It’s a turn of phrase from “The Wizard of Oz”. It means to deflect attention away from the real power sources (finance, law, government, media and large corporations) and onto - health care workers! For example.
Thanks for that info.
I think I’m going to bow out of the discussion now because my Spidey sense says that I’m starting to offend and that is not my intent at all.
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It’s a touchy subject. Brooks appears to have offended a lot of sensibilities. Of course Spoiler Alert the real point of revealing "the Man Behind the Curtain* is that once out in the open, it becomes clear that he is less powerful and imposing than he at first appears.
And maybe that’s where this discussion has led us: the Ivy brand is just a brand. It has power because we give it power.
I don’t think that the Ivy League broke America - they aren’t that powerful. Many, many people live their entire lives without giving a second thought to what is happening at Harvard. That being said, I think the growing inequity in our society is unhealthy and has led to a lot of divisiveness. While the educated/professional classes (and well paid workers in various skilled jobs) are doing well, we have a growing swath of our fellow citizens that seem to be holding on to a middle class life by the skin of their teeth.
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From “The Wizard of Oz”: Google Search
But that is exactly what Brooks is doing - he’s deflecting attention to academia. He’s trying to claim that all the ills of society that were caused by the real power sources have their origin in academia, and that we should blame academia for these.
I’ve lost track of who’s doing the deflecting. Yes, Brooks makes it very clear that he is categorizing a certain wealthy, highly rejective subset of academia as a source of power, but a lot of the pushback on this board comes in the form of “It’s not the college’s fault, it’s the people who get their diplomas from these places.” To which Brooks, I think, would retort - “But what would you expect, given their admissions policies?”
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Selective schools (absolutely not limited to the Ivy League people!) are a bottleneck, or a pressure point, if you will. They are both a symptom of widening inequality and a perpetrator. One of many perpetrators. But a diploma from a selective school opens more doors than one from a nonselective school. So it becomes more important to go to a selective school. Which is why so many people are so anxious to go to one.
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One thing I note is that it opens more doors at selective or elite jobs/companies. Those companies (e.g. McKinsey/GS/etc.) might be the ones that perpetuate and accentuate socio-economic disparities. McKinsey, for example, might suggest new and innovative ways to sell more opioids that cause addiction in lower socio -economic groups. Or banks may push to make people pay back underwater mortgages because “it’s morally right to pay your debts” when the elites recognize the irrelevance of the morality with a bank.
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The graduates of these colleges are not messing up the country because they attended these colleges. That’s like claiming that expensive clothes are to blame for the issues that we have in this country because so many of the people who cause these issues wear expensive clothing.
For the people in power, attending these colleges is a status symbol, and they would go on to identical careers no matter what colleges they attend.
The graduates of the Ivies caused the Great Depression and were the architects of other issues that were far worse than what we have today, all while having an entirely different set of admissions criteria. The issues with society are largely because many of the checks on power have been eroded or eliminated, and that has absolutely nothing to do with admissions processes at the Ivies.
You seem to be falling into the fallacy of “if a kid doesn’t attend one of a handful of colleges designated as ‘elite’ by a subset of people in the wealthy classes, you may as well not have a college degree at all”.
Graduates of Alabama, UIUC, Wisconsin, Minnesota, U Washington, U Iowa, U Indiana, Ohio State, etc, are not unemployed or working for minimum wage. Students who attend these colleges have a wide range of opportunities for upper middle class and better paying jobs.
You also seem to be falling into the fallacy that the biggest obstacle to a college degree is qualifying for admissions. Admissions to these colleges has always been mostly about academic achievements, not about “special talents”, or the other holistic factors.
That is also true for public Universities with lower acceptance rates, Like UCLA, Berkeley, UNC, UT Austin, or Michigan. AOs at these Universities are not looking “to build a Class”. They’re looking primarily at academics (though they do look at the context of the academic achievements).
What’s keeping lower income students from attending these colleges, what is causing the “chokepoint” if you will, are affordability and accessibility, NOT admissions processes. The only people who believe that admissions policies are what is limiting access to a well paying career are people who aren’t worried about paying for college to which their kid has been accepted.
Moreover, the extreme focus on the ills of holistic admissions is the result of extreme focus on admissions to private colleges, which practice fully holistic admissions. This is fallacy generally held by families who look primarily at private colleges and aren’t worried about paying for private colleges.
The vast majority of college graduates are not going through the admissions process that Brooks seems to believe “Broke America”, and that includes the vast majority of colleges graduates working in high paying jobs. Most were accepted to their college primarily based on their GPA, test scores, and possibly letters of recommendation.
The biggest reason that high achieving students don’t attend college is because they cannot afford to do so, and that is the biggest reason that, if they do attend, they don’t graduate.
As a general rule, families who are worried most about admissions to low acceptance colleges are not families who worry about paying for said college, which generally means that they belong to the very top percentiles by income, and are, therefore, a minority among people whose kids attend college.
Brooks draws a connection between the difficulties that wealthy kids have to be admitted to “elite” private colleges with holistic admissions and the differences in income between people who have a college degree and those who don’t requires. More than anything, this demonstrates that Brooks is a privileged affluent man who has absolutely no idea about college admissions for the vast majority of the USA.
Because of this, his conclusions are bunk.
His article reminds me of all the threads here in which people claim that it is impossible to be accepted to college, since colleges all have acceptance rates of below 10%.
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That’s kind of not what she said.
I agree with this. But, then again, so would Brooks. That goes along with his larger point that “these schools” - however many of them you squeeze into the label “Ivy League” are mainly the fever dreams of the very rich.
Brooks would probably agree with this too. The overwhelming majority of colleges in America do not receive enough applications to participate in anything resembling a sorting process.
I don’t remember Brooks saying that.
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So here is what Brooks actually says in the provided summary:
But the diploma divide isn’t only a political divide. It’s a social divide. High-school-educated people die eight years younger than college-educated people, on average. They are much more likely to perish from opioid addiction, to have children out of wedlock, to be obese, to say they have no close friends. The academic-performance gap between kids who come from affluent families and those who come from less affluent families is greater than the academic gap between white and Black students in the age of Jim Crow.
There is a chasm dividing American society, and it is defined primarily by education levels. For the past year, I’ve tried to understand this chasm—where it came from, and what can be done to close it.
If one takes this definition seriously: primarily using education level; their kids are on the good side of the academic performance gap; they have lower rates of opioid addiction, children out of wedlock, obesity, and social isolation; and they have longer expected life spans . . . then I do not in fact see why you would exclude, say, highly-compensated surgeons.
But if your point is that despite what Brooks said here, in fact we always should have understood this WAS just a political hit piece, that his real agenda was just to put some sort of half-baked, incoherent socioeconomic sugar-coating on what in truth is just a particular brand of right wing politics, and their particular sense of the “real power sources” we should be blaming for all the troubles in the country and the world . . . then sure, I would agree that is what was really going on.
Indeed, that was the very point I was making.
To which I would respond, Brooks, you completely missed the point and that is a terrible response.
The chasm you were purportedly describing, Brooks (although some think you didn’t really mean it in the first place), is not in fact “the fault” of people who get a college education either. It is “the fault” of a system where certain sorts of work are much more highly compensated, and investors in such operations are more highly compensated still. So if you don’t do that sort of work, and don’t invest in it either, you are far less likely to get various desirable socioeconomic outcomes.
Blaming the workers in those operations makes no more sense than blaming the schools that educated those workers. All that, in fact, is obviously a “deflection” from the actual cause of those disparities, the economic system which produces such disparate outcomes for the actual operations in question.
And I would further say to Brooks, to the extent you actually had anything resembling a proposal for college admissions, it was just to propose things they already do! Because you basically described modern holistic review admissions.
But again, this is a handy “deflection” from thinking seriously about what actually causes those disparities in outcomes.
I guess this depends on what you mean by nonselective.
But many, many people are happily going to, say, non-flagship-level public universities where admissions is mostly guaranteed if you meet certain basic qualifications, getting a four-year degree, and going on to successful professional careers. And actually, that also describes some flagships too, like Iowa and Iowa State.
That said, I have encountered online kids and sometimes parents who are in fact very anxious about the idea of going to a college like Iowa or Iowa State, let alone a non-flagship-level public. But to the extent they actually believe it is impossible to have upper middle class outcomes if you go to such a college, they are demonstrably mistaken.
I note that getting a first job in a commercial bank from which you can work your way up is not in fact as hard as getting a first job at a top tier investment bank like Goldman Sachs.
And in fact, to sort of come full circle, a lot of college-educated people are going to have successful careers at commercial banks and end up on the right side of Brooks’ purported “chasm” in the sense their kids will be competitive for very selective colleges, they will be wealthier and healthier and live longer on average, and so on.
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Um, I wouldn’t call 133 posts (and counting) evidence of such a deflection.
Indeed.
It is one thing to note that the path to upper middle class outcomes is possible through a variety of higher education paths. Indeed, you do not even have to start at a four-year college, it is demonstrably possible to start at a community college, then transfer to a four-year college, then get a degree that qualifies you to begin a career that will end up landing you in the upper middle class.
But that is “possible” in the sense of what the schools in question can do for you. You still have to be able to pay whatever it costs. And those costs can be much more than just tuition and fees. You have travel, insurance, and living expenses. You have the opportunity costs of time spent in school and not working for pay. You possibly end up with debt that needs to be serviced. And on and on.
All these things can in practice end up derailing a kid who could have succeeded in these schools, and could have had very different career options.
That is very much a real problem, but it is not a problem of college admissions. However, as you imply, it is the sort of problem that a typical Brooks’ reader likely has very little personal familiarity with.
Sure, maybe “attempted deflection” would be better. Brooks tried to deflect, various posters here quickly called him out on it, and here we are.
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I think it’s what back in the Dark Ages used to be called - a discussion.
Are you referring to what happened here, or Brooks’ piece itself?
I agree it would be wrong to accuse anyone here of “deflecting” as opposed to simply engaging in a discussion. Regardless of their point of view, I think everyone here is being sincere and trying to identify real issues worthy of serious consideration.
Brooks, though, I don’t know. Brooks makes a living having people pay him for his opinions (unlike those of us here, or at least I hope no one is getting paid and I am just missing out!). And I personally think he is very conscious of his branding/marketing.
And so I do think, as I suggested before, he is therefore very conscious of who we chooses to target for criticism, and who he is implicitly or sometimes explicitly defending from criticisms. And whatever you want to call that, I see this piece as being consistent with that sense of what he is doing.
Yeah, I don’t know what to say about all that. The guy on PBS News Hour seems pretty sincere to me.
I think Brooks’ point, that there is a chasm between people with different education levels (which, I now notice, has little to do with selectivity levels) is valid.
The question is, is the educational divide a cause, or a symptom?
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As one who graduated in 1972 from an Ivy and saw the “counter-culture” consume the narrative on campus, I have thought for a long time that the main way the Ivy League “broke America” for its students was any sense of understanding of much of the rest of the country, the then so-called “middle America”. This continues today in the “woke” era with over 95% of the professors identifying as Democrats or further left.
Brooks is an example of this phenomenon. He focuses on the upper middle class, the “bobos in Paradise”. He does not relate to or speak to working or middle class citizens who don’t watch PBS. That is why he is in the Atlantice and why he attracts attention on this forum.
To be clear, I value the opportunity and education I obtained from my undergraduate experience. I was unusual coming from a small rural town so I had the advantage of comparing what was taught or assumed about “middle America” and my own experience of it. Understanding ordinary Americans is a major blind spot at the Ivy League (and of Brooks as well.) But there is so much more there than this blind spot.
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