The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life (2014)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Replace kids with founders and it's still just as true. Coincidentally, many Ivy League grads end up starting startups.
But it passed away after I got out of the building and talked to other founders, they are in a worse situation :P
As a person from the third-world who went to the Ivy League, I am also scornful of America's culture of self-congratulation. When I went to Dartmouth, I remember one of the first things during our orientation was a senior faculty member giving a speech to us telling us all great we all were to be here, how selectively we've been chosen, and all that. I went there to learn, not to learn how cool I am. What rubbish.
There's a veneer of truth in your dig, but ultimately I had very little actual decision making power. Folks fitting your description were there to review applications and summarize them for higher-ups in the org, the deans. When I was there, their main skill was in identifying applicants who fit the admission criteria defined and redefined annually by the Trustees and Faculty of the University. You can make an argument that those people might be looking for the wrong things, but it does sort of upend your point.
Ivy's and Oxbridge are more about forming networks for later life - just as public(UK)/Private(USA) school is.
And cultures that fetishize STEM careers have just as many problems - how many kids have been destroyed by tiger parenting or pushed into careers they don't like or have aptitude for.
My oldest just graduated with a degree in sociology which is not one of the most employable degrees for an undergraduate. She is working part time in a library and living at home. She was meant to be a librarian and all that know her, know that about her. She has to be get a Masters of Library Science to be a librarian. She will have to put in two or so years at the library she works at to go full time without the MLS. So she stays with us and puts in the time. The good news is that she knows what she wants to do the rest of her life and to be severely dyslexic and be in a library is just awesome. Her mom and I are fine with her living at home till she can be full time since she is a saver and is responsible.
And as a person that has had mostly STEM related careers that I have loved, my youngest seems to be moving towards mechanical engineering next year. I love this about her as it warms my STEM heart.
Most important is that both seem to have found their passions. If you love your work you will likely be in the flow some and who can ask for more than that out of a career. After building several businesses my current employment gives me the opportunity to do what I love (programming and systems integration) and be in the flow. I could not be happier at work and I want that for my kids. Passion alignment is a great thing.
EDIT: And my youngest has some graphic design and art talent which I am sure will help her be a better design engineer. She was in doubt in high school if she should juggle the art and design classes along with her tech speciality center IT classes. We supported the extra work simply for the benefit of her love for creating art and design.
Seconded. Your comment brought me back to having a moment of extreme cringe about when you remember randomly something your older self realize was incredibly immature or stupid when you are in middle school (e.g., "lying to show off to peers on the school bus and thinking you got away with it when it was obvious to everyone else and even yourself now how stupid you were").
I bought completely into the whole "liberal arts" marketing sold by "elite" American college brochures and hung onto the words of admissions officers during tours as they were the gatekeepers of "knowledge" and "enlightenment"; now I realize I was hoodwinked and looked so stupid like I was trying to look cool with Abercrombie & Fitch in middle school.
Fast forward 12 years later, now that people whose personal life and flaws I am aware of now have taken posts as diversity officers and admissions officers; I realize what a sham everything is. Not to say that everyone in college admissions is pretentious and superficial but how it's like the marketing dept of a major corporation trying to increase their conversion rate.
>I am also scornful of America's culture of self-congratulation
Yes unfortunately it never ends. The fakery continues beyond undergrad to ... MBA, Young Ivy Mixers. But I shouldn't be so cynical and negative about some people, should at least give them credit for staying such a "trooper".
Oh brother, this brings back some memories. I also swallowed this "liberal arts = food for soul" bullshit wholesale. Delayed choosing a major because I didn't "find my passion" and ended up getting a lot less out of college than I would've had I gone in with my high school get-shit-done mindset.
In that dark year, at 14, I became focused on hacking and social engineering. I had lost my best friend and girlfriend, and the dynamics of it all isolated me from my other friends. Being 13 and somehow in love with the prettiest girl and then losing it all was devastating.
I barely graduated but had a fun and worked on cool side projects.
At 18, I met a hardware engineer and went on to work on various projects.
I have had a lot of interesting job offers or deals just by meeting people.
I had a major investment bank recruit me but I never even had a real job and probably couldn't get hired at Burger King. The deal I was offered was absurd. In the end, I declined it and somewhat regret it.
But my point is, had I dated that girl throughout high school, I probably would had went to a great University. And today would be some strange diminished version of myself.
Instead none of that knowledge or relationship skills are taught in schools. Instead they teach mostly useless technical skills, harass kids in physical education, allow a small percentage participation in sports, give a little information about having sex... and send them on their merry way to trial and error.
Society priories are as screwed as they were in religious-based ideologies. Instead of it being about God it is now all about production and consumption. Not how to know what you want out of life and how to get it.
Many people who are on the accelerated path end up losers in the game of life just as many who get their own their own time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working:_People_Talk_About_Wha...
The place I think people get crushed is when kids are the smartest person in their class in high school at the top and then arriving at an Ivy League college are of average ability in comparison. Their self esteem is propped by being the best at academic subjects while their peers excel in sports or in a social hierarchy. All of a sudden, they are not the smartest kid in the class.
My parents were so upset when I decided I didn't want to go to college out of high school. I was doing minipreps, isolating DNA, PCR chain reaction, and making gels, in my dad's genetics laboratory at an Ivy League school which is basically cooking. I liked cooking so much I decided to be a chef. That is when the yelling and screaming started. I should have stayed in the career closet.
The worst part was after 8 years and a successful career cooking with my parents accepting my choice I decided I wanted to do other stuff. Now my parents were upset at me again and refused to pay for school. Really? We are going to start this again?
That is the hardest thing for me right now, I'm not 21 anymore and I still have to pay the dues in a new career. After years of being at the top of a hierarchy mostly because of hard work a some natural talent, I now find myself at a bottom of a different hierarchy.
As somebody who never had a career subventionned by anybody, I am shocked by your attitude!
So from a practical standpoint cash flow is a consideration. From a dependency standpoint isn't eight years long enough for you to mature beyond financial and emotional dependency?
Not to imply a parent is obligated to pay, but parents aren't really obligated to pay when their kid is 18 either. It shouldn't affect retirement savings, unless spending increased in the intervening years and ate into the investment they had planned to make in their offspring.
Even though we have saved for my youngest to go to college we are expecting her to apply for many merit scholarships and we expect her to help with some expenses using summer internship earnings. The more she contributes the better her chance for ownership over the college outcome.
In the case described, I somewhat question the motives, since (s)he described "screaming and yelling" over the choice of a different career, which seems to imply they sought a degree of control over his/her future. Keep in mind both were Ivy League PhD's. So perhaps they didn't see it as money set aside as an investment, but more as something they'd donate with conditions. Not wanting to pay could also be a way of punishing their children for not pursuing the career paths they'd wanted.
The problem in this case, imo, is that there wasn't an understanding between them about whether paying for college would still be an option in the future. Since that's an attitude that will differ from family to family, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think a given family would need to work it out for themselves ahead of time.
>Some might have alternatively chosen to invest the money in their children another way, like using it to start a business or starting a stock/bonds portfolio.
I strongly support this for families where this works out. There is never one model fits all.
I don't see parenting as providing your kids with everything. I see it as provide your kids with the tools they need to be successful in life. Sometimes the hard way is the better way.
When a child is ~26 then hopefully they can be on their own.
I'm not sure how you can judge me self centered when I provided for the education of one child already and am ready for the 2nd one. I was pointing out that there are many dimensions of being a parent and providing for college.
What is wrong with waiting until I was 26 to start college? I was not ready for college right out of high school.
After reaching adulthood you should be taking financial responsibility for yourself, rather than demanding to be bankrolled by your family.
Rather, I would focus on a narrow range of activities, such as only math, reading and outdoors activity (sports / outdoors organization like scouts). The rest of their time would be up to them. If they wish to enroll in more activities, and your income so permits, then so be it. If they wish to meet with friends, then so be it.
Too many upper-middle class parents attempt to raise renaissance children, and I've found that most of my peers never really reach anywhere with their rennaisance skills. Their piano is whatever. Their kung fu is whatever. Their Chinese is whatever. Their art is whatever.
Yes, art, music, dance, foreign language school, martial arts, crafts, etc, can all be interesting. But there's also opportunity cost. When you're learning Chinese you're not learning math. When you're learning math you're not hanging out with friends.
In sum: Don't make a renaissance child. Focus on a few things and give the rest of the time to your children, preferably for outdoors or social time.
Let them play, but--and this is key--play with them, and notice what they like playing with. Learn what their dream is, because that's the best thing to be successful at.
Haven't read it, but the author taught a class I attended and it was great fun.
1. push [his] theoretical children into this race, or
2. let them eat into precious time to figure things out.
Whatever my opinion of the article under discussion, I can only agree with its author that option 1 is a horrible mistake whose consequences for his children may accurately be called lifelong impairment.
Option 2 is no better, and it only even seems that way if you don't think about it too hard. It implicitly accepts the premise, not that childhood is precious (which it is), but that childhood is precious because, and in the way that, academia claims it is. That's toxic as hell, and it will poison any parenting that proceeds from it.
Specifically: He won't be able to relax around his kids, because he'll always have that nagging ambivalence that he's doing wrong by them, failing to equip them to compete as functional adults in a world which does not care about them, and that will come through in his actions. It can't not, and his kids will pick up on it, because a young child's parents are by far the most important things in her world which are not actually her, and she notices everything about everything they do. She won't intuit any of the paragraph I just wrote, of course, because you have to be old and jaded and cynical for that. She'll just know her daddy is never happy or comfortable or relaxed when he's around her, and with the unconscious, inevitable egotism of the very young, she will assume that's because of something to do with her. And she'll almost certainly never get over that.
I don't know that I agree with David Benatar that bringing a child into the world is invariably harmful to the child. But I certainly have a hard time arguing other than that it's harmful to bring a child into the world to endure the kind of parenting I've just described -- hence my advice to GP.
A better third option, if anyone's interested, would be to opt out of the entire nonsense and raise your kids without reference to it. The trouble is that you are not more powerful than the society in which you exist, and it is interested in your kids whether you like it or not. You might find or make an enclave, and a method, in which to raise them without having them be too badly stunted by its more pernicious influences; people have done it before, are doing it now, and will no doubt continue to do so. Perhaps you will be among them. But it's not implausible that your notional kids are better off never having existed at all, if you're not even equipped to recognize the need to be willing to make the attempt.
Also, I want to know, what are the best modern examples of enclaves? Are they all bespoke? Some likeminded parents getting together? Something more formulaic that has actually scaled out without becoming a self-parody or a lifestyle brand?
To answer your question as best I can, I really can't answer your question very well, because I'm not a parent and never will be, and thus have only a peripheral knowledge of the detailed mechanics of parenting. Based on what little I know, the first place I'd suggest looking would be the homeschooling movement, which seems to be gaining secular adherents quite rapidly of late for reasons appearing not much different from those I suggested in my earlier comment.
"Provocative"? No, I think there needs to be an element of bad faith or inauthenticity. 'Actual' trolls are supposed to be malicious creatures.
> homeschooling
I wouldn't call that scalable, it only worked for me because I was already coding by the time I convinced my parents to let me do my own thing. Though maybe there is an advanced body of theory I'm not aware of.
Certainly homeschooling isn't scalable. There are techniques, methods, curricula, which can be (and are quite widely) shared, but no one can systematize it into something which will guarantee a good result in every case. Unfortunately, I see no reason to imagine anyone can so systematize anything else, either. After all, the current lamentable state of affairs is the result of concentrated effort, over a period at least of decades, on the part of many of the world's finest minds. If they can't come up with a "one size fits all", why expect that anyone else can? Perhaps the "social sciences", so called, are fundamentally in error. Perhaps every family and every child is unique, a non-reproducible n=1 experiment -- and perhaps, cast in those terms, it becomes a little easier to see just how wrongheaded the concept of a "one size fits all" solution for human beings might possibly be.
As far as I can tell, the most common objection to homeschooling is that it doesn't work in the absence of parents who are interested and closely involved with the progress of their children -- not in the modern "helicopter" style borne only of a desire not to be seen to parent badly, but rather in a consistent and, to the extent possible, effective fashion, out of both genuine interest in the wellbeing and success of their offspring, and a sense of the duty to society which also inheres in parenting, that is, to bequeath upon the world children whose presence is more likely to be overall a benefit than a detriment. Or, to put it simply, that homeschooling can't work reliably because it doesn't work at all without good parents.
Unfortunately, as the last decades have also shown us, without good parents, nothing else works, either -- and a sufficiently broken system can easily overcome the effects of even the best parents, if only by being vastly larger than them and all but inescapable. Here we have a Yale professor telling us that the existing system is sufficiently broken -- and not really telling us anything we didn't already know. Do we assume that nothing else can work either, and that our kids are doomed? Or do we seek alternatives, even those which are utterly alien to the sort of systems-first thinking that got us into this mess?
I can't speak for anyone else, of course, and I'm not raising any kids of my own, but it seems to me that the only option compatible with even the most basic concept of parental responsibility is the latter one. After all, we've not only seen ourselves that what we've got doesn't work; here we have one of its highest exponents telling us it doesn't work, which should be authoritative enough for just about anybody. Perhaps something else might work better? It'd be very hard for anything else to work worse.
I've decided that I'm not going to raise my kids in the U.S. This absurd hoop jumping isn't the optimum way to raise a successful kid, and it sure as hell doesn't create happy childhoods.
(I'm British, and I don't have any firsthand experience of the American higher education system.)
In theory, that's great, but in practice the CC is underfunded and there aren't enough classes offered, so it takes 3, or even 4 years, to get into all the classes required for the transfer. Upon getting into UCLA they find their department won't accept some of their CC classes for credit because they weren't rigorous enough, or that they need some prereqs that weren't offered at the CC, and it will actually take 3 years at the UC campus to graduate. They enter the workforce 2 years after their peers who went straight to 4 year universities and the 3 years of CC is easily more expensive than the 1 year of UC tuition saved, especially considering they fed and housed themselves for 2 extra years. Their lifetime earnings drop or they have to retire later.
None of this is their fault, either: The CC eagerly offers the few students who successfully (and luckily) navigated the class scheduling and credit transferring bureaucracy as the mode, and a 17 year old kid -- likely the first in their family to attend college -- isn't equipped to evaluate those claims. After all, why would they distrust the CC? They're told they'll save money and graduate at the same time, with the same degree, as their friends who went straight to UCLA and there's no reason for them to doubt that.
While I'm sure many CCs are perfectly good places to spend the first 2 years of college, there are at least some tar pits out there. It's a real shame, too.
Transferring credits between universities is also a huge crapshoot, as you never know whether school A will accept your classes at school B.
There's also a classic misconception of assuming the general public is stupider than they actually are. I looked up the transfer policies and talked to guidance counselors and got approval to transfer courses before I took my first class... Everything turned out OK. Other than the whole switching majors three times, and even that turned out OK in the end.
When transfers are admitted every year to my school (usually just 5-10) there's a writeup in the school paper about them. Without fail they all a) were accepted here, but chose to go to a similar/competing school like Princeton and b) are exceptionally accomplished at a young age.
In general, it might not quite be the case that it's (particularly) hard to transfer from a state school to an elite one. It's just the universe of people going to more democratic schools are distinct from those going to elite schools; in other words, if you took a random sampling of students who have no issues getting into top schools straight from high school and put them in community colleges for two years, they would have no issue transferring to a top school afterwards.
Every transfer at Harvard I know of was admitted to Harvard, but just decided to go elsewhere before deciding Harvard was the right choice.
I will consider this option in earnest once our own kids get acceptance letters.
But weren't you saying just the opposite? That being part of the elite, which here you call "meritocracy" because you're playing a card trick, drives people crazy?
Here's what I think: You're talking to the elite (if you weren't, you wouldn't be in the Atlantic), and you know said elite are more comfortable thinking of themselves in terms of "meritocracy" (even though one of your theses is that there's no meaningful merit involved), and you also know that pretending to care about unequal distribution of social benefits is currently in fashion among your audience (hence the preference for "meritocracy", because it implies that your audience's unequal share is earned). Keeping all three of these plates spinning at once is difficult; the sentence I quoted is them all hitting the ground at once.
>Davis: Some criticize this kind of self-reflection as narcissistic[...]
>Deresiewicz: [...]the main point is to know yourself so you know what you want in the world. You can decide, what is the best work for me, what is the best career for me, what are the rewards that I really want. And maybe you’ll end up saying that I do need a certain level of wealth, but you will know it because you will have come to know yourself.
Nope. Nothing narcissistic here. You know, in ages past when countries had explicit aristocracies rather than the implicit ones which deposed and replaced them, "the main point" as you put it was to serve others, rather than oneself. Can't imagine what brought that to mind just now, though. Totally unrelated to anything, no doubt.
>Gaining self-knowledge isn’t a simple or predictable process. Are there certain things that can only be learned outside the classroom?
Could there possibly be any wronger question to ask?
>Aside from the classes themselves, the fact that we’ve created a system where kids are constantly busy, and have no time for solitude or reflection, is going to take its toll. We need to create a situation where kids feel like they don’t have to be “on” all the time.
Are you sure? What it sounds like you're saying is that "we" have been doing the best "we" can for decades, and the result is barely tolerable. Are you sure it wouldn't help more if you just stopped creating situations? If the problem is that you're raising your kids inside a Skinner box, why would you think the solution is to make the walls less opaque? Are these the only terms in which you can think? You don't need to answer that one.
>When I taught humanities classes, I never talked about self-reflection, and I never invited students to talk about their feelings or their backgrounds or their experiences.
Well, you got that right, at least, if only by accident. And it has to have been by accident, because you think you got it wrong. The context couches this as a failure on your part, but why would it be? Why would you think that someone else's self-reflection should have anything to do with you? You don't need to answer that one, either.
So how does this amazing article finish? With its subject telling us about his own college experience, in the course of which comes this marvel, which I've emphasized so you don't miss it:
>I drifted for two or three years after college until I reached a cinematic moment in my life[...]
Why cinematic? Because we've all seen this movie. To call it "transformative" would be erroneous, because a plot twist doesn't change the shape of the plot, it's part of the story all along; to call it an "epiphany" would be the same, plus stupid, because we all know God is dead. Indeed, part of the interview describes how academia has tried to fill the former social role of religion and failed at it.
But this possibly quite significant point is glossed over entirely because it's not important to Deresiewicz's movie and therefore not important to the article or the audience, who are (presumed to be) in much the same state as the subject: their problem isn't that they've failed to live the movie plot they thought they wanted, it's that they've succeeded at it and found themselves nonetheless unfulfilled. Which is fine as far as it goes, what a shame for them but who cares, right? Except they've managed to inflict the same disaster on the next generation, because they are not only narcissistic but incredibly stupid besides.
And, having recognized the existence and nature of this error, what do they feel really matters? Is it that their descendants, their students, their supposed protegees, are going to have to find their way out of this clusterfuck on their own because everyone who might be expected to help them is too self-absorbed to bother and too stupid to succeed at it anyway? Of course not. No, what matters is who gets the blame, specifically that it be anyone but they themselves:
>But the take home message is that everyone has to liberate themselves from this system. Education should be an act of liberation. We need to make a better system but ultimately everybody has to claim their freedom for themselves.
These are literally the last words in the article. Do you think that's an accident? Because it's not an accident.