You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. Instead of service, how about service work?
How about waiting tables so that you can see how hard it is, physically and mentally? There are smart people who do not go to a prestigious college, or to any college—often precisely for reasons of class. But there are options. There are still very good public universities in every region of the country.
The education is often impersonal, but the student body is usually genuinely diverse in terms of socioeconomic background, with all of the invaluable experiential learning that implies. News and World Report supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top 20 universities, the number is usually above 90 percent. Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill.
Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive. If there is anywhere that college is still college—anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place—it is the liberal arts college.
The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others. Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values. Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else.
The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to plot our exit to another kind of society altogether.
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. 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. Of course, they have to stop cooperating with U.
More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. Selecting students by GPA or the number of extracurriculars more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind. 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. I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. High-quality public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all: the exact commitment that drove the growth of public higher education in the postwar years.
Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them—you know, the American dream. Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides.
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Rank: Almost Human 6, I provide clear, step-by-step instructions on how to do this in chapter 13 of my book. What gets you into an an elite institution these days?
Is it brains or work ethic or high levels of gifted creativity? In , 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution.
By , it was 55 percent. As of , 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 public institutions are not much better than private ones. 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. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely.
Today, fewer than half of high-scoring students from low-income families even enroll at four-year schools. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
Dishearteningly, Harvard has quietly instituted policy that makes debt-free college harder to achieve for Harvard students and their families. According to official policy posted here , Harvard is now refusing to accept 12 CLEP credits toward an undergraduate degree as it has in the past. There are thousands and thousands of excellent private and public colleges nationwide that are happy to grant credit for college level work done in high school.
I provide extensive detail about this here. Deresiewicz suggests that parents encourage their kids to stay away from the colleges that attract all the smartest high school kids. Do you have a niche, in-demand skill like social media marketing or programming? These skills are not taught exclusively at the Ivy Leagues or UC schools. All you need to access these skills, or whatever you want to know or be able to do, is to be engaged in your learning.
When you make an effort, the dividends pay off wherever you are. At the end of the day, the quality of education you receive as a college student is dependent on you, not the institution you attend.
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