Read the whole thing. It's long, but compelling.
I should say that this subject is very personal for me. Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth -- success. What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one -- all this was off the table. It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League -- college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, 10 years on the faculty at Yale -- that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.
Dismantle it? Not with our current crop of Congress Critters.
This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it's supposed to lead.
He says that like it's a bad thing! And who says they are "supposed to" lead us peons?
The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be.
And yet, the Smartest Man in the Room managed to get in. And out.
The major reason is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children's way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (enrichment programs, to use the all-too-perfect term) -- most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools.
And in the case of our current Secretary of State, Military "service".
The problem isn't that there aren't more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students' economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can't afford to -- they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base -- and it's not even clear that they'd want to.
And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming out of touch and entitled?
Get off the government dole?
I don't have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of service, and not in the spirit of making an effort, either -- swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to "buy them a coffee," as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to "ask them about themselves."
Just another chore for the enlightened - to interact with their inferiors.
Instead of service, how about service work? That'll really give you insight into other people. How about waiting tables so that you can see how hard it is, physically and mentally? You really aren't as smart as everyone has been telling you; you're only smarter in a certain way.
The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth.
The changes must go deeper, though, than reforming the admissions process. The problem is the Ivy League itself. We have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act for the common good, they will always place their interests first. The arrangement is great for the schools, but is Harvard's desire for alumni donations a sufficient reason to perpetuate the class system?
I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. I've come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don't have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.
Perhaps the Ivy-League educated author forgets that not everyone needs or wants a collage education?
William Deresiewicz is the author of "Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life", coming out Aug. 19. He taught at Yale from 1998 to 2008. He is also the winner of the Dallas Institute. A longer version of this essay was originally published in The New Republic. |