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(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, September 11, 2004

SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME

II


A University Diaries Series

[for background, see UD, 8/22/04]



Interviewer:


You point out that a significant number of students who graduated from Colorado College at around the same time you did have gone on to impressive, interesting careers. And you note that that also holds true for students from other good small colleges that rarely make it to the top of high-achievers' desperate-to-get-in lists. Yet applicants today who don't get into a brand name school imagine that their futures are ruined. Why do you think there's such blindness to the reality that many of the most talented and accomplished adults around aren't products of the most prestigious colleges? And why do these kids' parents seem not to have learned from their own life experiences in that regard?

Gregg Easterbrook:


I think parents are key. The successful boomers who control the nation's desirable suburbs and drive the right cars and eat in the right places are all convinced that college was the absolute formative thing that got them where they are. In a general sense, they're right; they got to live in great places like Bethesda, Maryland, and Winnetka, Illinois, because they went to college and studied and were well prepared at a moment when the economy was shifting from an exertion economy to a knowledge economy. But it's education generally—not any specific college—that did it for them. The boomers misanalyze the situation and think, Oh, such-and-such person must have gone to Harvard to get where he is. But the relevant fact isn't that he went to Harvard, but that he got a good education somewhere. And a good education is now available at a hundred, maybe two hundred colleges in the United States.