Were you to stroll into Whig Hall last Thursday afternoon, you would have found a bevy of Princeton students debating with a former Yale professor. The topic? Whether to send your kid to the Ivy League.
William Deresiewicz’s answer, for those who somehow missed his notorious New Republic article this summer, is “don’t.”
He expounds upon his argument in "Excellent Sheep," the book for which he is currently on tour. In it, he paints a bleak picture of the modern elite university. But his argument begins well before students are 18. Students as young as elementary schoolers become wrapped up in a process of admissions gaming that bills itself as a meritocracy but, with its emphasis on costly extracurriculars, looks rather more like classism. Building a Harvard-worthy resume requires both the WASP-y values of sportsmanship and the score-driven excellence of the “modern technocrat,” wrapping students up — whether by their own choice or their parents’ — in what Deresiewicz called “an egalitarian war of all against all.”
In Deresiewicz’s narrative, this anxious, utilitarian spirit then follows the students to college. And so it goes: Overloaded high schoolers became overloaded college students, and the whole cycle begins anew. But now, worried not about admission to a university but to the upper-middle class lifestyle of their parents, these students begin to frantically retool their resumes for the next hoop: finance and consulting applications.
In many ways, Deresiewicz’s arguments about the success-driven culture of Ivy League job recruiting are on point. Because the application process for many elite jobs resembles that of the college application process, it requires very little effort or imagination for the overwhelmed senior. For those who aren’t interested, there are other advertised options, but they are largely limited to the nonprofit world and, in some cases, the tech world (Blogger Cal Newport calls this our “stunted career vocabulary”, and David Brooks characterizes it as a “blinkered view of [our] options”).
In the Ivy League student’s psyche, these two options play the role of Disney princes and villains: one is poor but charming, the other pompous but wealthy. That’s the crux of the modern student’s anxiety, Deresiewicz argues: that there exists no gray area between success and failure, rich and poor, good and bad. That explains why students today are so risk-averse, why they insist on measuring the value of their education not in pages read but in future dollars. And it explains why elite universities have taken these changes in stride, no longer justifying their liberal arts curricula with humanist arguments but instead turning toward financial ones. Colleges, Deresiewicz laments, are no longer in the business of building souls.
Full disclosure: Right now, I am in the process of applying for consulting jobs myself. This is partly because, after spending the summer with people who got their public sector start in the private sector, I buy their pitch (work for us now; save the world later) and partly because my options do indeed feel somewhat blinkered (One thing Deresiewicz never acknowledges is that many industries students such as myself might formerly have entered, like academia and journalism, are dying or fossilized; another is that the gap between rich and poor is at almost at cartoonish levels).
But though I am anxious about the future, I’m still not ready to indict Princeton and the whole Ivy hamster wheel. Finding a vocational calling — or building a soul, which Deresiewicz wants to conflate — seems a much bigger task than can be answered in four years.
This is the point made by Joshua Rothman, the current archive editor at The New Yorker and the other guest at the panel. Like Rothman, who wrote an eloquent response to Deresiewicz, I think that while college can lay the groundwork for answering some of life’s big questions, it can’t hope to actually answer them. Ultimately, questions of purpose are more individual and less institutional than Deresiewicz would have us believe, and unlike the standardized tests that got us here, they aren’t multiple-choice. These are questions that require constant attention, constant reworking and reconsidering. And I doubt those questions will quiet down anytime soon, whether I’m filling out Excel speadsheets for Bain Capital or fetching coffee as an unpaid New Yorker intern or just sleeping in my childhood bedroom.
Certainly, Princeton and universities like it could do more to provide awareness of job opportunities beyond the finance and consulting/nonprofit binary (Career Services, to its credit, is trying, with events like the new “alternative” career fair). And I don’t mean to suggest that all jobs are created equal when it comes to soul-searching.
But I’m still not sure Princeton has sold my soul. By encouraging me to ask the kinds of questions posed by Deresiewicz and Rothman, and by surrounding me with peers as interested in figuring things out as myself, it might even have helped me start to build one.
Cameron Langford is a politics major fromDavidson, N.C. She can be reached at cplangfo@princeton.edu.
Read More
Encampments are not 'inherently unsafe.' Princeton should not arrest or expel students for them.
Daily Princetonian Editorial Board“We urge Princeton to cease student arrests and to refrain from expelling students simply for engaging in prolonged protest."
“We urge Princeton to cease student arrests and to refrain from expelling students simply for engaging in prolonged protest."
On encampments, free speech, and ‘time, place, and manner’ rules on university campuses
Christopher L. EisgruberPresident Christopher Eisgruber ’83 comments on encampments, free speech, and “time, place, and manner” rules.
President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 comments on encampments, free speech, and “time, place, and manner” rules.
Princeton needs to be a climate justice leader — emphasis on the ‘climate,’ emphasis on the ‘justice’
Alex Norbrook and Eleanor Clemans-Cope“Princeton must not only withdraw its support from injustices, but also positively re-invest in sustainable and community-informed initiatives.”
“Princeton must not only withdraw its support from injustices, but also positively re-invest in sustainable and community-informed initiatives.”
