How the Ivy League Broke America

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The Ivy League has created a system that rewards wealth and status, making it harder for students from lower-income families to succeed. This focus on standardized testing and grades has diminished curiosity and exploration in childhood. To reform education, we should prioritize traits like curiosity, social intelligence, and motivation over mere academic performance.

Key Takeaways:

1. Encourage holistic learning that fosters curiosity and social skills.
2. Address systemic inequalities in college admissions to support diverse backgrounds.
3. Redefine merit to include personal qualities beyond academic achievements.

Highlights from Article

In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities. They are impressive institutions filled with impressive people. But they remain stuck in the apparatus that Conant and his peers put in place before 1950. In fact, all of us are trapped in this vast sorting system. Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street. Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s. Even being a well-rounded kid with multiple interests can be self-defeating, because admissions officers are seeking the proverbial “spiky” kids’the ones who stand out for having cultivated some highly distinct skill or identity. All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.

The system overrates intelligence.

The whiz kids didn’t grow up to become whiz adults.

But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant’but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.

3. The game is rigged. The meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. But what it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college-admissions arms race. The gap between what rich parents and even middle-class parents spend’let’s call it the wealth surplus’is huge. According to the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits, the author of The Meritocracy Trap, if the typical family in the top 1 percent of earners were to take that surplus’all the excess money they spend, beyond what a middle-class family spends, on their child’s education in the form of private-school tuition, extracurricular activities, SAT-prep courses, private tutors, and so forth’and simply invest it in the markets, it would be worth $10 million or more as a conventional inheritance. But such is the perceived status value of a fancy college pedigree that rich families believe they’ll be better able to transmit elite standing to their kids by spending that money on education.

4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system. After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated.

5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers’educators, corporate recruiters, and workplace supervisors’impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster’congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.

Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs. Populist leaders worldwide traffic in crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies, all aimed at telling the educated class, in effect: Screw you and the epistemic regime you rode in on.

The challenge is not to end the meritocracy; it’s to humanize and improve it. A number of recent developments make this even more urgent’while perhaps also making the present moment politically ripe for broad reform.

What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.

• Struck me as a powerful line. Also reminds me of Brook’s book on empathy.

The German rationalists reorganized the forests, planting new trees in neat rows and clearing away all the underbrush. At first, everything seemed to go well. But as the Germans discovered too late, the trees needed the underbrush to thrive. Without the organic messiness that the rationalists had deemed superfluous, the trees' nutrient cycle got out of whack. They began ailing. A new word entered the German language’Waldsterben, or “forest death.”

The organizational-leadership expert Mark Murphy discovered something similar when he studied why people get fired. In Hiring for Attitude, he reports that only 11 percent of the people who failed at their jobs’that is, were fired or got a bad performance review’did so because of insufficient technical competence. For the other 89 percent, the failures were due to social or moral traits that affected their job performance’sour temperament, uncoachability, low motivation, selfishness. They failed because they lacked the right noncognitive skills.

Our meritocratic system encourages people to focus narrowly on cognitive tasks, but curiosity demands play and unstructured free time. If you want to understand how curious someone is, look at how they spend their leisure time. In their book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, the venture capitalist Daniel Gross and the economist Tyler Cowen argue that when hiring, you should look for the people who write on the side, or code on the side, just for fun. “If someone truly is creative and inspiring,” they write, “it will show up in how they allocate their spare time.” In job interviews, the authors advise hiring managers to ask, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”

• Amazing interview question (but a little invasive)

In chaotic situations, raw brainpower can be less important than sensitivity of perception. The ancient Greeks had a word, metis, that means having a practiced eye, the ability to synthesize all the different aspects of a situation and discern the flow of events’a kind of agility that enables people to anticipate what will come next. Academic knowledge of the sort measured by the SATs doesn’t confer this ability; inert book learning doesn’t necessarily translate into forecasting how complex situations will play out. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock has found that experts are generally terrible at making predictions about future events. In fact, he’s found that the more prominent the expert, the less accurate their predictions. Tetlock says this is because experts' views are too locked in’they use their knowledge to support false viewpoints. People with agility, by contrast, can switch among mindsets and riff through alternative perspectives until they find the one that best applies to a given situation.

• Love the term of metis. Also, appreciate the importance of agility (and in my experience, people who crush SATs aren’t always agile in the slightest)

As the education scholar Todd Rose writes in The End of Average, this system is built upon “the paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.” The whole system says to young people: You should be the same as everyone else, only better. The reality is that there is no single scale we can use to measure human potential, or the capacity for effective leadership. We need an assessment system that prizes the individual over the system, which is what a personal biography and portfolio would give us’at least in a fuller way than a transcript does. The gatekeepers of a more effective meritocracy would ask not just “Should we accept or reject this applicant?” and “Who are the stars?” but also “What is each person great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?”A new, broader definition of merit; wider adoption of project-based and similar types of learning; and more comprehensive kinds of assessments’even all of this together gets us only so far. To make the meritocracy better and fairer, we need to combine these measures with a national overhaul of what UCLA’s Joseph Fishkin calls the “opportunity structure,” the intersecting lattice of paths and hurdles that propel people toward one profession or way of life and away from others.Right now, America’s opportunity structure is unitary. To reach commanding heights, you have to get excellent grades in high school, score well on standardized tests, go to college, and, in most cases, get a graduate degree. Along the way, you must navigate the various channels and bottlenecks that steer and constrain you.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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