Excellent article, worth reading (in my opinion). I agree with most of what Brooks writes.
Personally, I think his description of higher education is basically incoherent and self-contradictory.
Like, on the one hand, he seems to lament a focus on intelligence and actually seems to be suggesting that we were better off before WWII when very few people went to college and those were mostly wealthy male WASPs who did not face notably selective college admissions criteria. Somewhat amusingly to me, he argues this was obviously a better world because it brought us things like the New Deal and victory in WWII. He seems not to have asked himself if maybe it was bad that the New Deal was needed in response to the Great Depression, or that victory in WWII was needed because there was actually a WWII (and note the II!).
But anyway, he then later complains that focus on intelligence isn’t true anyway, that “the game is rigged” and rather than sorting people by innate ability, it sorts them by how rich their parents are. So which is it? Bad to reward intelligence? Or bad it isn’t actually rewarding intelligence?
He then blames the US higher education system for creating an “American caste system”. And he cites the high career returns to a college degree as a major contributing factor. And it is certainly true that the US has experienced in recent decades a growing divide between the top few wealthiest households and ordinary households. But then he criticizes “the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success.” Uh, that’s the assumption you just used!
And if you know your US socioeconomic history, you know in the first decades following WWII, when the GI Bill first created an explosion in college graduates, many publics were greatly expanded, and so on, if anything that divide was shrinking. It basically wasn’t until the 1980s that it started expanding out again.
And for sure, I think the US higher education system often reflects that dynamic–not least the wealthiest private institutions, which have themselves become much wealthier much faster than ordinary US households, thanks in part to their own very high investment returns, but also to new donations from the families who have done the best in this dynamic. And then lot of what these colleges do with all that wealth is take the kids of already-successful families and help them stay similarly successful for the next generation. But I think the idea they are fundamentally causing this dynamic, rather than just being one of many components of the US socioeconomic system that are participating in this dynamic, is extremely weak.
Which is not to say I think issues like that growing divide are not real issues. I also think it is a real issue when employers require college degrees for jobs that really don’t require college education. I also think we have not done enough to encourage non-college post-HS paths like apprenticeships. And while I do not in fact think it is true all selective employers only look at Ivy+ colleges, it is certainly a problem whenever a next-step gatekeeper assumes the name on your college sweatshirt matters more than your actual transcript and other individual characteristics. But focusing on blaming the colleges themselves for how our society functions is to me again ignoring the forest for the trees.
And then his reform proposals are mostly very weak tea, the sorts of things that are happening anyway. Like, what in practice does this mean?
Now would be a good time for college faculty and administrators to revisit first principles in service of building a convincing case for the value that their institutions provide to America.
I am not aware of a time when college presidents and such did NOT view this as part of their job. They are always trying to make the case their institutions provide value to American society, citing first principles.
Or this:
In a reformed meritocracy, perhaps colleges now struggling with declining enrollments might develop their own distinctive niches in the ecosystem, their own distinctive ways of defining and nurturing talent. This in turn could help give rise to an educational ecosystem in which colleges are not all arrayed within a single status hierarchy, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton on top and everyone else below.
Dude, have you like NEVER met an engineer? Are you not aware a variety of specialty schools (some independent, some within various larger institutions) already exist, and in fact are doing a great job educating and placing working professionals? I would be a lot more interested if he even seemed aware that, say, Cal Poly SLO actually exists.
To me this just underscores the fundamental perception problem here is not the structure of US higher education, it is people like Brooks who are in fact reinforcing the very perceptions they claim are bad! Like he is literally arguing we should see US colleges as all aligned on some generic ranking, and then arguing it is bad that people see them that way. So he could maybe not actually do that!
Or this:
We need to stop treating people as brains on a stick and pay more attention to what motivates people: What does this person care about, and how driven are they to get good at it? We shouldn’t just be looking for skillful teenage test-takers; we want people with enough intrinsic desire to learn and grow all the days of their life.
Uh, you might want to check in with all the parents of high numbers college-bound kids on the uncertainties surrounding holistic review college admissions.
Anyway, there is much more there of a political nature, which is obviously off topic. And I want to emphasize I don’t think all his individual criticisms of US higher education are completely unfounded. I just think his way of describing the US higher education system as a whole is both incoherent and uninformed, which I don’t think is really helping.
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@NiceUnparticularMan I read the whole thing and had a lot to say, but you said it better. I also perceived some contradictions.
One thing I will add: I find the idea of rating people’s “soft” qualities to be intrusive and possibly prejudicial. In fact, since kids (and families) are generally excessively dependent on external motivators, students might even be kinder just to get a good score, which is psychologically damaging.
The title of this article is puzzling. I believe the US is not ready for a female president, let alone a female of color (I am female). I would leave it at that. That said, it is helpful to try to understand class resentment that can indeed lead some to a vote for Trump. It is a bit myopic to blame a few universities. Are they controlling the price of food?
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Yep, you nailed it (and provided the short synopsis of most of Brooks’ writing: “basically incoherent and self-contradictory.”)
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This is a huge pet peeve of mine with this apparently popular genre of diatribes against the state of higher education today. It almost seems required that you mention the Ivy League, or Harvard, or something like that in the title.
But then when you look at the actual issues being discussed, it turns out at most those particular colleges are only a small part of the issue, and sometimes not at all. Which is hard to avoid, because at the end of the day, the vast, vast majority of four-year college graduates, or indeed even very successful college graduates, will not have attended one of those few colleges. They are just too small, even collectively, and it is a very big country.
And again, in this case, Brooks is specifically complaining about people putting these few colleges on a pedestal . . . while doing exactly that!
Of course I guess an article titled, “How Cal Poly SLO Broke America,” would not only be less click-baity, but also already be hinting at the deeply flawed analysis to come.
Or take the WSJ’s, “Sorry, Harvard. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now.” As we discussed in that thread, something like, “Sorry, Penn State Altoona. Everyone Wants to Go to College in the South Now,” would have actually fit the data. But not the target audience, I imagine.
Oh well. I wouldn’t even care, except I actually do think there are very serious issues worthy of discussion in these areas. It is just counterproductive in my view to wrap them in audience-pleasing Ivy-bashing when that really isn’t the nature of the issue.
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Kinda like when Brooks was writing his book The Road to Character while cheating on his wife with his decades-younger research assistant for said book?
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The title “How the Ivy League Broke America” is not only misleading and even inane, I think in this day and age, if the wrong person reads it, it could inspire violence. Scapegoating Ivies will go over well with many despite the flaws in Brooks’ argument.
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It was a long, meandering, illogical essay for sure.
Personally, I believe USNWR broke the system by attempting to rank something that is inherently not conducive to that. As a result too many highly qualified students apply to too few schools.
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There were some things I actually really liked about the essay, and several points I agreed with, and some I simply found thought-provoking.
But I agree that THIS may be the real story not being told.
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Without looking, is it pretty much a re-write of Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest”?
Something else may be relevant, which is the growing economic divide between the economic winners and everyone else. What it means is that there is now greater pressure to get into the economic elite, since the likelihood of downward mobility if one does not is greater than in past generations. A more competitive society also tends to bring out motivation to try to exclude competitors in the competition to get into the elite.
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(and yes I do understand that you were quoting this from the article). When it comes to engineering and computer science, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are NOT at the top of the hierarchy. They are not even close. They are decent schools. I could understand someone going to Harvard or Princeton to study mathematics, or because they got great need based financial aid, and then ending up as a computer science major. That would be fine. This does not mean that these schools are the preferred schools in computer science or engineering. They are just perfectly good, along with a very long list of other schools.
A while ago I asked two high tech hiring managers whether they would prefer to hire a software engineer out of Harvard or U.Mass Amherst. They both immediately without any hesitation said U.Mass Amherst. This is entirely compatible with whom I am actually seeing being hired.
And yes, Cap Poly SLO would be like U.Mass in the sense that their graduates would also be preferred.
I think that high tech (first computers and then the Internet) may have upturned the “Harvard, Princeton, Yale” dominated world as much as anything else did.
And democracy does mean that if a sufficiently large percentage of the population thinks that the financial or political elite does not care about them, they might elect someone who will similarly turn things upside down, with a range of possible consequences (some good, some not so much).
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The interesting thing about engineering is that it is meritocratic, but the sorting happens after the first job. There isn’t a strong correlation between top performers and their undergraduate institution.
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As a regular reader (and disagreer) of Brooks, this seems like yet another passive-aggressive propaganda piece to back up his political views.
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Oh, I think I see where he and Halberstam differ. What Brooks is writing about is sort of the zombie version of The Establishment which had pretty much lost all credibility following the Vietnam War which was probably the major accelerant in its demise. Putting the politics of that era aside, Brooks gives way too much credit to Conant’s influence on higher education. He was president of one college, but there were others, too, starting in the 1920s and including, Meiklejohn at Swarthmore and Hutchins at Chicago, giving lip service to giving greater coherence and deference to intellectual ability in the recruitment of college classes.
Read the David B. Potts opus, “Wesleyan University, 1910-1970, Academic Ambition and Middle-Class America” (2015);
"Repeating and elaborating on thoughts expressed when serving as admissions director in the late-thirties, [President Victor L. Butterfield] stressed getting “the best in brains.”
but
[s]uch students should also have “character.” Traits he associated with character included “drive, buoyancy, moral courage.” “a sense of fairness and justice”, willingness to “make sacrifices for the common good”, and “a desire to make this world a little better and happier place.”
p. 296 “Wesleyan University, 1910-1970”.
Butterfield was Wesleyan’s president for 24 years
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It’s a bit of an aside, but I think you have an incomplete understanding of the situation.
The most selective employers in the country (i.e. much more selective than the FAANGs) readily hire CS students from these colleges. They know that while the CS education at these colleges isn’t that great, many of the students joining the program are exemplary, and therefore still good hires.
This makes perfect sense, because that company never sees the best CS students from Harvard or its peers. Those students were either snapped up and taken off the market by their sophomore year of college, or are creating startups, or are joining PhD programs.
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The best students at Harvard though, would have been great students anywhere.
And, while maybe true for CS or engineers doing business consulting jobs, I don’t believe that people hiring for technical engineering positions are lining up at any Ivy League school, save Cornell.
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You are incorrect (at least for CS positions). This will be last post on this topic.
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Yes, if you re-read my post, I specifically mentioned that, along with engineers that do less technical facets of engineering.
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