12312312

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers
By William Deresiewicz

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, 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 in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.
But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.
The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate 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.

You are all too elitist - Hodge
Higher education minister Margaret Hodge this week branded universities institutionally elitist as a two-year study found that selection procedures discriminated against the poor.
Ms Hodge said universities, even new ones, displayed a depth of cultural elitism found nowhere else in the public sector.
The report, published yesterday by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, exposes elitist attitudes among admissions staff.
Speaking at a widening-participation conference in London on Wednesday, Ms Hodge said the culture had to change. Universities had accepted the principle of widening participation but had yet to put it into action.
She said: "There is an institutional elitism which pervades the higher education system. I am not suggesting deliberate discrimination but what I think is embodied in the sector is that the criteria employed to select students deliberately exclude many young people from higher education.
"I want to build an intellectual elite not a social elite, which is what we have now."
The Ucas/Hefce Paving the Way project, based on a two-year study of more than 1,000 students, found that the admissions model that served the elitist higher education system of the past "continues to drive current admissions practice, which ill-serves existing applicant diversity and widening-participation objectives".
Poor students, mature students and those with vocational qualifications rather than A levels were disadvantaged. Coming from non-traditional backgrounds, they lacked the knowhow and family support to progress into higher education. Another study this week shows that old universities also discriminate against ethnic minorities, while new universities are biased in favour of some ethnic groups.
Tariq Modood, professor of sociology, politics and public policy at Bristol University and co-author of the report, said: "This is a wake-up call for higher education."
Speaking after the widening-participation conference, Ms Hodge said: "I think elitism is ingrained in the traditions and history of institutions and that is what must change.
"The systems are such that, whether it is in the way people are admitted to university or whether it is in the way they are treated while at university, it is more difficult for young people from poorer backgrounds.
"Universities cater for the middle classes and not for people from low-income backgrounds. What they now have to do is translate that commitment in principle to widening participation into experience and practice. They have to move from commitment to results."
Ms Hodge acknowledged that universities needed more money to reflect the additional costs of recruiting and retaining students from poor backgrounds. She said this had formed a significant part of the department's bid in next month's comprehensive spending review.
She said: "We need to think about what we offer young people in higher education. Bringing in a new cohort of people will need more investment in teaching and student support. We need to really value teaching in the higher education sector: all incentives in the past have focused on research."
The Paving the Way survey looked at students from under-represented working-class backgrounds in East London, Birmingham, Lancashire and Yorkshire. It revealed a continuing reliance on A level and GCSE grades as the basis for admissions decisions.
"Ensuring a more equitable and sensitive admissions practice that can respond to applicant diversity and support widening participation is a complex and time-consuming task.Responding to the charges of elitism, shadow higher education minister Alistair Burt said: "Margaret Hodge's obsession with class is threatening to overshadow sensible debate about the growth of higher education."