William Deresiewicz’s claim that elite education stunts your empathy, risk-taking, question-asking, and your general social and intellectual growth has been going around the academic blogs. In general, my take on the essay is that he identifies real issues that should be discussed, but he draws the wrong conclusions about the cause of them, presents weak evidence to back them up, and basically argues his points exceedingly ill and overlooks better points that should have been the focus of such an attack.
One thing that does not seem to have gotten enough attention is that Deresiewicz accuses the entire apparatus of elite education:
Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium.
This is important. He should have gone further with it. Because the problems that he identifies are not coming from spending age 18-21 at an elite school. Some key comments:
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 never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.”
Sir, you were brought up wrong. You need to talk to your parents. I knew all those things before I finished elementary school.
Now, while there is a real issue with class segregation in this country—which Deresiewicz clumsily tries to highlight with his plumber anecdote—elite colleges are doing a much better job of fostering cross-class diversity and engagement than any of the other “feeder” steps in upper-middle-class education, as I detailed at Easily Distracted. Far from college being the place where Deresiewicz learns the inability to talk to the working-class man, it is highly likely to be the first place he ever has a conversation with children from the working class.
Deresiewicz indicts elite educations as a whole. Well, I had an elite education at a peer institution to the Ivy League, and little of what he says applies to what I observed. And he himself suggests a couple of times that liberal arts college might do a better job of overcoming these issues. But stops there. Yet clearly the real question is that if the Ivy is a qualitatively different type of elite education, then what makes it different? The problem is not elitism—Swarthmore, Williams, Amherst, Grinnell, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Smith, Carleton, Middlebury, “25 New Ivies“—-are no less elite than the Ivy League. So what is really driving the problems that Deresiewicz sees?
The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
There is a lot to be said about the entrenched apparatus of corporate recruitment on elite college campuses. Deresiewicz said almost none of it. The little he did say doesn’t sound right to me—-technical fields? My elite small liberal arts college was selling the notion that you could get a Wall Street job with an English major because the corporations recognized that the true value of the education was in the writing and thinking.
Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.
Really? Because the students who know best how to play the system are the ones who have broken it down and analyzed how it works. Sure, the system trains teacher-pleasers. But I don’t think it’s because students don’t know what’s going on.
Deresiewicz finishes:
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.
Well, if Deresiewicz is going to toss out John Kerry and George Bush as support for his point—I give you Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, Princeton graduate.
Round-up
Be sure to read the comments at Ferule & Fescule, where the Cleveland State comparison is attacked and defended.
University Diaries has a nicely comparative approach linking to similar pieces.
Easily Distracted, Planned Obsolescence, Uncertain Principles offer more. The comments at Uncertain Principles are especially rich on what one should say to a plumber.
Just a couple of thoughts, because while I think most of his arguments are sound, I agree that he fails to offer the right evidence or pursue the right paths.
But – I do not think you will meet many of the children of America’s working class at elite colleges of any kind. The “working class” – that second quartile of the American economic structure (20,000-35,000 annual family income) rarely attend four year colleges, and when they do, almost invariably go to “second tier” state universities. Most attend school systems where no Guidance Counselor has ever seen an elite college application. Even in my son’s “college prep” charter high school, the only institutions applied to east of the Appalachians in the four years he was there were Ithaca (where my son applied, was accepted, and refused to go after visiting because he said, “everyone looks and sounds exactly the same”) and one young woman who attended the Naval Academy.
And most evidence I’ve read suggests that elite schools have gotten far more elite economically over the last 20 years, not less.
And – Wendy Kopp? I would view her as the definition of what Deresiewicz is discussing. Elite colonialism which could have come right out of a 19th Century English boarding school is hardly empathy. Wendy Kopp pads the resumes of rich kids while offering poor kids a revolving door of untrained and inexperienced teachers. And she, and her Ivy friends, view this as a positive. Just as I was saying, an inability to observe.
By: Ira Socol on 25 June 2008
at 4:55 pm
I’m not disagreeing with your view of Wendy Kopp or TfA—but you can’t accuse her of not having vision, passion, taking risks, challenging the system, or asking big questions (even if you think her answers are wrong), and I bet she can walk into a ghetto school and chat fine. As WD set up the argument, she knocks it down. An indictment of TfA might have been a much better attack on the Ivy League, but that’s not the attack WD wrote. I didn’t see WD mention either lack of observation or tendency to internal colonialism as a problem of elite education, although the articles linked from University Diaries may bring those issues up.
My far-too-implicit point, though, was that counting notable graduates is a stupid way to argue these issues.
I’m sure that class segregation is very extreme in elite colleges and becoming more so. But that is a systemic issue, entrenched across the US, and elite colleges are consciously working against it. They may be failing, but at least they are enforcing an apparent egalitarianism on campus, while less elite institutions offer cheaper classes if you take them during off peak hours, and let you buy your way into the single-room dorm while poor kids are living in triples in the unrenovated houses. Those schools may have more poor kids statistically, but do you think there is much cross-class intermingling there?
My elite SLAC took kids from affluent feeder schools in the rich suburbs of New Jersey, and assigned them to work-study jobs in the dining hall, serving pasta under the supervision of uneducated cafeteria workers.
By: Dance on 25 June 2008
at 5:30 pm
I agree that there’s no meaningful difference among the Ivies, elite SLACs, and schools like the “New Ivies” (at least when it comes to their students’ social-economic backgrounds and the quality of the faculty/education; I suppose there are differences in campus “personalities”). I went to an Ivy, and I had some genuinely poor friends in college: my roommate grew up in a trailer in rural Maine (her single mother worked night shift at a fish-packing plant). Another close friend was periodically given coats and shoes by the costuming department in the Drama School, where she worked, because her own were often in such bad shape.
But these are not thing you’d have known to look at them, and Deresiewicz also has a point when he talks about the pressure for normalcy — everyone tries to conform, more or less, to the aesthetic of their campus (which may be more preppy or more artsy or whatever, depending on where they are), and everyone inculcates the same values about work, play, study abroad, etc.
Potentially, that’s one of the great things about these kinds of schools, the access that students (ALL students) get to experiences unlike their own. As someone more or less in the middle, socioeconically speaking (adequate but not great public high school out west; on financial aid and work-study), it was really eye-opening having one roommate who worked two campus jobs and one who ordered any old thing she wanted from the J. Crew catalogue (and having all three of us become really close friends).
BUT. I’m not so sure that most schools do a good enough job helping students from less-affluent backgrounds adjust, in the early stages — that’s the problem with the pressure for normalcy. Students from such backgrounds — and heck, even from mine; I felt culturally and intellectually out of step for a while — can feel like they’re the weirdos, and it’s their job to fit in and catch up; at least at my institution I didn’t see a lot of resources geared toward easing that adjustment period.
(Well, okay: another friend did start, freelance, what he referred to as “the 1 bathroom society,” open to kids who had grown up in households with only one bathroom. That was his dividing line between lower-income and middle-class.)
By: Flavia on 26 June 2008
at 12:08 am
Dance: Yes, you are right. Wendy Kopp does have vision. It is Rudyard Kipling’s vision, and while I suspect she can engage in small talk in poor communities I know she doesn’t listen when she’s there (any more than John McCain did on his stroll through that Baghdad marketplace). Whether she takes risks – well that’s the place I most agree with your analysis – there are no real risks for Wendy Kopp, as there are no real risks for George W. Bush – but that’s a family, society, economic system thing, not an Ivy League thing.
Anyway, yes, colonialism – be it GWB’s type or Hillary Clinton’s type – is my complaint. Deresiewicz didn’t tackle that at all. I’m not sure many Ivy grads are capable of seeing that.
As for the stories of poor roommates. Yes, they exist. Just as rich kids show up at “State U.” But the stats say they are rare. And even rarer are those “working class” kids. (It is more likely that you will get into Harvard if your family is below the poverty line than if your family earns between the poverty line and $40,000 a year).
But Flavia’s points are really worth looking at – what are the costs and benefits of the homogeneous campus culture? – is there a way to help those “non-typical” students adjust without becoming even more colonially abusive?
By: Ira Socol on 26 June 2008
at 2:49 am
You know, Kipling gets a bad rap. He was much more a critic of empire than shows in “the white man’s burden”, both the way it was practiced and the ideas behind it.
Flavia, love the idea of the 1-bathroom society. Totally agree that the lower-class students at elite schools are busily trying to blend, (I grew up with two bathrooms but also sometimes gov’t cheese and food stamps, more detail on that here.)
Ira, if we are arguing in favor of a transformative education and human interaction, then the statistics don’t matter. The stories are what count, and every person that exits with a story like Flavia’s is a victory.
Colleges have been doing a lot to help minority/international students adjust for a long time. Expanding those things on a socio-economic basis would be a first easy step, and flow naturally from the changes in affirmative action policies.
By: Dance on 27 June 2008
at 3:33 pm
Absolutely, every story like Flavia’s is a victory. We just need many more. And we also need the real possibility that those from the “1-bathroom-society” (gives a whole new description to my upbringing – which was previously described as “1-bedroom”) can actually impact the culture at an elite campus in a significant way.
And yes, Kipling saw much, and, if I think about it, he could easily have written “White Man’s Burden” to Wendy Kopp – I think I blogged that a month ago.
By: Ira Socol on 27 June 2008
at 9:13 pm