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Friday, September 03, 2004
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Take it slow, and Daddy-o, you can live it up and die in bed. [A nod to JVC Comments, and his penchant for song lyric titles…]
A couple of recent articles (Why Ranking Colleges is Good and Who Needs Harvard?) offer numbers and reasons in support of something UD has believed for quite awhile: There are many excellent colleges in the United States, and, in terms of outcome, Northwestern, for instance, is probably as good as Harvard. One article quotes experts estimating between one and two hundred such places, but this seems high to UD. She’d say there are around fifty or sixty colleges whose strong faculties will equip you to enter a first-rate graduate school. The authors of these pieces suggest that “going to the ‘highest ranked’ school hardly matters at all” in terms of success in life. Indeed, the highest ranked schools, according to Gregg Easterbrook, are “losing their status as the gatekeepers of accomplishment. …Pretty good schools of the past have gotten much better, while the great schools have remained more or less the same.” Paul Samuelson, reviewing college rankings which sometimes place Ivies like Dartmouth and Cornell below non-Ivy schools, concludes that “A Harvard degree just isn’t the status symbol it used to be. And that goes for Yale and Princeton too….The Ivies have lost some luster.” UD is pleased to see her sense of things strengthened here, and she hopes that people will conclude from it that they should stop turning their children into hyper-competitive wrecks. But what really struck UD in these articles was a peripheral comment Easterbrook made toward the end of his essay. For one group of young people - those from poor families - choosing the highest ranked school does matter: “Kids from poor families seem to profit from exposure to [such schools] much more than kids from well-off families. Why? One possible answer is that they learn sociological cues and customs to which they have not been exposed before. In his 2003 book, Limbo, Alfred Lubrano, the son of a bricklayer, analyzed what happens when people from working-class backgrounds enter the white-collar culture. Part of their socialization, Lubrano wrote, is learning to act dispassionate and outwardly composed at all times, regardless of how they might feel inside. Students from well-off communities generally arrive at college already trained to masquerade as calm. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds may benefit from exposure to this way of carrying oneself - a trait that may be particularly in evidence at the top colleges.” Too true. The losers - in college, graduate school, and life - can’t control their emotions. Haven’t learned to keep cool. The losers who love Rush Limbaugh are out of control. Rush himself is not. On zee other hand… gelid self-possession can be carried too far. Consider the hyper-stiffs from the Ivy League that the Democrats keep putting up for President - Al Gore, John Kerry… These guys have been refined out of existence. |