I don’t know that William Deresiewicz really made the case that Ivy League schools are overrated, but he did raise a lot of interesting issues. Having grown up in Princeton, I can be a little sensitive about how Ivy Leaguers are perceived, but I know them first hand and I know all about entitled little shits. Back in the 1980’s when I was cavorting around Princeton’s campus and socializing with the student body, things were not quite as competitive as they are today. But they were competitive enough.
One thing that happens to you when you come from an Ivy League town is that you get to hear anecdotes from people who are not from Ivy League towns. The most common anecdote we are treated to is about the Ivy League guy they knew at work who was totally incompetent at his job. I have heard this anecdote hundreds of times. It may be that the Ivy League produces legions of incompetents, but I don’t think so. I think people expect Ivy Leaguers to be superhuman, and when they’re average people judge them harshly.
Today’s Ivy Leaguers are all super-achievers, not only in their grades and test scores, but in their extracurricular activities. They all have an absurd work ethic. At least until they arrive on campus, they’ve racked up an unblemished string of successes. These people are exceptionally bright. But they’ve also had every advantage. They’ve gone to the best schools, gotten the best tutors, and been sent around the globe to gain experiences and do “good works” that will pad their applications. Most of them are well-rounded, but I don’t think we should expect most of them to be well-adjusted. Mostly, they’re basket cases who are terrified of failure. They’re also so goal-oriented that they can become unglued if no one is pointing them to the next goal. And maybe there aren’t enough different goals. Med School, Law School, a job in finance. Beyond that, what?
These schools are self-consciously trying to educate the people who they expect to be the leaders of the country, but only the highest classes have the resources to invest in their kids that will win them entry.
I am very aware of what I’d have to do if I want my four year old son to go to an Ivy League school, and I would consider it a form of torture to inflict that kind of regimen on him. Can you go to Michigan State and still be a leader in this country?
You can, but it’s harder. Take a look sometime at where the people who serve in the Obama administration went to school. There aren’t a whole lot of public university degrees in the bunch, and those are likely to be elite schools like Cal-Berkeley, Virginia, or Michigan.
Mr. Deresiewicz has some good suggestions for how to make the admissions process better at our elite private universities. Probably the best suggestion for our kid’s sake is to limit how many extracurriculars you can list. If kids know they can’t list more than five, they won’t feel so pressured to do a million things and they might have some time to just be kids once in a while.
IF you can run a sub 4.6″ 40 in pads, why, yes.
Only if you’re a lineman at that speed.
I sort of automatically think in those terms. I’m 6’3.5″, and way too many lbs.
Only kidding. Sub-4.6 is pretty solid.
(For a lineman, it’d be insane.)
I’ve not met any who were incompetent. The problem is that, while all very bright, many of them — not all (I’ve met many who were fantastic) — are robots. There’s a bit of the old Book Smarts vs Street Smarts thing to it in many cases.
It’s not just an Ivy League thing. I saw it with kids from elite schools from all over when I worked in DC. I met kids from China and India when I was in grad school in Britain who could do math I’ll never be able to do. None of the Chinese and Indian kids could explain the ISLM model or discuss why Real Business Cycle theory was stupid.
Figuring out how to do the math is great. But the math is just there to tell a story, and to allow you to see if the story makes any sense.
None of this is to bash the Ivy League. A guy or gal who can do absurd things with math or computers and just needs a little direction can be incredibly valuable. But if choosing between hiring a Michigan guy and a Harvard guy, the odds are better than 50/50 the Michigan guy is going to come off as the better candidate.
There are folks in the Obama administration with public university educations — a friend of mine is a New Mexico State grad (not exactly thought of as an academic powerhouse) — but you’re right that it’s harder. And that’s a shame.
It should change. Being able to put together a laundry list of extracurricular activities isn’t in keeping with the spirit of that section of an application. I’m fine with taking extracurricular stuff into account, because they’re looking for well-rounded, interesting kids with big dreams. But instead they’re getting zombies who’ve no identities or interests, because they’ve been buried in the insane rat race by their idiot parents.
I wouldn’t mind the money that would come from an elite school on my resume. But, all things considered, I’m happy with my dumb football school.
Plus, how many national championships has Princeton won lately? 😉
Can you go to Michigan State and still be a leader in this country?
Never mind. I forgot for a second that you’re a fan of Big Blue and not the Iggles.
In some lines of work, yes.
But it is interesting to me the pattern of hiring by geographical proximity. If an Ivy Leaguer wanted to work for a small corporation in Mississippi unless he or she were from Mississippi they likely would be ruled out. And even if brilliant, they would have a major culture shock. It can and has been done and has resulted in some great analytical books. North Carolina-base employers still tend to go to Duke, UNC, and NC State first. South Carolina-based employers go to Clemson or USC depending on the employer’s own loyalty. And so on.
The Ivy League schools have opportunities in the transnational organizational world. Successful Ivy Leaguers tend to be great at sipping information from a fire hose. Academically, that more than anything else is what the experience does. No education can teach you how to make good judgements. Or behave ethically. Or have compassion. So the institutions should not be faulted for that.
The assumption of privilege for the very fact of having gone to an Ivy League school is by far the most debilitating handicap of that sort of education. And the most obnoxious trait for others dealing with Ivy Leaguers.
“No education can teach you how to make good judgements. Or behave ethically. Or have compassion. So the institutions should not be faulted for that.”
That’s kind of the definition of a liberal arts education. 😉
And I happened to get and use one from a dip shit regional state school who took me because I had a HS diploma and a pulse.
They graduated me rather than throw me out at the first chance because I did the work and got the grades.
My life is more than half over and I never felt professionally or personally disadvantaged in settings when I had to work with Ivies. They are no more or less prone to screw up or to personal defects than anyone else IMO.
Who does an honest-to-goodness liberal arts education anymore? A two-year core curriculum and then on to the professional training major or, more accurately, pre-major.
I’m not sure that the drink-from-a-firehose syllabuses in more comptetitive universities lend to ethical or judgemental reflection.
Where you get your education does not tend to be a predictor of professional or personal success or failure. How willing you are to seek out your own education using college and your surroundings there as means seems to me to be more important than anything else.
A self-motivated individual can get a liberal arts education from the book sections of most thrift stores for that matter. More than one of these folks can add to this education by creating their own seminars.
What schools like Ivies do for the large amount of money is provide a social network into the elite if you can use it and stamp your ticket as Ivy. And if you are lucky, you get to hobnob with some brilliant scholars to the extent that their globetrotting schedules, willingness to teach undergraduates, and the size of their classes permit.
I’ll tell you this. For a variety of weird reasons, I wound up going to Western Michigan University, which is pretty much a school that takes anyone with a pulse. Meanwhile, some of my closest friends were going to Ivies, Cal, second-tiers like Middlebury, etc.
I usually had done all my reading by the end of the first month of the semester and spent my time reading unassigned material, mostly history, Russian lit, and philosophy. I was basically trained and acculturated to drink from the firehose but I went to a school that made no demands on my intellect. When I saw what my friends had to read I was part envious and part grateful. I was envious that they were being challenged, but I was still kind of grateful that I didn’t need to do that much work.
I made a few good friends at that school, but it wasn’t an intellectually stimulating place for me at all. I actually took Ancient Greek because at least it was difficult and it attracted the smartest and most driven kids.
One of the things I miss about Princeton is just being around intellectually curious people who are whip-smart. There’s a whole banter to it. It’s a competitive sport that’s just fun for the brain. I got that a little but when I was a regular at the Philly Chapter of Drinking Liberally, which was basically a salon for political writers and editors. We enjoyed each other’s company so much specifically because we were very smart and very well-informed.
But, the thing is, you can’t just stay in that comfort zone, because it is a very privileged thing. The world is not like that. You’ve got to go out and discover the world as it is or you can’t really understand why things are the way they are. I learned a lot by hanging out with folks from Kalamazoo, and I learned even more by working in our inner cities. One of the main things I learned is humility. I also learned that intellectual banter is fun but it doesn’t do a damn thing to improve the world unless it is specifically applied to that purpose.
The Ivies are more diverse these days, but not by class. They’re richer now than they were after the reforms of the 1960’s. And so there’s a bubble of privilege that really amounts to a blind spot in their education. There’s a couple ways to go about trying to fix that, both from the admissions end and from the exposure to different stuff end.
there’s another side to intellectual endeavor, however and the same intellectual challenge and reasoning that you create on Bootrib can be found in the academic setting whether for students, especially in a seminar setting, or for faculty with challenging analysis of their work by peers. True one can acquire knowledge from reading the books, but to grow intellectually requires dialog partners to whom one listens, whom one allows lor is forced to allow[ to correct one, and leaning to express ones thoughts in writing. I have had the joy of learning and teaching in such environments and it’s not the banter, it’s a development of creative and constructive understanding of “the real” as it were. and developing the craft to communicate. why else do you think the .1% ers want to exclude? Boo, I’m pretty sure that if you hadn’t graduated from probably the best public school in the country, you wouldn’t have gotten what you did out of a college that didn’t challenge you. The problem with most colleges now and the Ivies are an extreme case, students are so driven to career development they don’t have time for intellectual development, for questioning, not knowing, puzzling over, rethinking, that is the exciting and creative side of the intellect.
Looking back, the Princeton Regional School system sucked in a lot of ways. But what made it so outstanding was something totally separate from the decisions made by the administrators. It was just the intelligence of the kids. You don’t have any idea that 99.9% of the world isn’t like where you are growing up. What I learned, I learned just by osmosis. I was around brilliant people, all the time.
Probably my best friend growing up was the son of the co-chair of the English Department at Princeton. And I remember going over to his house early on when we had just met and playing some kind of trivia game with him and some other professors’ kids. I was terrible. I knew nothing. I was humiliated.
But I internalized that I needed to know this stuff. I couldn’t be a dumbass. What mattered is that you weren’t an ignorant fuck who didn’t know anything.
Later on, I think I surpassed all those kids in terms of the breadth of my knowledge and I would crush them in any meaningful trivia game today. But I never would have been motivated to learn without that kind of experience.
But what’s knowing trivia, really? Being able to best your friends in a battle of knowledge or wits isn’t really that valuable. I actually have three friends who have appeared on Jeopardy. None of them won, and maybe I wouldn’t win either. But I wouldn’t want to oppose me.
What I eventually learned is that knowledge has to be for something. I also learned that the world revolves around politics and the eggheads never win. The arena that matters isn’t the one with the Ivory Towers.
it’s not the trivia, it’s what you did learn, the importance of breadth of knowledge, the analysis, and the intellectual dialog that allows you to learn from substantial critique of your positions and from history, listening to the counter arguments. and yes, it is “for” something, for the deepening of human understanding of the world and our place in it. there’s a reason this blog is different from most others I read, and it’s along the lines of some professional blogs and that is your approach together with the seminar type commentariat. I believed the “ivory tower” through the beginning of my masters program, spent a lot of my time working on issues at the school, then I recall being overwhelmed the first months of study at the next level in work in a seminar with a very creative philosopher, saying to myself “what is this ivory tower crap ppl have been feeding me? this is where it’s happening”; the trivia, the “ivory tower” cliche is a way of turning away intellectually creative ppl.
I guess my problem is that I don’t really believe that much is happening in academia outside of the sciences. Individuals have their lives enriched, sure, but academia has shockingly little influence over public policy except in technology, where corporations are actually more influential.
I studied philosophy and history, and I am grateful for what I learned, but none of our discussions accomplished anything for anyone other than ourselves. Now, some of us went out into the world and tried to improve it, and our education guided us. But we didn’t start making a difference until we dropped the theoretical and started organizing.
If you want to know why I am hostile to “framing” for example, it’s because I concluded that you aren’t going to get anywhere by playing the egghead game. You’ve got to talk to actual people on their level and get them to work with you on tangible goals.
What the Obama campaign understood at the deepest level is that you don’t gather your electorate, you create it.
Let me think about examples
yes, I’ve studied and taught in both Ivies and non-Ivies. it’s a problem when students are so locked in to a world view they can’t learn to see things differently from how they always have seen things. both their background and the nature of the academic institution play a role in that.
I have a son with a full boat Masters/Doctoral scholarship at an Ivy League school. Tarheel, you are on a run. The following sentence absolutely pins his take on what is happening here.
He could have gone elsewhere…less tension, essentially the same educational possibilities and work experience in his field…but he realized that the dues he paid to go Ivy would set him up to to do better work at higher pay once he made it through, so he took the challenge. (He’s in the environmental/biological sciences.) As regular as clockwork I get half-yearly calls from him, pissed off by the jive hype with which he has to deal inside the system and threatening to leave and take his skills…already quite saleable…out into the real world. But then he reconsiders and buckles down again. Almost through, he’s a more patient man than I will ever be.
“Are the Ivy Leagues Really So Bad?” is the question.
The answer:
Not if you use them well. If you just dive in as an entitled wiseass and play the game? Yeah. They’re hellish. But almost all of his departmental allies are from other countries. Lots of UK people, lots of Latin Americans and quite a few Asians and Canadians as well. There for the work, not the hype. Bet on it.
AG
I’ve met two M.I.T. grads when I was with International Harvester. One was applying for a computing job. He felt he should be a manager because he came from MIT. Honestly! Not a day of experience but he thought he should be a manger because he came from a snoot school. Our management fell all over him drooling. It was our custom to take applicants out to lunch at a nice restaurant (OK, right now, you know this was the early ’80s). We took this guy to IHOP. When our boss asked in a horrified voice why we did that, Dave, the senior man, answered, “I thought that was all he deserved.”
The second guy, Joel, was an IH employee. The first time I saw him he had his bare feet propped up on a drafting board. Joel looked like a stereotype hippie with a beard, ragged jeans and bare feet. IH was a buttoned down place and Joel was continually in trouble about appearance and going on the shop floor in bare feet (a safety violation). He was a first class engineer and a great gut. Eventually he was fired for being too unconventional. When everyone else was afraid to be seen with him, I was one of the few who was in attendance in the bull pen as he played “The working at Harvester Blues” on a guitar. As we shook hands good bye, I said to him, “You know, when I first saw you with that beard and bare feet, I never thought we would be friends.” He told me, “You know, when I first saw you, with that pin stripe suit, military shoes and crew cut, I never thought we would be friends, either.”
So, a sample of two. One an arrogant asshole, the other an extremely competent nice guy. I still bet the assholes predominate.
I went to public high school, had absolutely zero tutoring (my SAT prep consisted of me taking 14 old SAT exams on my own time), came from a family that was solidly middle class, and I made it to an Ivy League school (Penn).
Yes, I probably got a lucky somewhere along the way – I was deferred and accepted in regular admission (extremely rare for that to happen) – but I still firmly believe that if you have a good head on your shoulders and a good work ethic, you can make it without so many of the advantages that others probably came in with.
Perhaps we should consider that they may not be so good.
Warren Court:
Earl Warren
UC Berkeley
Boalt Hall
Hugo Black:
Ashland College
The Birmingham Medical College
University of Alabama School of Law
Stanley Forman Reed
RKentucky Wesleyan College B.A.
Yale University asecond B.A.
University of Virginia and Columbia University, law but did not obtain a law degree.
Felix Frankfurter
City College of New York
Harvard Law
William O Douglas
Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington
Columbia Law
Robert H Jackson
no college
Albany Law School – one year
Tom C Clark
University of Texas Law School
John Marshall Harlan II (conservative wing)
Princeton
NY Law School
William J Brennan
Wharton School – Univ Pennsylvania
Harvard Law
Potter Stewart (conservative wing)
Yale
Yale Law
Byron White
University of Colorado – Boulder
Yale Law
Abe Fortas
Rhodes College – Memphis
Yale Law
Thurgood Marshall
Lincoln University
Howard University – law
undergrad doesn’t matter so much from a substance standpoint. the top 5% from pretty much anywhere will get recruited by the top grad schools.
grad school is where you see differences across programs. and at the top schools, between the my-dad-was-famous, and those top-5%-from-anywhere’s.
Let’s not buy too heavily into stereotypes about Ivy League student bodies, ok?
I grew up on a dairy farm, attended a public high school with 200 students total, and then attended Harvard (class of ’02). Many of my classmates were far more privileged than me, in one way or another, but it is not impossible for people who lack such advantages to get in through sheer hard work and determination, plus a little luck (at least it wasn’t as of 12 years ago).
I will say, though, that regional considerations probably worked in my favor – I think it is relatively easier for a strong student from a rural state to gain entry to the Ivy Leagues than one from, say New York, where strong students from private schools are a dime a dozen (in which case you really would need vast quantities of extracurriculars and other activities to stand out). So, the possibility of having a somewhat normal life and getting into the Ivy Leagues still exists, provided you grow up somewhere like Wisconsin, Wyoming, etc.
Incompetents? No. But arrogant assholes? By the boatload.
That’s not to say that arrogant assholes don’t come from Podunk State U, or that every Ivy-grad is an arrogant asshole, but the distribution is skewed that way.
The “arrogant asshole” attitude is “all you NON-Ivy types are incompetent, as I will show you!” which is often followed by more or less hilarious/disastrous failure.
I had the opportunity to attend a big Ivy but chose Oberlin. I thought it had a much better learning environment. At the time the playing field for entry was much more level than it is today. This was the year before Reagan slashed the BEOG (later Pell) grants, the NDSLs, and gutted the GSL program. In addition, this was before wealthy parents learned to game the system by enrolling their kids in full semester SAT-test-taking classes and before SATs were revised to include a lot of material that isn’t readily available in average and poorer high schools. Well, for that matter, this was before funding of moderate and poorer high schools was slashed so much that many topics important for SATs just aren’t covered.
Now that I’ve spent decades as a high tech manager, with all the hiring and promoting that I’ve seen, and I have my own high school-aged and college-aged kids, I have a different viewpoint. First, hiring firms and managers put a lot more weight (now versus the early 1980s) on where you went to school – not just in your first job or in your first two years after school but forever. Too often they look at just a few bullet points – where you worked, your job titles, and your school(s). This is the same bullet point list that is used to describe management teams in intra-company and inter-company slide presentations – it has to be impressive. Western Michigan ain’t going to cut it for the really good jobs, and in many cases probably not Oberlin either. Now, you can fix this problem by getting a grad degree from a big name school. If you get your MBA part time from U of Chicago you can stop saying you went to Western Michigan or Oberlin. (This is partly the attraction of those “executive MBAs”, which give you a degree in a shorter period of time with less learning, by the way.) But the school you choose will, depending on your career choice, impact your hiring and promotion opportunities basically for your entire career.
The second point is that the behavior I describe in the first point wasn’t really valid for choosing the best people for a job back in the 1980s and is even much less valid now. That’s because it is now much much harder to get into – and, importantly, pay for – the Ivyies now for non-privileged kids than it was back then. In the 1970s I just applied and assumed that any school that wanted me would work with me to get my bills paid, and they did. I left school with $12,500 in total school debt – today that won’t pay room and board for one year at many schools. It still wasn’t an ideal system, as having to work 10-15 hours/week in food service-type jobs and work 60 hours/week in summer jobs mean that the kids who had parents paying for everything had more time to study and opportunities for unpaid internships over the summer, but today the inequalities are far, far greater.
Which means that your typical Stanford or MIT grad is still probably smart (but not guaranteed so – lots of legacy admissions there) but if you are hiring for ability and not for a bullet point on the slide to impress people with your manager’s pedigree you are almost certainly better off looking at people from lesser schools. That’s because there are a lot of them out there from places like Grand Valley State or Southern Illinois University who might have gone to a Brown or Swathmore decades ago, but due to the inegalitarian system we have today chose a school they could afford. These people won’t have such high salary demands and won’t have expectations of their rightful place in the hierarchy.
Now, what about in terms of the actual education itself? For that I go back to my original assessment in the 1970s. From what my friends reported back to me at the time, all the top schools throw tons of work at you. The differences were in terms of how much they focused on teaching the students versus other activities (research, PR, fund-raising, etc.). This could be measured in terms of quality of staff, percentage of time devoted to teaching, quality of the student body, quality of facilities, etc. On that topic the quality of the education seemed to vary greatly from institution to institution and even between departments within the same institution. I don’t think you can generalize about all the Ivyies on that topic any more than you could, say, say all Big 10 schools are the same with regards to education quality.
There’s a reason Obama has paid attention to the student loan situation. As far as a great education goes, there are plenty of small liberal arts colleges that are great, and community college for the first two years also works well – there’s a reason Obama has emphasized that strategy and building the community college system. same as in your example – community colleges have excellent teachers and you list the school where you complete the 4 years on your cv. And, since we’re on the topic of education, everyone should read Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery for a view from ppl who recognized and acted on the importance of education.
My brother Phil, my father, my mother, my grandfather, and one of my great uncles are all Oberlin graduates. If my brother Andrew hadn’t broken the spell, I might have wound up there, too.
Wow. Obies are known for marrying each other and for legacies (only at Oberlin legacies still have to qualify and there is no expectation of big payment from the parents).
I don’t expect any of my kids to go there, but suddenly my Asperger’s harpist daughter is getting rave reviews for her play and has started making inquiries. No idea how I’d pay for it, however.