college admissions is a machine

galoisien
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 09:09:55 +0000

And of course everyone knows that. Well, some poor little innocent underclassmen on this forum do continue be painfully unaware of this fact, but you know what I mean.

Yet two months after decisions (and quite happy!), the fact still bothers me though – and maybe it bothers some of you. A while ago, I posted a little diatribe on privilege and admissions – and I wish to apologise for that. It was just a little pondering, and I think my intended target was the products of ‘the machine’.

Some of us after all, get rather queasy at the knowledge that schools like Exeter or Andover send 40-50 kids to Harvard each year. It’s not that we’re faulting them for being brilliant or for their having been raised in a nurturing environment, and note that my labels won’t specifically apply to those schools (it just reminds me of the concept), but it’s the idea this whole scene seems like a factory sometimes. At times, it seems the prep school and the Ivy League institutions are just points along the assembly line chain, manufacturing our doctors, lawyers and I-bankers. The most well-off of parents can be often be found among the factory workers. I am not at all faulting the idea that college admissions can be an industry – as any student of the dismal science knows, there must be some system to allocate goods efficiently, and why not take advantage of market forces?

Yet, does the industry serve the students, or is it that the students are enslaved to the industry?

There’s a bit of the concept of educational determinism involved – was free will truly involved, or only because these students’ environmental factors have plotted the course of their lives? Maybe it’s my delusional naivete, but my conception of Ivy League students (and of similar calibre – the “cream of the crop”) has been for a while that of students who transcend the path Fate set out for them. And I’m not talking about “my parents wanted me to get into school X and I got into an even better school” sort of way.

I do not have anything against doctors, lawyers, i-bankers and the like. It takes a lot of work to get into those professions and such people deserve to be proud. But do the students produced get consumed by the rather powerful organisations they join? I’m not expecting that all of the top brilliant business students have ambitions of working to found massive profitable-yet-humanitarian (following the classical idea that seeking economic profit develops an industry and its surroundings) development efforts in developing nations. But on the other hand, it is rather de-inspiring to read of financially successful Harvard graduates in the news who become like … any other executive (maybe with a higher salary). How have they transcended the path set out for them?

There is no doubt that students of ‘elite institutions’ are highly intelligent.
The question is, do the majority of the students produced reinforce the machine, or do they work to transcend it? It must be one or the either, for there is no such thing as “have no effect” for students of Ivy League calibre.

These past 100 years have produced millions of such students, but the majority of students seem to be those who reinforce the machine. When I hear of efforts to overhaul or reform education, I rarely see such students at the forefront. The Ivy Leaguish graduates in my state work silently in their comfy office jobs at the state’s top firms. Maybe earlier in their lives they were “active in the community,” but they seem rather invisible to me!

Too invisible perhaps, that I may be mistaken about the efforts of these students. I know of plenty of such students who work to “transcend the machine,” working tirelessly with a vision to set up schools that will be different in approach from the rest, or using their amazing skillsets to charter development efforts overseas. Yet these seem to be in the minority.