Memory is a slippery and shifting thing, but as I remember it, my friends in high school drove each other crazy competing to get into Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and if you didn't make that cut, well you could live with the rest of the Ivy League or some of the smaller schools like Swarthmore, Haverford or Amherst, and we were all very shocked when the class valedictorian, a kid who never had a single grade below A since elementary school,l shoved off to Stanford. Did he know something we didnt'?No pleasure in life was permissible unless it somehow helped you take a step toward Harvard: You like to swim? Well, if you get on a team and compete in the leagues around town, you might interest the Yale swimming coach. Oboe appeal to you? Maybe your ticket to Princeton. And so on.
The only kid I knew who did not got straight to college after high school joined the army in 1964, and we all felt very sorry for him. His life was over. He'd spend the rest of his life struggling. Met him three years later, 1967. He had just got back from Germany and was going to college on the GI bill. And he, unlike all the rest of us, was not sweating bullets about getting drafted and being sent to Vietnam. His path less taken had proved to be smarter.
Then there was the guy who dropped out of college and wound up working in a General Electric aircraft engine factory, doing a sort of welding which is so high tech welding seems a very poor description. He is a bright fellow and moved up the ranks to the manager level, but there GE drew the line; he could not become part of management because he did not have a college degree. So a bunch of guys who spent four years drinking on their fraternity veranda got moved ahead, until the plant managers got tired of calling in this non college grad to fix all the messes the college boys made, and now this guy, who put in 32 years at the plant has retired, quite comfortably at age 55.
Around here, in New Hampshire, there are legions of men and women who work at small factories, fewer than 300 employees making stuff for airplanes or spacecraft or submarines, or they work on the nuclear submarines at Portsmouth Navy Yard, and they are not living in McMansions, but they have nice homes, boats, cars and time off. And maybe, if their companies do not screw up too much, they will have good pensions.
Which brings me to the book by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, which examines the value, beyong bragging rights, of an education at one of those elite colleges which parents in New York City begin grooming their kids for in kindergarten.
Hacker and Dreifus do not deny the cachet these brand name schools carry among parents, nor does he deny the sense of validation of the gene pool, parenting prowess, good karma, sense of the cream having risen to the top and all those things which parents of children who receive those fat envelopes from the big three or the golden dozen may feel; you have arrived. Now what?
What actually happens once the phone calls to the grand parents are made, once the neighbors are casually informed of the family triumph, once the faculty at the high school know, once the congregation hears, once the decals go up triumphantly on the rear window of the car?
It should come as a great satisfaction to anyone who was ever turned down by Princeton to read of Hacker's study, such as it could be a study, of what happened to the Princeton class of 1973. After acknowledging the many famous and important people who have been Princeton graduates, Hacker and Dreifus make the point that for any school with thousands of graduates, you would expect some to become rich and famous and important.
But what happens to most of the graduates? The answer for this Princeton class appears to be: Not much. They become middle managers, and most lead comfortable lives. The median income was--and I may not have the exact number--but in the neighborhood of $160,000, which means half fell below that and some were probably several multiples above it . But, as a group, they were remarkably unremarkable, mediocrities, yes men, yes women, not cage rattlers or earth shakers, just people who had learned to game the system, not to change the system.
Which is not to say we don't need people who can keep the law firm running, who can manage the automobile plant or plot the marketing strategy for General Motors, but it does mean that if you go to Princeton, your roommate is not going to be the new incarnation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, or the intellectual heir to Albert Einstein, or even, most likely as interesting to listen to as Paul Krugman.
He'll likely be a guy who is really good at video games and can play these all day, then cram all night and ace the calculus exam the next morning.
Harvard grads speak of "Dropping the H bomb," on people when they are asked where they go or have gone to college.
The effect of the name in a bar or at the beach or on the cruise may be worth all the effort, which is to say, it may get you to first base, maybe even second base with the girl. But what happens then?
But the best reason I've heard for going to HYP is you'll spend four years having really interesting conversations with very bright people and you'll make friends you'll never forget.
I hope that's true, for all the effort and expense, but from personal experience, not by any sort of scientific survey, judging only by the people I have known who went through HYP, I'm not so sure.
Beyond the competition and the social cachet, there is the more important portrait drawn by Hacker and Dreifus: The university as a center of unworthiness. Faculty who are overpaid, who spend their time pursuing consulting gigs off campus, who regard their own students as a burden and impediments to their own self advancement, constitute a pretty unappetizing lot.
Faculty who, once established, work remarkably little and are burnt out and uninspiring. Classes taught by undergraduates to undergraduates or by graduate students. Papers graded, not by the professor who teaches the course, but by graduate students.
There are wonderful teachers who love what they do in the classroom, but no mechanism to select for these teachers and against the unworthy ones.
It's not a pretty picture.
The famous remark: "The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton," may have been the prototypically English snob statement. But it is this basic faith which guides so much public support for our own universities: From these playing fields will come the future leaders in thought, science and finance. But no. The big leaders lately have all been college drop outs: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg. Reminds me of the remark attributed to Tony Fauci, who now heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the man organizing research to combat AIDS. He was offered a cushy position on the faculty of Cornell University Medical College and turned it down to the stupefaction of the faculty, who were scandalized. How could he do this, he was asked, to turn down such a plum? "Someday, I'm going to be either very rich or very famous, but if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither." He denies having said that, but the story will not die. Probably because it so neatly summarizes what so many, who have been through the drill at elite institutions believe. Education at these places is not what the Greek source of the word "education" means: To Draw Out. Education is the pouring on, the beating down. People who have real internal compasses flee it. They have more important things to do.
Makes you wonder how our country is going to do, in the coming decades. Look at our institutions: The universities of Hacker and Dreifus; the courts and police of The Wire; the banks and financial institutions of mortgage backed securities; government thwarted by a disloyal Republican opposition; a "professional" or some would say "mercenary" military given missions by the likes of George W. Bush; the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
Gads, what dystopia. George Orwell would blush.
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