COST BENEFIT TO A $300,000 HYPE (HARVARD, YALE, PRINCETON ELITE) VOCATIONAL EDUCATION?

COST BENEFIT TO A $300,000 HYPE (HARVARD, YALE, PRINCETON ELITE) VOCATIONAL EDUCATION?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(August 23, 2010)

“When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business . . . We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorification form of vocational training.”

William Deresiewicz, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, Summer 2008

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REFERENCE:

One of my regular readers, a Canadian and a professional engineer, alerted me to this article in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. Dr. Deresiewicz is a product of HYPE (Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite) where he matriculated as a student and also has taught. My reader knows that for the past quarter century I have been saying many of the things in this article, as has my colleague and friend, William L. Livingston IV.1

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A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

I really like this article. http://www.theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leader ship/.

It hits on many of the points raised by yourself and Bill Livingston. Maybe a trend is developing. I hope so.

Best wishes,

George

P.S. I originally discovered this article in a publication called Utne Reader. I have subscribed to it for at least a decade. The article in Utne Reader is somewhat revised from this one, but it's the same content and message. Utne Reader is a digest of reprinted articles from the alternative press: www.utne.com

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

George,

Thank you for alerting me to this piece. Yes, it has many themes similar to what Bill and I have been writing about over the years. The problem is that a long piece like this is unlikely to be read by many.

Considering it is two-years old the status quo and business as usual has not changed one iota at HYPE, or anywhere else because of it. Nor will it until people have the vision, courage, determination, and yes, the risk taking inclinations necessary for social transformation. We don’t create such leadership because the system doesn’t support such leadership. We have had leaderless leadership so long that it is now considered leadership. It pains me when I pick up a best selling book on leadership only to find it reifies the obvious and the conventional from the perspective of institutional infallibility.

Two things I’ve said repeatedly. I am glad that I was born poor because that meant I had no safety net. I’m happy as well that I’ve never left my roots or the people that made me, me. I am still a Clinton, Iowa boy out in the world fencing with windmills.

My whole life has been an attempt to point out to my children and friends how the system is stacked against them; how they are willing participants in their own enslavement be it cultural programming, lifestyle, mimicking the rich and famous, or being obsessed with following authority, celebrity and the pedigreed without reflecting on their own station, situation and relation to the scheme of things.

Too many I have known have been drawn into the energy-sapping intrigue of career, promotion and professional acceptance. This has been at the price of their identity, dignity and self-realization.

They become, as a consequence, a diligent affectation of what they are not to the dilution of what they are. They are victims of the private terror of public failure. So, they become safe hires, stay put in a miserable job, take orders from an incompetent boss who when failure occurs, and it always does, force them to take the brunt of the blame or be made redundant.

When I was a consultant, I worked with Ivy Leaguers and was impressed with their analytical but not their empathetic skills. They saw me as an anomaly as they often worked for me, especially when I was a contract consultant for The American Management Association.

One especially perceptive Ivy Leaguer during those days said I was a strong mind trapped in my own glutinous frustration. In other words, I enjoyed pissing people off to calibrate their reaction.

He also said that I enjoyed going against the grain to turn dogma on its head and that I delighted in asking those in power embarrassing and sometimes unpardonable questions. I smiled at this because I didn’t think it was too wide of the mark. “You don’t care what I think of you?” he said finally. I didn’t answer.

I offer this as preamble to what follows, which are highlighted excerpts of Dr. Deresiewicz’s article.

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IVY RETARDATION – INABILITY TO CONNECT WITH ORDINARY PEOPLE

The author had a plumber working in his home, and he had no idea how to talk to him. “It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy . . . elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there. . .

“This is not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanism that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public ‘feeder’ schools . . .

“Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated . . .

“Because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone one in it . . .

“We were the best and the brightest, as those places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright . . .

“I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t smart . . . social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms (of intelligence), are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. . .
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IVY RETARDATION – TEST TAKING MENTALITIES

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

“SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those (rankings) . . .

“They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity, not only your identity, but your value . . . what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests.

“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.
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IVY LEAGUE EDUCATION – ENTITLED MEDIOCRITY

“An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there . . .

“The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy . . . The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair (if I got caught cheating or failing and penalized for it because I have the self protection of the old-boy network that now includes girls) . . .

“Elite schools nurtured excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale student I know calls ‘entitled mediocrity.’ A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough . . .

“It’s no coincidence that (President George W. Bush), the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale . . .

“It’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to under performing CEOs are an adult version of the A- . . .

“The belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club . . .

“One of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security . . .

(The failure to take school teaching jobs is based on the rationale) “Wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? . . .

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IVY LEAGUE SYNDROME – ANTI-INTELLECTUAL IMMATURITY

(The fight to get into Ivy League schools is intense) “Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They have been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure . . .

“If you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual . . .

“Being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework . . .

“If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them . . . that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers . . .

“Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas, and not for the duration of the semester . . .

(Most students of elite universities seem) “Content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them . . . (few) have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim’s soul . . .

“If students want (a transformation) conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal college . . .

“When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business . . . we are slouching, even at elite schools, towards a glorified form of vocational education . . .

“There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers, holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty . . . the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni . . .

“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 . . .

“It’s no wonder that the students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused . . .

“Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society, and then realizing the vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile . . . it takes more than intellect; it takes imagination and courage . . .

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IVY LEAGUERS – TEACHER PLEASERS AND LOOK ALIKES

“Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system . . . (they are) world-class hoop-jumpers and teach-pleasers, getting A’s (no matter how pointless the subject) . . .

“I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone look . . .(they are) thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance, and affect, that go with achievement (Dress for success, medicate for success.) . . .

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IVY LEAGUERS – FEAR OF SOLITUDE

“A pretty good description of an elite college campus (is) never being allowed to feel alone. (I asked that question) What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? (A student answered) I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself . . .

“Emerson says that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. (One of the students interrupted) Wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend? . . .

“There has been much talk of the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude . . . Now students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships . . .

“What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude . . .

(A student asked) “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time; one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system . . .

(The author references Al Gore, John Kerry, and George Bush as products of this Ivy League system and sees the next generation of leaders in) “The kid who’s loading up on AP courses in junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone to think. (This kid) will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.”

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FINAL NOTE

Amen!

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Be always well,

Jim

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1 See WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), THE WORKER, ALONE! (1992), THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998), CORPORATE SIN (2000) and A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007) by James R. Fisher, Jr., or THE NEW PLAGUE (1985), HAVE FUN AT WORK (1988), FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES (1990) and DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) by William L. Livingston IV. Both authors went to secondary or tertiary universities outside the Ivy League, a fact that is unimportant other than that ideas expressed in this piece are old hat to them. Most readers are unlikely to know traditional publishers are enamored of Ivy League protocol and the hindsight thinking that emanates from it. As I’ve said in one of my recent missives those in charge of job creation in this recession have never run a mom-pop business, never been made redundant, never struggled to make a mortgage payment and may have compassion for the unemployed but little sense of their plight in human terms, and therefore a total inability to connect.