Why ivy leagues are overrated

I, Jeannie, believe strongly that parents can help their children sidestep this pitfall by helping them to develop career goal very early on. 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. 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. Something to think about. Deresiewicz strongly suggests that high school kids should do less and be more. There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks.

Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for? The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance. Learning how to think is only the beginning, though.

The notion may sound strange. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.

College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted. Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.

Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect. What an indictment of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word. At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no?

Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. The result is higher marks for shoddier work. Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify.

A whole day! Why is it that people feel the need to go to places like Guatemala to do their projects of rescue or documentation, instead of Milwaukee or Arkansas?

When students do stay in the States, why is it that so many head for New Orleans? How about just doing good? To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society. But what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top.

Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. As of , about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell.

Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science.

Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next. For the most selective colleges, this system is working very well indeed. Application numbers continue to swell, endowments are robust, tuition hikes bring ritual complaints but no decline in business. Whether it is working for anyone else is a different question.

It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all. But diversity of sex and race has become a cover for increasing economic resegregation.

Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy. The truth is that the meritocracy was never more than partial. Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

Marketplace recently did an investigation into teacher pay practices. Some jobs not only require a degree, but a degree from the right university. Go to Harvard , Yale , Princeton , or maybe Stanford.

No one cares about those places. Better to graduate with 3. What areas should require specific credentials, degrees and licenses? And what areas should actual knowledge and skill count for more than the piece of paper you obtained at 22? Have you been held back because, even though you had the knowledge, you lacked the paper? This post originally appeared at Bnet.

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