I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week I discuss what a recent and widely read piece that criticizes higher ed’s impact on society correctly diagnoses — and overlooks.
The ‘Pressure Cooker’
In the weeks leading up to the election and the months following it, the American intellectual class broadcast its anxieties about how colleges have contributed to an unsettling moment in the country’s history, with a divided electorate set to pick a candidate who rejects the worldviews and even the world order set out by the pointy-heads. Some blamed it on the culture wars that colleges had harbored, others on the “diploma divide.”
David Brooks’s essay in The Atlantic on “How the Ivy League Broke America” gained a lot of attention, with reposts on various social-media feeds. You probably read it, but if you didn’t: Brooks argues that after James Conant, a former president of Harvard University, shifted the entrance requirements from family pedigree to test-measured intelligence, the race for college started to skew other patterns in American life. This “meritocratic pressure cooker,” as Brooks characterizes it, led to high-stakes testing, anxious parents, school curricula designed around assessments (rather than a love of learning), and graduates who enter fields (like finance) that are high-paying but possibly deleterious to society as a whole.
Brooks’s diagnosis has some truth to it. Success in school is not the same as success in life, as Brooks points out, and yet some portion of American society puts enormous resources into getting their children into the “right” college, and then pressuring them to pick a prestigious major. In the process, Americans devalued art and shop class, along with the training that might lead young people to skilled trades and other remunerative work that doesn’t require a college degree. And Brooks is right that the college “game is rigged,” and that it stands as one of the factors creating a new “American caste system” — although it’s hardly the only factor, or even the most important one.
However, Brooks blames these problems on American higher education — and in particular, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other elite institutions that “control the choke points of social mobility.” But throughout the essay, he tends to see higher education monolithically.
“If you’re a valedictorian in Ohio, don’t go to Ohio State; go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are,” Brooks writes of the attitudes out there. “All of us are trapped in this vast sorting system. Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street. Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s.”
Is this college rat race really the driving factor in the experience of most Americans, and in the deterioration of our civic values? Brooks acknowledges that, personally and professionally, he has spent much of his life in the elite system, which may have distorted his views. Most students don’t go to elite colleges, and many would be thrilled to go to Ohio State University. In fact, one of the problems here is not so much that great students want to go to Harvard rather than the local state flagship, but that the flagships want to be more like Harvard and become more exclusive to those local students.
More than anything, Brooks doesn’t sufficiently discuss how income inequality, fraying social safety nets, and the political power of the corporate sector drive anxiety and divisiveness among Americans — or how those factors shape the colleges and careers students feel that they have to pursue.
As an example of a career that has been closed off to students lacking an elite-college degree, Brooks points to journalism, a profession once dominated by working-class reporters that’s now “reserved almost exclusively for college grads, especially elite ones,” with more than 50 percent of staff writers at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal composed of elite-college alumni, according to a 2018 survey. But that may be as much a result of the state of newspaper journalism, an important industry that has been in freefall for decades — in part because of changing technology and reading patterns, but also because billionaires treated newspapers as real-estate investments or as a business to “right size” and sell at a profit. In this unsteady environment, people with family wealth can more safely choose a demanding, modestly paid, and risky profession — and persist until they reach its most prominent companies. And Ivy League graduates are more likely to come from wealth. (That said, some of the best journalists I know come from relatively modest college backgrounds.)
At the same time, apparently, status still counts, even when you’re arguing against it: Brooks suggests that the whole meritocratic system is flawed because studies show that graduates with a high IQ go on to “respectable” careers in law, medicine, and academe, but didn’t become “transcendent geniuses” who changed the world or won Nobel Prizes. This has an odd confluence, coming from an opposite direction, with the views of the Harvard economist Raj Chetty: He has argued that we can change society by giving more lower-income students access to Ivy League colleges and a handful of other highly selective institutions, paving their way to prominent corporate and government positions.
How about this? Forget about the Ivy League, Stanford University, and the rest. It would be great if they were accessible to more people — and to people who have the kinds of curiosity, commitment, and social intelligence that Brooks believes ought to be of the highest value in the education system. But they are never going to be accessible to the vast majority of students who need a college degree to advance in life. And if you read Anthony Abraham Jack’s work — or Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen, from about 20 years earlier — you’ll see that the culture of the elite institutions has long created hurdles for students from lower-income backgrounds.
Instead, as Ned Laff and I argue in our forthcoming book, focus on improving the institutions that serve the vast majority of students: Scores of curious and committed students attend community colleges, public regional universities, and modest private colleges, which do the heavy lifting of educating the nation. Students just need to be shown how to connect their personal motivations to the opportunities and resources at any institution. Such colleges are affordable, located near or within the communities students live and work in, populated with professors who are as competent as any you’d find among the elites, and don’t have the admissions requirements driving parents and students crazy, as Brooks paints it. And they have all the resources students need to acquire “respectable” careers — even “transcendent” ones.
