Elite Education | The Point Magazine

The author never met anybody who would trade our social order for theirs, who wants to go back to that old Princeton world. And yet ... and yet there are disturbing ghosts around the campus. The old order haunts this one, and whispers that maybe something was lost as well as gained when we sacrificed all for the sake of high achievement, safety, an... See more

With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

In particular, the choice to valorize disruption and innovation sits uneasily with both the actual process of university education and the needs of careers that people will actually have. It’s also bad for society on net.

Starts with explaining how in the 1980s and 1990s, in elite schools (e.g. Harvard), there was a shift in focus from producing good corporate employees to the following:

Having an institution geared to producing really top-rate people who play within the system is not going to set the world on fire, but maybe we don’t  want  a world on fire.