don't send your kid to the ivy leagues
TRANSCRIPT
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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NEW EPUBLIC
NEOtI,{[i"1' {'Y
Don'tSendYourKidto
the
IqFLeague
The
nation's on
colleqes
re
urnins
our
kids ntei onlmr#*
By Wiiliam Deresiewicz
n the spring
of
2OO8,
did a daylong tint on the Yale
admissions ommittee.
We-that
is, three admissions tafl a memberof
hecollegedean's
office,and
ffi , the faculty representaEive-were
oing
hroughsubmissions
rom eastern
Pennsylvania. he applicantshad
beenassigned
score
rdm
one o
four,
calculated
rom
a string of figuresand codes-SATs,
GPA, lass ank, numerical
scores o
which
the etter
of recommendation ad
beenconverted, pecialnotations
or legacies nd diversity
case
The oneshad alreadybeenadmitted,
and he threesand ours
could
get
n only under
special onditions-if they were a nationally anked
athlete, or instance,
or a
"DevA,"(a
applicant n the highestcategory
f
"developnrent"
cases,which means
a child of very ric
donors).Our task or the daywas o
adjudicate mong he twos.Huge
bowlsofjunk food
were
stationedat the sideof the room to keep
our energ,y p.
The
unior
officer n charge,
a
young
man
who
looked
o
be
about3O,
presented
achcas
rat-a-tat-tat,n ablizzardof
adrnissions
argon
hat I had
o
pick
up on the fly.
"Good
rig":
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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the transcript exhibits
a
good
degree
of academic igor.
"Ed
level 1":
parents
have an
educational evel no higher
than high school, ndicating
a
genuine
hardship
case.
"MUSD
a musician
n the highest category
of
promise.
Kids
who had five
or six items
on their list
of extracurriculars-the
"brag"-were
already n trouble, because
hat wasn't nearly
enough. We
istened, asked
questions,
dove nto
a letter or two,
then voted up or
down.
With
so
many
accomplished
applicants o choose
rom, we were looking
for kids with
somethingspecial,*PQs"-personal qualities-that were often revealedby the letters or
essays.Kids who
only
had
the numbers
and the r6sum6 were
usually rejected:
"no
spark,
"not
a team-builder,"
"this
is
pretty
much in
the middle of
the fairway for
us." One
young
person,
who had
piled
up a truly insane
quantity
of extracurriculars
and who
submitted
nine letters
of
recommendation,
was
felt to
be
"too
intense."
On the other
hand,
the
numbers
and the r6sumd
were clearly indispensable.
'd
been told that
successful
applicants
could either be
"well-rounded"
or
"poinQ/"-outstanding
in one
particular
way-but
if they were
pointy,
they had to
be reallypointy: a musician
whose
audition
tap
had
impressed he music
department, a scientist
who had won
a national award.
"Super
People,"
he
writerJames
Atlas has called
them-the
stereotypical
ultra-high-
achieving
elite collegestudents
of today. A
double major, a
sport, a musical nstrument,
a
couple of foreign
languages, ervicework
in distant
corners of the
globe,
a few hobbies
thrown in for
good
measure:They have
mastered hem
all, and with
a serene
self-
assurance
hat leavesadults
and
peers
alike in
awe. A friend who
teaches
at a top
university once
askedher class
o memorize 3O ines
of the eighteenth-century
poet
Alexander
Pope. Nearly
every single
kid
got
every single ine
correct. It was
a thing
of
wonder,
she said, ike
watching thoroughbreds
circle
a track.
These
enviable
youngsters
appear to be
the winners in the race
we have made
of
childhood. But
the reality is very
different, as have witnessed
n
many of my
own
students and
heard from the hundreds
of
young
people
whom I have
spokenwith
on
campuses
or who have written
to me over
the last few
years.
Our system
of elite educatio
manufactures
young
people
who are
smart and talented
and driven,
yes,
but
also anxious
timid, and lost,
with little intellectual
curiosity
and a stunted
senseof
purpose:
trapped
in
a bubble of
privilege,
heading meekly
in the same
direction,
great
at what they're
doing
but with no idea why
they're
doing it.
READ: 'm
a
Laborer's
Son.
Went o
Yale. Am Not
"Trapped
in
a
Bubble
of Privilege."
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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When
I speak of elite education, I mean
prestigious
nstitutions
like Harvard
or Stanford
o
Williams
as well as he larger
universe of second-tierselective
schools,
but
I
also mean
everything
that leads up to and away rom
them-the
private
and
affluent
public
hgh
schools; he ever-growingndustry
of tutors and
consultantsand test-prep
courses; he
admissions
process
tself, squatting ike
a dragon at the entrance
to adulthood; the
brand-
name
graduate
schoolsand employmentopportunities
hat come after
the B.A.; and
the
parents
and
communities, largely upper-middle
class,who
push
their children into
the
maw
of this
machine.
n short, our entire
systemof elite education.
I
should say hat this
subject
s very
personal
or me. Like
so many kids
today, I went
offto
college ike a sleepwalker.You
chose he most
prestigiousplace
hat let
you
in; up
ahead
were vaguely understood
objectives:status,wealth-"success."
What
it meant
to actually
get
an education and why
you
mrght want
one-all this was
offthe table. It was
only
after
24years in
the Ivy League-college
and a Ph.D. at Columbia,
ten
years
on the faculty at
Yale-that I
started o think about
what this systemdoes o kids
and how they
can escap
from it, what it does o our society
and
how we
can dismantle
t.
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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young
woman from
another school wrote me
this
about
her
boyfriend at Yale:
Before he started
college,
he
spent most of his
time
reading
and writing
short
stories. Three
years
ater, he's
painfully
insecure, worrying
about things my
public-
educated friends don't
give
a second thought
to, Iike the stigma
of eating lunch alone
and
whether he's
"networking"
enough. No one but me laows he fakes being well-read by
thumbing through the first and last chapters
of any book he hears
about and obsessively
devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing.
He does this not
becausehe's incurious,
but
because here's a bigger social reward for
being able to talk
about books than
for actually
reading
them.
READ:
Can
World
of
Warcraft
Save Higher Education?
I taughtmanywonderful
young
people
during my
years
n
the Ivy League-bright,
thoughtful,
creative ids whom t wasa
pleasure
o talk with and earn
rom. But most
of
them seemed ontent o color within
the
lines
hat their education
had marked
out for
them.
Very ew were
passionate
bout deas.Very ew
sawcollege
as
part
of
a
arger
project
of intellectual
discovery nd development. veryone
ressed
s f they were read
to
be nterviewedat a moment'snotice.
Look
beneath
he fagade
f seamless ell-adjustment,
nd what
you
often ind
are oxic
levels
of fear,anxiety,and depression,
f emptiness nd aimlessness
nd solation.
A larg
scalesurveyof college reshmen ecently ound hat
self-reports
f emotionalwell-being
have allen
o their
lowest
evel n the study's2f-yearhistory.
So
extreme
are he admission
tandards ow that kids who
manageo
get
nto
elite
colleges ave,
by definition,neverexperienced
nythingbut success.
he
prospect
of
notbeingsuccessfulerrifies hem, disorientshem. The costof fallingshort,even
temporarily,becomes ot
merely
practical,
but existential.The result s
a violent
aversio
to risk. Youhave
no margin for
error, so
you
avoid he
possibility
hat
you
will
ever make
an error. Once,a student
at
Pomona
old me that
she'd
ove
o have
a chance o think
about he thingsshe's tudyrng,
nly shedoesn'thave he
time. I askedher if
shehad eve
considered ot tryrng o
get
an A in everyclass.She ooked
at me as f I had
madean
indecent
suggestion.
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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hereare exceptions,
ids
who insist,against
ll odds,on trying to
get
a real education.
But their experience
ends
o make hem
feel ike freaks.Onestudent
old me that a friend
of
hershad eft Yalebecause
he
ound he school
stifling
to
the
parts
of
yourself
hat
you'd
call a soul."
MAP:America's
10 Richest
Universities
Match These
Gountries'GDPs
eturn on
investment": hat's he
phrase
ou
often hear oday
when
people
alk
about
college.
What no one seemso ask
s what the
"return"
is
supposedo
be
Is t
just
aboutearning
more money? s
the only
purpose
of an education o
enable
you
to
get
a
ob?
What, n short, is college
or?
The irst thing
that college
s
for
is
to
teach
you
to think.
That doesn'tsimply
mean
developing
he
mental
skills
particular
o individual
disciplines.Colleges an opportunity
to stand
outside he
world for a few
years,
between
he orthodoxyof
your
family
and
he
exigencies
f career,and contemplate
hings rom a
distance.
Learninghow
to think is only the beginnhg,
hough.
There's
omething
n
particularyou
need
o
think about:
building
a self.Thenotion
maysoundstrange.
We've
taught hem,"
DavidFosterWallace ncesaid,
*that
a self s something ou ust have."But t is only
through the act of
establishing ommunication
between he
mind and the heart, the mind
and experience,
hat
you
becomean
ndividual,a unique
being-a soul.The
ob
of colleg
is to assist
ou
to begin o do
that. Books, deas,
works of art and hought, he
pressure
f
the minds around
you
that
are ooking
or
their
own answersn their
own ways.
College
s
not
the only chance
o learn o think, but
it is the best.One hing is certain: f
you
haven'tstarted
by the time
you
finish
your
8.A., there's ittle
likelihood
you'll
do it
later. That swhy anundergladuateexperiencedevotedexclusively o careerpreparation
is
four
years
argelywasted.
READ:Send
your
kid to the lvy League A
rebuttal.
Elite
schools
ike to boast
that they teach
their students how to think, but
all they mean is
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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that they train them
in
the analytic and rhetorical skills hat are necessaryor
successn
business
nd he
professions.
verything s technocratic-the
development f
expertise-and everything
s
ultimately
ustified
n technocratic erms.
Religious olleges-evenobscure, egionalschools
hat
no
one haseverheardof on the
coasts-often do a muchbetter
ob
in
that respect.
What
an ndictmentof the Ivy League
and
ts
peers:
hat collegesour levelsdown on the academicotem
pole,
enrolling
studentswhoseSAT cores rehundredsof points ower han theirs, delivera better
education,
n the highest
sense f the
word.
At least he classes t elite schools re
academically
igorous,
demanding n their
own
terms,no?Not necessarily.n the sciences, sually; n other
disciplines, ot so
much.
Thereare exceptions, f course,but
professors
nd students
ave argelyentered nto
what
one observer alleda
"nonaggression
pact."
Students re regarded y
the
institution
as
"customers,"
people
o be
pandered
o insteadof
challenged. rofessors re rewarded
for research, o hey want to spendas ittle time on their classes s hey can.The
profession's
hole ncentivestructure s
biasedagainst eaching, fid
the more
prestigiou
the school,
he
stronger
he bias s ikely
to be.
The
result s higher
marks
or
shoddier
work.
It is true that today's
youngpeople
appear o
be
more
socially
engagedhan kids have
been or severaldecades
nd
that they are more apt to harbor
creativeor entrepreneuria
impulses.But t is also rue, at leastat the most
selective chools,hat
even
f
those
aspirationsmake t out of college-a big "if" -they tend to beplayedout within the same
narro\M onceptionof what constitutes valid ife: affluence,
redentials,
restige.
Experience
tself has
been
educed o instrumental
unction,via the
collegeessay. rom
learning
o commodify
your
experiences
or
the application,
he
next
stephasbeen
o
seekout experiencesn order o have hem
to commodiff. TheNew York
Timesreports
that there s now
a
thriving sectordevoted
o
producing
essay-readyummers,
ut what
strikes one s the superficiality
of
the activities nvolved:
a month traveling
around Italy
studyrngheRenaissance,awholeday".witha bandof renegade rtists.A wholeday
I've noticed
something
imilar
when
t comes o service.Why s
t that
people
eel
he nee
to
go
to
places
ike Guatemalao
do their
projects
of rescueor documentation,nstead
of
Milwaukeeor Arkansas?When
studentsdo stay n the States,why is it
that so many head
for NewOrleans? erhapst's no surprise,when kids
are rained o think of service
as
something hey are ultimatelydoing or themselves-that s, for
their rdsumds.
Do
well
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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by doing
good," goes
he slogan.
How
about
ust
doing
good?
If there is one idea, above all, through which
the concept of social responsibility
is
communicated at the most
prestigious
schools, t is
"leadership.'
"Harvard
is for leaders,
goes
he Cambridgeclich6. To be a high-achievingstudent is
to constantly be
urged to
think of
yourself
as a
future leader
of society.But what these
nstitutions mean by
leadership s nothing more than
getting
to the top. Making
partner
at a major
law firm
or
becoming a chief executive,climbing the greasypole of whateverhierarchy you decide to
attach
yourself
to. I don't think it occurs
o
the
people
n
chargeof elite
colleges hat the
concept
of leadership
ought to have a higher meaning,
or,
really,
any meaning.
The irony is that elite students
are told that they can be whatever
they
want,
but most
of
them end up
choosing
o be one of a
few very
similar things. As
of 2O1O, bout a third
of
graduates
went into financing
or consulting at a number of top
schools, ncluding Harvar
Princeton,
and
Cornell. Whole fields
have disappeared rom view: the clergy,
he military,
electoralpolitics, even academia tself, for the most port, including basic science. t's
considered
glamorous
o
drop out of
a selectivecollege f
you
want
to become he next
Mark Zuckerberg,
but
ludicrous
to stay
n
to become a social worker.
*What
Wall Street
figured out," as Ezra Klein has
put
it,
"is
that
collegesare
producing
a large
number of ver
smart, completely confused
graduates.
Kids who
have ample mental horsepower,
an
incredible work
ethic and
no idea what
to do next.n'
For the most selectivecolleges, his system s working very well indeed.
Application
numbers continue to swell, endowments are robust, tuition hikes bring ritual complaints
but
no
decline in business.Whether it is working for anyone
else
s
a different
question.
t almost feels
ridiculous
to have o insist that
colleges
ike
Harvard
are bastions o
privilege,
where
the rich send heir children
to
learn
to
walk,
talk, and
think
like
the rich. Don't we
already know this? They aren't
called
elite
colleges or
nothing. But
apparently
we
like
pretending
otherwise. We ive
in a meritocracy, after all.
The
sign of the system'salleged airness s the set of
policies
that travel under the banner
of
"diversity."
And that diversity does ndeed represent nothing
less han a social
revolution.
Princeton, which didn't even admit its first woman
graduatatudent
until
1961-a
year
in which a
grand
total of one
(no
doubt very lonely) African
American
matriculated
at
its
college-is now half female and only about half white. But
diversity of
sex and
race has
become a cover
for increasing
economic resegregation.Elite
collegesare
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still living offthe
moral capital they earned n the 196Os,when
they took
the
genuinely
@
courageousstep of dismantling
the mechanismsof
the
WASP
aristocracy.
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
studyrngand
playing
alongside he
children of
black, Asian, and Latino
businesspeople
and
professionals.
Kids
at schools ike
Stanford
think that their environment is diverse f one comes rom Missouri and another from
Pakistan,
or
if
one
plays
he cello and
the other lacrosse.Never
mind
that all of
their
parents
are doctors or bankers.
That
doesn't mean there aren't a few exceptions,
but that is
all they are. In fact,
the
group
that is most disadvantaged y
our current admissions
policies
are working-class
and rural
whites,
who are hardly
present
on selectivecampuses
at all. The only way
to think
these
places
are diverse
s
if that's all
you've
ever
seen.
Let's not kid ourselves:The
collegeadmissions
game
s
not
primarily
about
the
Iower
and
middle
classes eeking
o
rise,
or even about the
upper-middle class
attempting
to
maintain its
position.
It is
about determining the
exact hierarchy
of statuswithin
the
upper-middle
class tself. In the affluent suburbs
and well-heeled
urban
enclaveswhere
this
game
s
principally played,
t is not
about whether
you
go
to an
elite school. It's
abou
which
one
you
go
to. It is Penn versus
Tufts, not Penn versus
Penn
State. t
doesn't matter
that a bright
young person
can
go
to Ohio State,become
a doctor, settle
n Dayton,
and
makea very good living. Suchan outcome s simply too horrible to contemplate.
This
system s exacerbating nequality,
retarding
social mobility,
perpetuating
privilege,
and creating an
elite that is isolated from
the society hat
it's supposed
o lead. The
numbers are
undeniable. In 1985,
46
percent
of incoming
freshmen
at the 25Omost
selectivecolleges
came rom the top
quarter
of the income
distribution.
By 2OOO,
t
was
5
percent.
As
of 2OO6,only
about
15
percent
of
students
at the most
competitive
schools
came
from the bottom half. The more
prestigious
he school, the
more unequal
its studen
body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of
2OO4,4O
percent
of first-year
studentsat
the most selective
state campuses
came rom
families
with incomes
of more than
$1OO,OOO,
p from 32
percent
ust
five
years
earlier.
The major reason
or the trend is
clear.Not increasing
uition, though
that
is
a factor,
but
the ever-growing
cost of manufacturing
children who are fit
to compete n the
college
admissions
game.
The
more hurdles there
are, the more expensive
t is to catapult
your
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kid across hem. Wealthy amilies start buyrng their children's way into
elite colleges
almost
from
the
moment
they are born:
music
essons,sports equipment, foreign
travel
("enrichment"
progfams,
to use he
all-too-perfect erm)-most important,
of course,
private-school
uition or the costsof living in
a
place
with
top-tier
public
schools.
The
SAT
is supposed
o
measure
aptitudeobut what it actually measures s
parental
income, which
it
tracks
quite
closely.Today, ewer than half of high-scoring
students rom low-income
families even enroll at four-year schools.
The
problem
isn't that there aren't more
qualified
lower-income
kids from which
to
choose.
Elite
private
collegeswill never allow their students'
economic
profile
to mirror
that of society as a
whole. They
can't afford to-they need
a critical massof full
payers
an
they need to tend to their donor base-and it's not
even clear that theyd want
to.
And so
it
is hardly a coincidence hat income inequality is
higher than it has been
since
before the Great Depression,
or that social mobility is lower in
the United States han
in
almost every other developed country. Elite collegesare not just powerless o reverse he
movement
toward a more
unequal society; heir
policies
actively
promote
it.
s there
anything that
I
can do, a lot of
young people
have
written
to ask me, to
avoid becoming an out-of-touch,
entitled
little
shit? don't have a satis$ring
answer,short of telling them to transfer
to a
public
university. You
cannot
cogitate
your
way to sympathy with
people
of different backgrounds, still less o
knowledge
of them. You need to interact with
them directly, and it has to be
on an equal
footing: not in the context
of
"service,"
and not in the spirit
of
"making
an effort,"
either-swooping
down on a
member
of the college
support staffand
offering to
"buy
them a coffee," as a former Yalie
once suggested,n order to
"ask
them about themselves
Instead of service, how
about service worl? That'll really
give
you
insight into
other
people.
How about waiting tables so
that
you
can seehow
hard it is,
physically
and
mentally? You really
aren't as smart as everyonehas beentelling
you; you're
only smarte
in
a
certain way. There are smart
people
who
do not
go
to a
prestigious
college, or to
any
college-often
precisely
or reasonsof class.There
are smart
people
who are not
"smart.
I am under no illusion that it doesn't matter where
you
go
to college.But
there are
options. There are still very
good
public
universities n every region of
the country. The
education
is
often impersonal, but the
student body
is
usually
genuinely
diverse
n terms
of socioeconomicbackground,
with all of the invaluable experiential
earning that implies
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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S. News and
World
Reportsupplies the
percentage
of freshmen at each
college
who
finished n the highest1O
ercent
of their high schoolclass.Among
he top 2Ouniversitie
the
number s
usually
above9O
percent.
'd
be
wary
of attending choolsike that.
Students etermine he levelof classroom
iscussion;hey shape
our
values
and
expectations,or
good
and ll. It's
partly
because f the students hat I'd warn kids
away
from
the
Iviesand heir ilk. Kidsat ess
prestigious
chools re apt to be more nteresting
more curious,more open,and ar lessentitledand competitive.
If there
s
anywhere hat college
s
still college-anywhere hat teaching
and he
humanities
are still accorded
ride
of
place-it
is
the
liberal
arts college.Such
places
are
small,which s not for everyone, nd hey're often airly solated,which s
also
not
for
everyone.The bestoption of all maybe the second-tier-not second-rate-colleges,
ike
Reed,Kenyon,Wesleyan, ewanee,MountHolyoke,and others.
nsteadof trying to
competewith Harvard and Yale, heseschoolshave etained
heir allegiance o real
educational alues.
Not
beingan entitled
ittle
shit
s
an admirable
goal.
But
n the end, he deeper ssue
s the
situation hat makes
t
so hard to be anythingelse.The ime hascome,not
simply
o
reform that system op to bottom, but to
plot
our exit to another kind
of society
altogether.
The educationsystemhas o
act to mitigate
he classsystem,not reproduce t. Affirmative
action shouldbe basedon classnsteadof race,a change hat manyhavebeenadvocatin
for
years.
Preferencesor legacies nd athletes ught o be discarded.
SAT cores hould
be weighted o account
or
socioeconomicactors.Colleges hould
put
an
end o r6sum6
stuffing by
imposinga limit on the number of extracurriculars
hat
kids
can ist on their
applications. heyought o
place
more
value
on the kind of service
obs
that
lower-incom
studentsoften take
n high
schooland that high achieversalmostnever do. They
should
refuse
o be
mpressed
y any opportunity hat
was
enabledby
parental
wealth.
Of cours
they
have
o
stop cooperatingwith
US. News.
Morebroadly, hey need o rethink their
conceptionof merit.
If
schools re
going
o train
beffer classof
leaders han
the ones
we have
oday, hey're
going
o have o ask hemselv
what kinds of
qualities
hey need o
promote.
Selecting tudents
y
GPA r the
numbero
extracurricularsmore often benefits he faithful
drudge han
the original mind.
The changesmust
go
deeper,
hough,
han
reforming
he admissions
rocess.
hat
mrgh
8/11/2019 Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy Leagues
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address he
problem
of mediocrity,
but
it won't
address he
greater
one of inequality.
The
problem
s the Ivy Leaguetself.Wehave
contracted he
trainingof our leadership
lass o
a set of
private
nstitutions.
Howevermuch they claim
to act for the
common
good,
hey
will always
place
heir interests irst. The
arrangements
great
or
the schools,
ut is
Harvard's
desire
or
alumni donationsa sufficientreason
o
perpetuate
he class
system?
I used o think
that
we needed
o createa world where
everychild
had an equalchance
o
getto the Ivy League.'ve come o see hat what we really need s to createone whereyou
don't
have
o
go
o the Ivy League, r any
private
college,
o
get
a first-rate
education.
Hrgh-quality
public
education,
inancedwith
public
money, or
the benefit
of all: the exac
commitment hat drove he
growth
of
public
higher
education n the
postwaryears.
Everybody
gets
an equal chance o
go
as
ar
as heir hard work
and talent will take
them-you know;
he
American
dream.Everyonewho wants
t
gets
o
have
he kind
of
mind-expanding,soul-enriching
experience hat a iberal
arts education
provides.
We
recognizehat free,qualityK-12 ducation s a rightof citizenship.Wealsoneed o
recognize-aswe oncedid and
as
many
countriesstill do-that
the same s
true of highe
education.We
have ried aristocracy.We
have
ried
meritocracy.Now t's
time to
try
democracy.
William Deresiewiczs the author of Excellent
Sheep:
The
Miseducation
f the American
Elite and The Way o
a
MeaningfulLife, http://www.excellentsheep.com/
coming
out
August19 rom FreePress.
He taughtat
Yale
rom 1998 o 2OO8.