Excellent sheep

Any book about college is going to get personal and the number one way to get a bad Goodreads review is to get political. I'm a little surprised the reviews here weren't more raged filled. I'm even a little peeved at a recent New Yorker article that made a positive reference to this book and led me to check it out of the library, thankfully I didn't buy this.

Deresiewicz divides his book into four parts and the first part, aptly titled "Sheep", starts off with an excellent critique of the Ivies and Ivy League parenting. I graduated from Columbia in '03 and this all rang true. Despite some modicum of post grad success there's plenty of angst for me. Working tangentially in the financial industry I'm aware of the Ivy League parenting, tiger moms, and private-like public schools that feed into the US News and World Report driven frenzy that is our higher education system. Deresiewicz cites a lot of terrific books throughout - my favorite was The Marriage Plot, so his book is worth perusing just for the references. His writing style is enjoyably conversational. Conversational like you are having coffee with him right off an Ivy League campus, not like if you are the plumber trying to fix his sink - note that this book originated from an earlier Deresiewicz article inspired by the author's inability to converse with his plumber.

After diagnosing what's wrong, Deresiewicz turns to the "Self" in the second part by posing the much-debated question "what is college for?" He gives an exposition on the classic debate between academic versus vocational training, understanding that vocational in our knowledge-based economy means courses that prepare students for specific white-collar jobs like accounting or computer science, not like welding or plumbing. Deresiewicz bemoans the shift away from the academic humanities like English and towards the crasser vocational majors like Economics, although Economics itself is completely academic and often just glorified calculus, students majoring in it think they are preparing for a life on Wall Street. His distinctions between English and Economic departments isn't much different than the distinction people make between Brown and Columbia, which we did, foolishly, and which Deresiewicz derides, rightfully.
Deresiewicz's argument for the humanities echos the well-worn arguments that have been made since Mortimer Adler and Lionel Trilling. What Deresiewicz adds is the argument that a young person should try to create a secular religion out of the humanities. Getting religious is probably worse than getting political if you want a good GoodReads review. However, this isn't a bad way to view the humanities. Religion has been present throughout human existence, if you are going to do with the Abrahamic God, like the Gods of the Greeks, then something has to fill that vacuum, it might as well be the humanities, although Deresiewicz isn't a fan of the Western Cannon like I am.

However, Deresiewicz presents a false choice here. There are enough credits (120+?) to go around at college to take both humanities courses and more vocational-like courses. For example, at my Alma Mater, everyone had to take the same core curriculum for basically their first two years, which was a crash-course in the humanities surveying the great works of Western Civilization, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Mozart and Michelangelo included. So, what I think he's really upset about is college politics, fewer majors in English looks bad when it comes to budgeting. It doesn't mean students are not taking courses in the humanities or that they have to choose between English and Economics, really you could major in both, which is even idea Deresiewicz mentions, the double major, and shoots down. Deresiewicz wants more English majors because he's an English professor.

The next two parts really go off the rails. The third part reviews the type of schools out there that one could apply to besides a top ranked research university. Deresiewicz advocates for second tier small liberal arts colleges. These are not perfect institutions and are often filled with the less successful versions of affluent students who fill the first tier. This contradicts or ignores Deresiewicz's other argument that the greatest influence of a college on students are the other students, which is his argument against massive online courses, and argument I agreed with. However, the author is just an Ivy League professor and hasn't spent significant time at any of the other institutions he romanticizes. Advocating for second tier liberal arts colleges looks like a case of the grass being greener.

Deresiewicz is inconsistent with his views on second tier state colleges. When bashing massive online open courses, a critique where he’s spot on, he argues there’s a huge difference between Stanford and Fresno State, the students, but then later he favors second tier state schools as an Ivy alternative. I can’t keep track of the state school hierarchy. Does it matter? We are not supposed to make too much of the distinctions between Yale and Stanford but we should distinguish between Michigan State and directional Michigan? Towards the end this section he cheers Cleveland State for making an A student a C student because the student handed in her paper a few hours late because she was waiting tables. That’s horrible. Yes, we got extensions all the time at Columbia and guess what, we get them all the time at work too. The same privilege continues. Someone is always late to a meeting, clients miss mandated deadlines, managers make up fake deadlines because they anticipate the work being late, and there’s the old joke is software developers are 90% done 50% of the time. He just may be annoyed with the extension culture, but maybe Deresiewicz should call his plumber more often, repairmen and deliveryman are notoriously late and construction seems to always take twice as long as planned if you're lucky.

The author thinks that the teaching quality is better at second tier schools because the professors don’t generate as much research grants, so they are there more for the love of higher education than the research careerism. This is like saying triple A baseball players love the game more than major leaguers because they play the same game for less money and prestige.

The final part is a dumpster fire in a train wreck. First, Deresiewicz argues against the notion of Ivy League kids doing service for the poor and instead argues that they should work service jobs like waiting tables. Who can be against charity? Ignoring the fact that some students do wait tables and it doesn't make them any better, when I took principles of economics, one of the first questions we were asked is 'why doesn't Michael Jordan mow his own lawn?' It's because although he could physically do the job, his talents and skills are better applied elsewhere. Likewise, Ivy-League students have better skills to teach for America than to wait tables, a point the author would agree with himself. Any menial service job for an Ivy Leaguer is simply temporary and the student always knows they have much more privilege and social capital than their menial service peers. Deresiewicz thinks the problem is that Ivy students are entitled because they're over praised, but that's a problem of society at large (i.e. everyone gets a trophy). Books like Strangers in Their Own Land and White Fragility, detail the sense of entitlement that pervades working class whites and whites in general. Why would entitlement be only for the Ivy League set? Deresiewicz seems to think that working alongside working class people will decrease the sense of entitlement, but just tell those people you're going to live on welfare and watch the entitlement ensue.

It's ironic that Deresiewicz recommends menial service, because one of the characters in The Marriage Plot goes to Calcutta to help Mother Teresa and is not positively changed for it at all and he ends up the only character who still has no post-graduation plans fourteen months later, which also refutes Deresiewicz argument for a gap year.

But that's not all. Deresiewicz begins his last chapter by offering extreme outliers as examples of "bad" Ivy League graduates. These outliers are all politicians. Like President Obama, who is bashed by the author. After attacking Elaine Kagan and Condi Rice, Deresiewicz goes on the offensive against Michael Dukakis. Dukakis is considered a failure even though he was Governor of Massachusetts and won the Democratic presidential nomination, accomplishments that very few Ivy League grads can claim. The forces behind his loss in the '88 election had more to do with the anti-intellectual tradition, racism (i.e. Willie Horton), and fear of the unknown, than the rise of the technocrat. These three forces are major currents in our society that Deresiewicz never addresses because it makes non-Ivy Leaguers less romantic. In Deresiewicz's catalogue of bad celebrity grads, he even brings up Bill Clinton who didn't go to an Ivy. The whole notion of picking a few celebrity grads is ridiculous, they are like the 0.0001% and Deresiewicz in an earlier chapter argues that those celebrity grads are not at all representative of their colleges. Dishonestly using outliers is bad, kicking someone when they are down is a shame.

Deresiewicz thinks the educational system is to blame for our society, but I don't think that's the case and besides a bad case of sour grapes, that's his biggest flaw. Our economic system is the problem. The historic restrictions on social mobility have upped the stakes for the college admissions rat race. It's the lack of mobility and economic uncertainty that makes more vocational degrees more attractive. Our society is facing never before seen income inequalities because of the structure of the economy and not because of the rise of research universities. If you want to de-escalate the college admission arms race, bring back the humanities, and offer a better undergraduate experience, you need to implement big structural changes in the economy and social welfare systems (e.g., student loan forgiveness, single payer health care, affordable state college tuition, abolishing Balkanized school districts, etc.). Trying to change elite higher education in the plutocracy of late-stage capitalism is like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

And so, this book was much like that boat, started off in a righteous and grand manner, but ended up sinking catastrophically. Like most of life, college is what you make of it, an Ivy League education may be the best thing that happens to you and you may have time of your life, or not, and that's why it's hard to offer meaningful advice to a mass audience and easy to throw stones instead.