Ivy alum here. Students were kicked out. It was done in an elegant manner, though, they were “sent home,” with the option to return. Those of whom I knew were athletes; I don’t know of any who returned. I also knew of those who left, due to family emergencies or financial troubles.
I’ve never been able to make small talk. It’s not the fault of the Ivy, it’s just my character. I can talk about almost any topic in depth, but the smiling falsity of polite pretense escapes my grasp.
I echo Tamar. Many of my classmates went on to lead lives serving others, whether as doctors, teachers, writers, or aid workers.
When Mr. Deresciewicz states, “My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class,” I think it’s worthwhile to remember that what a school endeavors to teach is not always what the student learns.
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I kind of like the characterization of Harvard as a large, tax-exempt hedge fund with a moderate-size eleemosynary educational institution attached, and which serves mostly for public relations.
I had an interesting time there (grad school, not the College) and as a TA I saw papers from students of widely varying quality. We will probably encourage our kids to go somewhere else for college, though.
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I finally got a chance to read this. I was struck by how well it works alongside JK Rowling’s terrific commencement address at, coincidentally, Harvard in terms of showing the importance of risk-taking and failure. And it reminds me of how I once took a risk, failed miserably, and ended up happier than I ever could have imagined.
I was in a cushy academic administrative job in NYC, but I had just had a baby and the commute was hard. So I took a chance on a one-year position in Maine. Three years later I had post-partum depression, no job, two kids, and a husband who loved his job in Maine. (Ugh.) Long story short, and alluded to in my reply to the JKR post, I’m now happy, finally.
I wasn’t in an Ivy feeder school. Out of my class of 222, we had one Yale, one Cornell, one Princeton, one Penn, one MIT (not Ivy, but a great school). I’m the second college graduate in my family (we now have several more). I’m not crazy about failure, but I lived in a family with a lot of financial risk, so I was used to going without the things I wanted. I think disappointment is a good thing, and I try to disappoint my kids as much as possible. 🙂
The late John Lovas, whose blog I used to read and really enjoyed, had a criterion on one of his writing assignments for “risk.” He would reward students who took risks in their writing. I’ve never figured out how to be comfortable assessing risk-taking, but that’s something that’s always stuck with me. FWIW, he was a community college professor. I can’t imagine “risk” being a criterion in an Ivy League writing class.
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I think everyone bemoans that the world is changing so that there’s less risk taking, and yet doesn’t know how to “fix” it. This is an issue that comes up in science as well. As Wendy says, the probably with taking risks is that one can fail miserably. In life, perhaps, one can recover after that miserable failure, but it’s difficult for an agency/school/whatever to encourage the risk-taking, because that means it also encourages the failure (i.e. that’s what risk means).
To use a financial analogy, I think that risk taking is actually encouraged by having nothing or having everything. If, for example, you have 100 million in the bank, you can take a 10 million dollar risk w/ a potential payoff of 100 million. If you *only* have 10 million in the bank, you can’t, because a loss would leave you with nothing. I think this as a serious impact on dynamics of investment, and I haven’t seen it very well discussed in the popular press. I’ve noticed it myself as I discuss “upside” risk w/ friends, especially common during the internet bubble. If you don’t invest 10K in Amazon in the early days, well, you lost out on a gazillion dollars. If you invested 10K in oh, ask jeeves, in the early days, you lost 10K. So, having 10K to spare helps you take risks. Same with the safety nets of family and friends and Harvard. Some of those things that your guy is complaining about help with risk. My guess is that many of those Harvard graduates doing *cool* *helping* things are quite comfortable, and not worrying about their children’s education (and definitely not whether they eat).
The other thing that encourages risk taking is having nothing (i.e being so poor that investing moderately won’t get you anything).
Sometimes both groups take bad risks (i.e. are willing to play with drugs). Sometimes privileged, snotty kids, take an absolutely great risk, without realizing it. I bet you that the Harvard admissions folks were thrilled with the cartoon (though one has to wonder how they would have felt about it with no legacy in the background).
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Yeah, ** motors is too distinctive. Take it out Laura. 🙂
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I agree with Tamar. I got my PhD from Yale, so had a lot of exposure to undergrads through TAing, and I can tell you many of them were heavily involved in the community (lots of volunteer work in the schools, with the homeless, with unions, etc.) Some travelled abroad to places I would consider dangerous to work on poverty or social justice-related projects. Many wanted to do some kind of social service work when they got out (though I’m sure some will wind up on Wall Street despite their best intentions!) And most of them were very smart.
A few were obnoxious, with that sense of entitlement he talks about, but this was a small minority. (This is in a humanities class, so maybe it’s different for those in other fields.) I think he’s way off base – avoidance of risk is not a high priority, and they are not detached from “normal people” – in fact, a lot of them have “normal people” as parents, hometown friends, etc. in the first place.
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Discovering President Bush went to Harvard and Yale pretty much has predisposed me to lose what little respect I ever had for either school. I pretty much think that the Ivy League schools are overrated and their tendency to give degrees to rich people because their daddy and/or mommy made large contributions leaves me dubious of whether their degrees can actually be trusted to mean anything.
(That being said, my friend Justin went to Princeton and his reports made it sound pretty good.)
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i have no idea what these “ivy league feeder schools” are that you mention – other than the big name private prep schools like exeter, andover, &c.
i guess that’s the benefit of living on the west coast, like amy said, the ivy league schools don’t loom quite so large.
our philosophy with our son is to (1) instill in him a deep love of learning, (2) send him to elementary and secondary schools that will encourage that and not squash it, and (3) provide him with the financial resources to be able to take his path from there.
if that ended up being an ivy leauge or some other top tier private school then fine. but with a love of learning, good skills, and a strong financial cushion, we figure he’s going to end up being just fine, whatever path he chooses.
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I wasn’t in an Ivy feeder school. Out of my class of 222, we had one Yale, one Cornell, one Princeton, one Penn, one MIT (not Ivy, but a great school)
It’s obvious that I have no idea what a feeder school might be, if that’s not it.
In my class of 144 in SE Texas, 2 went to Rice (the highest ranked college an alumnus had attended in 25 years), and a dozen went to either of the big state schools. Most of the rest of the top 50% went to the local 4-year state school. I thought that was pretty typical, at the time.
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I can’t describe a feeder school, but I’m pretty sure I went to its opposite. My school didn’t have anyone to give advice about how to get into competitive universities and many of the activities that would be expected on an application were not available. Even something as basic as taking the SAT was something that I found out about on my own (the in-state schools took ACT scores). The guidance counselor was very knowledgeable about how to get scholarships at local universities (and gave me a perpetual pass out of study hall my senior year), but probably didn’t know anybody who knew anybody who went to an ivy-league school.
My school wasn’t poor, just very rural. I had classmates who went to one-room school houses until 9th grade. That said, I don’t know if my background made me more risk-acceptant.
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Link to list of top feeder schools.
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I think Laura means something slightly different from “feeder” school — i.e. a high achievement/high pressure/college prep high school. Walt Whitman in Maryland, Lakeside (Bill Gate’s alma mater) in Seattle, Head-Royce in Oakland . . . .
Trischka, I think your philosophy is ours, too. But, I think as I look at older kids, I think it’s not so simple. That’s ’cause people perceive the “Ivies” (i.e. highly selective colleges) as looking for well-rounded + an area of extraordinary strength & passion (for non-legacy admittees). So, as I’ve said before when I say that I think a lot of tutoring in early grades is trying to get above average kids to function at the extraordinary level, I think a lot of the pressure cooker environment is designed to get above average kids to look (but not actually be) extraordinary in their apps. And, even extraordinary kids have to prove that they’re extraordinary. I think that’s lead to a quantification of activities that would have been more free. For example, kids with serious engineering passions would always build things in their garage. Now, there are contests for that, so that they can win engineering contests, to put on their college CVS. Kids who loved to write would write in their journals. Now, they have to get their book to a packager and publish it, or enter poetry contests. Kids who loved to know things would read encyclopedias and newspapers. Now, they have to win trivia contests.
So, do you let your kid participate in all that? Do you encourage them to do so? Do you make them develop a passion, if they don’t seem to have one?
Right now, I’m trying to provide opportunity for a passion, but it’s a hard line to walk (opportunity v pressure, especially when you have a child who likes to compete (and win) and perform (i.e. show off))
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Well, I can’t comment on feeder school or no. All I can say is that, in my work experience, I have frequently come into contact with people who went to the Ivies. And I have found them to be unevenly successful. It’s definitely not a for-sure thing that an Ivy graduate will flourish or become an elite. Are they a success or not? You can usually tell by how often they mention where they went to school; the more often it comes up, the less likely they’ve done anything meaningful since.
The risk aversion thing I think is more generational. This has been my experience anyway; the current crop of kids was raised in a hyper-safety-aware, helicopter parent atmosphere. They have yet to learn the benefits of taking risks. But almost everyone encounters a setback eventually and will need to allow some risk in their life.
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“I think a lot of the pressure cooker environment is designed to get above average kids to look (but not actually be) extraordinary in their apps. And, even extraordinary kids have to prove that they’re extraordinary. I think that’s lead to a quantification of activities that would have been more free. For example, kids with serious engineering passions would always build things in their garage. Now, there are contests for that, so that they can win engineering contests, to put on their college CVS. Kids who loved to write would write in their journals. Now, they have to get their book to a packager and publish it, or enter poetry contests. Kids who loved to know things would read encyclopedias and newspapers. Now, they have to win trivia contests.”
And this can lead to gruesome results, like the case of that student who plagiarized a book (about the pressure of getting into an Ivy League school), got into Harvard and got published. Back in the day, she could have plagiarized it for her high school literary club, not gotten published, not gone to Harvard, and then she and her family could have been spared the humiliation of becoming national news.
The extracurricular regime is also horribly expensive. Under our current austerity regime, I haven’t signed the kids (3 and almost 6) up for anything since we moved to Texas. We have our zoo membership, our children’s museum membership, and we get into the campus pool free. Ideally, our oldest would do ballet and swim lessons and our youngest would do Kindermusik, but I’d like a house a lot more. It seems like the sky is the limit for older kids and extracurriculars. Parents get sucked into the vortex of competition and travel teams and stop doing a cost-benefit analysis. The worst I’ve ever heard was a mom on the radio confessing to Dave Ramsey that she was spending $1,000 a month on equestrian stuff for one daughter, and that she had been keeping the expense a secret from her husband. That sounds extreme, but on reflection, I suspect that that kind of outlay is not at all unusual in other activities, considering travel expenses, etc.
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Laura, I guess I see your point re. my classmates and success, but many of them have in fact taken huge risks in various ways with their careers, at least two dropping out of the law-school path to pursue journalism (okay, granted, a minor risk), one moving to a dangerous low-income part of Boston so he could practice what he preaches, one dropping out of journalism to do instead of report about doings, etc. The majority of my classmates have changed careers at least once, and from personal observation, I’d say at least some of those new careers entail more risk rather than less.
Also, it depends how you define success, doesn’t it? Many of the people I’m talking about are hardly living high on the hog, though I agree they’ve (often brilliantly) achieved a different sort of success. A union organizer can’t afford to buy a house in the Boston area at current prices, for example, and I’m fairly certain this particular friend doesn’t come from money.
And again, I don’t know what your perception of people going to Harvard entails, but when I attended, well over half were receiving some sort of student aid (including loans, so I well know what it’s like to have to pay those back, though admittedly not in the huge sums now needed). And I’m sure you’ve heard about Harvard’s groundbreaking new policy, offering no-to-low cost tuition for students whose families earn under X and Y amounts per year (too lazy and busy to look up the numbers). President Faust said at Commencement that the college is reaping the benefits of the program, seeing larger numbers of kids matriculating from lower income communities. Which may not be entirely on point, but does go against the Ivy-feeder-school mentality and the notion that everyone at Harvard fits neatly into the cultural elite package from Day One, doesn’t it?
BTW, I agree with jen, I believe risk aversion is more generational than schooling-specific.
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“BTW, I agree with jen, I believe risk aversion is more generational than schooling-specific.”
That’s a weakness of the Deresiewicz article where he talks about the Yale of Kerry and Bush–presumably, that Yale is no more.
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Some of my best friends are Harvard grads, too, Tamar 🙂 and I do agree that there are many honorable, hard-working, able, and risk-taking folk among you. I think Harvard has become the focal point for dislike of class and elitism, and people forget that there’s also a lot of intellectual power and energy and opportunity there.
I did love the book “Price of Admission” though, a fascinating tell all book about the effect of privilege on admissions. The author includes a discussion of legacy admissions, faculty “brat” admissions, donor admissions, and athletic admissions, not for football, but for equestrian/crew/sailing (and in a cute little quirk, squash, which turns to help out Indians applying from India). He ends by spotlighting three schools that he says succeed without having any “Price” for admissions: Caltech, Cooper Union, and a school in Appalachia that offers a full scholarship to all students. At Caltech, he quotes faculty members saying that their children aren’t really right for the school. At Cooper Union, the head of the alumni association says that they tell people that there’s no way to “buy” your way in, and use their son as a case study. He wasn’t admitted to Cooper Union, though they are the schools biggest boosters. Why? He couldn’t draw well enough. Where did he go instead? Yale.
I think Harvard could do a lot for its image (in my eyes at least), by abolishing any advantage for legacies, donors, and “rich” sports. I look forward to seeing the effect of their new scholarship plans. They have a unique opportunity, because, as Dave mentioned they have a hedge fund backing them.
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re: feeder schools. In my highly competitive area of the country, there are public schools that are extremely successful at getting kids into elite schools. There’s a three year waiting list for the SAT prep class in my old town. When I was there, students used to share notes about how to fluff their applications. They compared SAT scores in gym class. They memorized college rankings. The parking lot at the local supermarket is filled with BMWs with college stickers on the rear window.
One point that I thought was interesting in this article was that the Harvard kids may be successful, because they’ve been told that they will be successful. And they may have been given an easier ride (ie, more second chances) than kids at state schools.
When I was teaching at a public city school, I always had a handful of brilliant kids in my class. If they came from different backgrounds, they would be at Harvard and succeeding. I would like to see more of those kids having the same opportunities.
I’m no so concerned with whether or not the Harvard kids are taking risks or really challenging themselves. I am concerned that not enough smart kids are getting those same opportunities. I am concerned with the legacies. I am concerned that state schools are training kids for mid level jobs and the ivies are training their kids to be presidents of hedge funds. I am concerned that Harvard grads live in wealthy towns with feeder schools that assure that their kids get into elite schools. It’s the calcification of the system that bothers me.
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thanks for the list to the feeder schools wendy. interesting that 19 out of 20 of them are in the NE, with one in chicago.
and bj, it makes a lot of sense what you say about setting up the whole opportunity/pressure thing. my instinctive response (seeing as my kid is just 2) is to say “we’ll see who our kid turns out to be and what is right for him”. so if he wants to enroll in contests or whatever, we will get behind him 100% but if he’s not into it we will not push him because “you need to get into a good school”.
but then, both his father & i attended state universities and are very much of the thinking that there are worse things in life than (ZOMG!! HORRORS!!) attending a state school.
but laura’s point about state schools training for mid-level positions vs. ivies schooling for leaders is also an interesting one.
again, this is my west coast perspective, but life doesn’t seem nearly so competitive out here. and so i guess what i’m trying to say is that i can see laura’s point as being an accurate one, in the NE. that attending a state school as opposed to an ivy (or other top tier private) can make for a huge ultimate difference in quality of life. we don’t necessarily see that out here, though, but that may be the difference in our visions of what is possible for our kids.
you know? being a president of a hedge fund is not on our radar. what appears to us to be highly successful is, for example, to be a tenured wildlife biology professor who travels the world doing interesting research projects. and a state university undergrad education wouldn’t necessarily be a hindrance to that sort of goal.
similarly, having a mid-level job at some high-tech firm (that hasn’t been outsourced) can make for a nice lifestyle as well, if one likes to do things like hike/camp/mountain bike on weekends. though what that would buy in NJ would be significantly less enjoyable.
so, out of curiousity, to hear it from others, what specifically do you see being different in the life outcomes for those who attend state schools as opposed to elite private universities? smaller houses in inferior school districtis? boring and/or stressful jobs?
what access is denied? less money to travel, see museums, plays, whatever?
i believe that there are differences; i’m just not able to picture them necessarily.
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Not to be picky, triska… but the University of Illinois Laboratory HS is in Urbana (about 2.5 hours south of Chicago). As resident of Illinois, we like everyone to remember there is a whole state outside of the city.
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On the campus with the historic cornfield right in the middle?
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oops, sorry anita. my mother participated in a medical research program at the university of illinois medical school, which is in chicago, so i assumed all the UofI was there as well. my bad.
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