It’s mid-August, school hasn’t yet started, and recruiting season is already underway - my LinkedIn feed is already full of posts from McKinsey consultants alerting everyone to coffee chats and on-campus events from Monday through Friday next week (interestingly, school starts on Wednesday). Like any aspiring management consultant, I was looking for practice cases to run with other hopefuls, and among a folder of hundreds on hundreds of mock cases, I found a PDF of this article by William Deresiewicz.

I haven’t read too many things lately of that length (it’s about nine pages) that made me think as much as that. Perhaps the “Disadvantages” of an elite education isn’t an accurate title - "The Privilege” might fit better - but then again the word privilege gets (in my opinion) so often attached to the word “white” that it lost its socio-economic core definition long ago (for me, at least).

I’d almost recommend skipping the first three paragraphs, because I don’t think they’re all that important. I love the phrase “Ivy Retardation,” though I’d use it differently than the author or his friend would. Rather, I’d jump right to paragraph 5, which really hits home Deresiewicz’s point that “an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth”. Indeed, it makes me reflect on the insane level of narcissism and ego I carried in high school (it’s still largely there, though less so):

We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright… (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.)

Ever since I heard about them, BHP and Plan II were supposed to be top-dog programs. The first comparison I heard from the BHP Faculty Director, Dr. Robert Prentice, was to Wharton. Plan II, according to some exorbitantly-wealthy investment-banker-type I had chatted with when I was 16, was an amazing education, one that’d be valuable in the future for my then-aspirations to Wall Street. I had received the “best and brightest” message my entire life; I still do. Though I’d hope that I never descended to actively thinking about how others weren’t, I’d imagine I did so in the past. Hell, I tell people I go to school in Austin (as if UT Austin is the paragon of prestige - I still assert that it’s the best university within 1000 miles, even above Rice, but that’s for another post).

The most personally important point (in a shaping-your-character kind of way) to me is in paragraphs 5 and 6:

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.” …however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic… social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

This is a particularly interesting lesson that I know, but haven’t fully learned. In other words, it makes sense on paper, but I don’t really live my life having fully comprehended it. One of the people I respect the most never went to college, though I’d wager he’s wiser and more admirable than 99% of people with a degree (he certainly makes a better Cowboy Casserole). On the other hand, there are some truly narrowly-excellent (what a euphemism!) people, especially in EE. They can shock you with their ability to analyze a circuit diagram or write some clever algorithm, but are otherwise devoid of social/emotional intelligence (and I too am probably much more narrowly-excellent than I realize).

Deresiewicz closes out his argument on a false sense of self-worth as follows. I’ve added the emphasis. For some reason, this hit particularly home.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more.

Deresiewicz’s next point is why I believe the article is more about the privilege, rather than the disadvantages, of an elite education.

Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

Now that it’s mentioned, I can recall the number of second-chances I’ve received - even without asking. My freshman year, I was late on some deadline for some semester-long project. The TA told us (without asking, I believe) that we could get 80% credit if we wanted. This past semester, I accidentally sent an older version of an essay to my psychology professor. She knew because she had already read over the draft, and informed me about the potential mistake I had made. I ended up with a 97 instead of what probably would have been a high C. I decided to not do my last project for my software class since I already had a guaranteed A. Somehow, during the course of office hours, the professor told me that I could get half credit if I just did it before the end of the semester.

More damning than the second chances is grade inflation. I recall my high school philosophy teacher complaining about it, and all we’d do is mock him for it. But the BHP curve is real (I believe the average GPA is roughly 3.6), as in Plan II (I got an A in my World Literature class that I didn’t deserve). I remember my Circuit Theory professor tell the class happily that he was feeling generous and would likely curve the class to a 2.7 and being dazed. I got a B+ in Organizational Behavior and felt as if some great injustice had been committed to drop my GPA by 0.02.

Indeed, the core of educational privilege is that

[t]he elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out… For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab… as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club.

This article was written in June 2008. If it were written just a few months later, perhaps we wouldn’t be talking about Ken Lay.

Finally, I wanted to talk about something unrelated to elitism and privilege, a lack of intellectual pilgrims.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade… I’ve had many wonderful students... But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul.

I’d like to think that for the most part, I’ve been a pilgrim. In fact, I think I can safely say that adding engineering midway through your college career is solid evidence that I am, at least to some extent. However, I’d wager that many people aren’t. I recall going to office hours regularly for my marketing and MIS professors to just talk. Not about school, not about the next assignment - solely to pick the brains of my professors. Throughout the course of those conversations, I’d like to think I gathered an amount of respect from my professors for trying to actually learn about things, and not just focusing on the grades or the assignment all the time (it certainly did happen). Similarly, I feel that most people who enter office hours do so with transactional intent - they want to receive help and leave. I’ve always wondered what it felt like from the professor’s point of view to have that happen - to see your students walk in, probe slightly-too-bluntly to figure out their problem, and then just leave until the next assignment rolls around (I’d imagine it’s somewhat depressing).

There are many parts of Deresiewicz’s article that I didn’t discuss. I certainly don’t love everything about it - the tone seems remarkably arrogant in parts, and some points I just didn’t want to discuss for brevity purposes (as if this article isn’t already about 1500 words). Nevertheless, I found it incredibly thought-provoking. I hope you did too.