Interesting Article on Why You Should *Not* Go to an Ivy

This is a very thought provoking article on how the Ivy League is not all its cracked up to be when it comes to creating well-rounded adults.

The major reason for the trend is clear. 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. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. 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.

This creates quite a few people that are really smart, with awesome work ethic, but you end up with this:

Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.

You have scared kids that think they are a failure if they fail at becoming a partner at a prestigious law firm or a CEO. What is interesting is that these kids will keep the privilege going from one generation to the next regardless of race.

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. Kids at schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan, or if one plays the cello and the other lacrosse. Never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers.

So there is no real economic or class diversity. You end up with clueless people that have no idea about the life of the regular working-class person or worse people that look down on them. Case in point is Congress and Wall Street. Many of them are Ivy Leaguers who have no idea what it was like to wait tables or live paycheck to paycheck. They lived in the bubble of privilege and move their kids onto the same treadmill of success that they went down. Also this article has concrete steps to change things.

The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth. Of course, they have to stop cooperating with U.S. News.

You might get more kids that work hard but who's parents are Latino immigrants that could barely speak English. That might improve the compassion that this potential "Ivy League leader" will have toward his fellow man going forward.