The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Last week I came upon an article by William Deresiewicz, a Yale Associate Professor of English, entitled “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” In it, Deresiewicz puts forth his theory that elite universities are disadvantaging their students and alumni. In particular, he identifies what he perceives as five generalized disadvantages of an elite education:

1. Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”
2. An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.
3. Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.
4. Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.
5. There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

It is certainly a critical article, and it is one that immediately drew a sharp reaction from me. After all, who wants to be labeled as, essentially, an elitist who skirts by in life? Assuming Deresiewicz would consider Stanford “an elite institution,” I (and all of my friends from school) just got slapped in the face by a man who has never met us, much less spoken to us.

Though to be clear, if he has trouble finding anything to say to a plumber with a Boston accent and a Red Sox cap, he would probably have trouble finding anything to say to me also. I can think of at least ten one-liners to rag on the Red Sox immediately (”Damn, how hard is it for your team to catch the fucking DEVIL RAYS?” or, as Stoops suggested, “It’s a good thing we both hate the Yankees.”).

Yes, I understand that his criticism is technically of the institutions themselves, but it’s a bit like we were all sprayed by stray bullets from the drive-by.

However, I would be lying if I categorically denounced the entire article. When I look closely, within his shockingly elitist examples, there is some truth. Let’s take a look:

Elite educations make you incapable of talking to people who “aren’t like you.”

I’ve probably covered this already, but I consider this point to be a complete fucking joke. I didn’t go to Yale (and maybe Stanford’s just not as stuffy of a place), but I have a feeling this is more an issue with the individual than the institution. As Phil put it in an email, “What I find comical is that he expects to be able to relate, and then blames his education and collegiate institutions for his deficiency.”

It’s unfortunate that Deresiewicz opens his article with this particular point, because I feel like the absurdity of it really discolors his other arguments and observations. Perhaps his inability to converse with ‘people not like him’ is more a reflection of another of his points - not all intelligence plays well in the classroom.

Frankly, socially intelligent individuals (many of whom I know endured these apparent ‘Elite Educational Prisons’) are capable of talking to any human about, literally, any topic. Are we to believe that attending an elite institution removes your ability to enjoy sports, music, movies, news, and every other potential topic of conversation that is shared commonly between large portions of the population? I think they’re allowed to listen to rap music at Yale.

I don’t even know what “people not like me” means - are these people who are lacking vital organs that I have? The whole point is crazy.

An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

It’s hard to deny the (at least half-) truth of this statement. I was witness to this fact while I worked at Google. In case you were not aware, Google likes to hire Ivy League and Stanford graduates in all of its departments, including departments where the primary job function is answering customer support emails from users/advertisers/publishers. I can’t tell you the number of times I heard the phrase “I’m/we’re over-qualified…” from such coworkers while I worked at Google, as if such work was simply beneath them.

That’s not an indictment of those employees, or even Google, but rather just an observation that there is a significant sense of self-worth inculcated by an elite education. I’m not positive that I view this sense of self-worth to be truly a disadvantage, save for (the fairly plentiful) occasions when it extends to arrogance.

Elite educations train students to expect and accept an entitlement to be mediocre.

I don’t imagine anyone would argue the presence of some level of grade inflation at elite institutions. Yet the generalization that all elite educations reward mediocrity seems overdone. And certainly Deresiewicz’s contention that all students of elite institutions expect that to be able to turn their work in late with no repercussions is absurd, at least at Stanford. I have no insight into Yale or Columbia.

I don’t remember ever hearing any of my friends talk about how they’d just run that paper over a day late. But I certainly do remember the eerie glow of rows of monitors at Sweet Hall at 3 in the morning, or working in the lab trying to debug that damn microprocessor implementation before it was due in a few hours at 9am.

The truth is that I would have been really fucking embarrassed to act as Deresiewicz describes. I think all of my friends would have also.

Elite educations willingly lead students to the “safe” and secure life.

Agreed (for 90+% of the Stanford graduates that I know). I can’t even really begin to argue with this point, as I’ve commented to numerous folks that temptation for security and fear of failure manifest themselves in my own psyche. After all, this temptation is the same reason that Google continues to be able to stock its customer service teams with Harvard/Stanford/Princeton/Yale graduates who end up incredibly conflicted due to their strong sense of self-worth.

For many Asian-Americans, I would add that parental influences often play an even more significant part than their elite educations. As an example, trying to explain to my own mother why I would leave a company like Google or go play poker for a living is somewhere between comical and impossible.

There is no intellectualism (as he defines it) because students just do “good enough.”

I’m extremely conflicted on Deresiewicz’s last “disadvantage.” His contention is that because elite institutions (and their students) have become increasingly focused on jumping the hurdles to reach a diploma (and subsequently the secure life), the students ignore true ‘intellectualism’. He describes the intellectual life as focus on “The Big Questions” and large visions. In doing so, he also takes a side swipe at all technical fields, which he paints as part of the evil commercialization of elite instititutions:

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Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

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There is some level of truth to his overarching point (I certainly did jump through the right sequence of hoops to graduate at school), however one can’t help but read his argument and wonder if he is just profoundly biased. After all, has Bill Gates led this “intellectual life”? Has Steve Jobs? And if they have not, is that because they haven’t focused on ‘The Big Questions?’ Or is it because their ‘Big Questions’ aren’t about understanding Kierkegaard or examining Faulkner’s inner motivations?

If, as Deresiewicz says, “Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas,” then how is it that ‘an infrastructure to serve an essentially infinite number bytes of information to small boxes in every home in the world over the fucking air’ not an idea?

The beauty of living in the Silicon Valley is that you see, meet, read about, and see the work of countless individuals who are passionate about ideas every day. For some (not all) of them, elite educations were four+ years spent building a foundation to just enable them to be passionate about ideas. And that seems like fairly decent work by our best universities, even by Deresiewicz’s own definition of why they exist.