College is when your mind gets blown. Right?
Last year, author William Deresiewicz published a book, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which questioned whether the elite model of higher education—specifically the model the HYPsters (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) practice—still blows students’ minds. A model where most students get A’s, where everyone is expected to be busy, busy, busy all the time, and an elite college is a step on the path you’ve been on since age three.
I challenge anyone who attends one of these universities to read his book and not wonder if he’s right.
Dwight Garner at The New York Times sums the author’s argument up, explaining that Deresiewicz, as a Yale professor, worries “we’ve spawned a generation of polite, striving, praise-addicted, grade-grubbing nonentities—a legion of, as his title puts is, ‘Excellent Sheep.’”
Deresiewicz himself describes the problem as being that “the kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success.”
I remember the horrifying college application process all too well, and he’s right about one aspect of it. If you screwed around at all in high school, you can kiss those Ivies goodbye. In order to get into any of the schools in the top 25 U.S. News ranking, you cannot have anything less than a top GPA and amazing SATs, not to mention the extracurricular activities and whatever unique, life-altering experience you wrote about in your college essay. Getting into the top 50 isn’t that much easier.
It takes a certain personality type to manage such an accomplishment.
One of the reasons AU appealed to me is because the school did not seem to be courting those perfect students. I was not a perfect student. And in the same way you don’t want to date someone who doesn’t want to date you, I didn’t want to go to a college that didn’t want me. I was excited that the AU admissions counselor told me that AU valued work experience in the application, that I could apply test optional and that it would be okay that I didn’t try very hard in school when I was 15.
In fact, I was excited to be going to a school that was good, but was not necessarily elite. I was excited to have classes full of both Type A and Type B students. I was excited to be going to a school full of wonks, and not just a school full of future consultants and investment bankers.
But AU has been climbing in the rankings every year I’ve been here.
On the one hand, that’s a great thing. The value of my degree keeps increasing. It’s more and more prestigious to be able to shake hands with someone at a cocktail party and say, “oh, yes, I went to American” every year. In theory, that increased value means that AU can increase tuition and add to the endowment every year because we’re all getting more for what we pay. And, in theory, AU can use that extra tuition to give future students a better education through more resources, more interesting classes, more tenured professors.
But on the other hand….it feels like AU is raising my tuition every year just to stay competitive with schools like GW. And GW is doing it to stay competitive with with Georgetown. Who is doing it to compete with the HYPsters.
GW’s president even admitted it in a Washington Post article, where journalist Kevin Carey characterized the GW president’s philosophy as being that “College is like vodka,.....Vodka is by definition a flavorless beverage. It all tastes the same. But people will spend $30 for a bottle of Absolut because of the brand. A Timex watch costs $20, a Rolex $10,000. They both tell the same time.”
AU President Neil Kerwin hasn’t said the same. But I can’t help but suspect he feels the same way.
AU is using my ever-increasing tuition to build our brand. They are expanding the campus, building fancy new dorms like Cassell and Nebraska Halls. The school has increased our administrative personnel every year I’ve been here and our admittance rate is declining as we tell more students “no.”
We’re getting more selective.
It’s just a feeling. It’s hard to prove. But as I enter my last semester as an AU student, AU’s increasing eliteness hangs over campus. As AU goes up in rankings, it feels like the University is starting to value students who can make the grade over students who can make some noise. It feels like AU is beginning to value working at consulting firms and investment banks over working for nonprofit organizations. Peace Corps ads decorate shuttle buses across campus, but nearly twice as many students line up to hear from the World Bank at involvement fairs.
The higher in the rankings AU climbs, the more of an elite school we will become. And I’m worried that the more elite we become, the less we will value toppling the system that put elites there in the first place.
When I was a senior in high school, my mom was at a party, and she told someone I would be attending AU in the fall.
“Oh!” said the woman. “Well, if you want to be part of the political system, you attend GW. If you want to change the system, you attend American.”
My mom, for her part, didn’t quite know how to reply.
But I was so proud when my mom told me the story. I remember thinking how excited I was to go to a school with the movers, the shakers, all the wonks who wanted to change things. And now I’m worried that AU is privileging the U.S. News Rankings over keeping that reputation. That we’d rather be full of excellent sheep than a group of students who like to make some noise.
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sostergaard@theeagleonline.com
Shelby Ostergaard is a senior in the School of Public Affairs. She blogs at shelbyostergaard.com.
