College students hunger (not just for Doritos, apparently)

There is an intense hunger among today's students, my travels in the last few years have shown me, for what college ought to be providing but is not: for a larger sense of purpose and direction; for an experience at school that speaks to them as human beings, not bundles of aptitudes; for guidance in addressing the important questions of life; for simple permission to think about these things and a vocabulary with which to do so.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 73

Colleges and their grads' careers

[C]olleges and universities do nothing to suggest that some ways of using your education are better than others. They do nothing, in other words, to challenge the values of a society that equates virtue, dignity, and happiness with material success.

Nor do they do much to help kids find their way to alternative careers. . . .

Selling your students to the highest bidder: it doesn't get more cynical than that. But though the process isn't often that direct, that's basically the way the system works. As a friend of mind, a third-generation Yalie, once remarked, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 71

U.S. News panic

In the spirit of the SATs, in fact, we might propose the following analogy. U.S. News rank : schools : : SAT score : students. Each is dubious as a measure of academic excellence and meaningless as a standard of self-worth, but both have consequences serious enough to send their subjects into a state of panic.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 68

Students as customers

[T]he worst effect of the commercialization of higher education is the way that it has changed how institutions see their students. Now they think of them as "customers," people to be pandered to instead of challenged.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 69

Liberal arts vs. research university

The foundational compromise of modern American higher education—the idea of housing a liberal arts college within a research university‐have provided to be untenable. Because a single faculty exists for both, and because professors are trained and rewarded for research, the values of the university have inexorably won out over those of the college.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), pp. 62

Universities have forgotten larger educational role

Universities, writes Harry R. Lewis, the former Harvard dean, "have forgotten their larger educational role for college students": to help them figure out who they are and what their purpose in the world should be.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 60

How college admissions system builds cynicism

Beyond the junior careerism, the directionless ambition, the risk aversion, and the Hobbesian competitiveness, the [college admissions] system cultivates a monumental cynicism. Whatever the motives out of which they were established, the old WASP admissions criteria actually meant something. Athletics were thought to build character—courage and selflessness and team spirit. The arts embodied an ideal of culture. Service was designed to foster a public-minded ethos in our future leaders. Leadership itself was understood to be a form of duty. Now it's all become a kind of rain dance that is handed down from generation to generation, an empty set of rituals known only to propitiate the gods. Kids do them because they know that they're supposed to, not because they, or anybody else, actually believes in them. . . . The process takes activities that used to be ends in themselves and reduces them to means. . . .

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.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), pp. 56-57

Education without education

Teachers are trapped in the system, as well, as one of them told me. A veteran of many years, she has watched her institution [an elite high school] evolve in the direction of a customer-service mentality: give the parents what they want, no matter what's good for the kids. Don't challenge them intellectually, don't encourage them to engage the material, don't even try to insist on academic rigor.

That may be the most damning thing about these schools, so full of smart teachers teaching the smart children of smart parents: that they finally don't care about learning at all. . . . Everybody wants their child to get an education, but nobody wants them to get an education education.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 49

Elite but unhappy

It comes to this: the elite have purchased self-perpetuation at the price of their children's happiness. The more hoops kids have to jump through, the more it costs to get them through them and the fewer families can do it. But the more they have to jump through, the more miserable they are.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), p. 241

Opportunities opened and shut

Our glittering system of elite higher education: students kill themselves getting into it, parents kill themselves to pay for it, and always for the opportunities it opens up. But what of all the opportunities it closes down—not for any practical reason, but just because of how it smothers you with expectations? How can I become a teacher, or a minister, or a carpenter? Wouldn't that be a waste of my fancy education? What would my parents think? What would my friends think? How would I face my classmates at our twentieth reunion, when they're all rich doctors or important people in New York? And the question that exists behind them all: isn't it beneath me? So an entire world of possibilities shuts, and you miss your true calling. 

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), pp. 24-25