Excellent Sheep

The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

William Deresiewicz

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476702735
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

A groundbreaking manifesto about what our nation's top schools should be—but aren't—providing: "The ex-Yale professor effectively skewers elite colleges, their brainy but soulless students (those 'sheep'), pushy parents, and admissions mayhem" ( People ). As a professor at Yale, William Deresiewicz saw something that troubled him deeply. His students, some of the nation's brightest minds, were adrift when it came to the big questions: how to think critically and creatively and how to find a sense of purpose. Now he argues that elite colleges are turning out conformists without a compass. Excellent Sheep takes a sharp look at the high-pressure conveyor belt that begins with parents and counselors who demand perfect grades and culminates in the skewed applications Deresiewicz saw firsthand as a member of Yale's admissions committee. As schools shift focus from the humanities to "practical" subjects like economics, students are losing the ability to think independently. It is essential, says Deresiewicz, that college be a time for self-discovery when students can establish their own values and measures of success in order to forge their own paths. He features quotes from real students and graduates he has corresponded with over the years, candidly exposing where the system is broken and offering clear solutions on how to fix it." Excellent Sheep is likely to make…a lasting mark….He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America….Mr. Deresiewicz's book is packed full of what he wants more of in American life: passionate weirdness" ( The New York Times ).

PART 1

Sheep

One

The Students

“Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: they have mastered them all, and with an apparent effortlessness, a serene self-assurance, that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. Today’s elite students, says David Brooks, project a remarkable level of “comfort, confidence, and competence.” In Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, the kids at a prestigious liberal arts college “seemed cheerfully competent at everything.”

Such is our image of these enviable youngsters, who appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality—as I have witnessed it among my former students, heard about it from the hundreds of young people who have written to me over the last few years or whom I have met on campuses across the country, and read about it in places where these kids confide their feelings—is something very different. Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. We all know about the stressed-out, overpressured high school student; why do we assume that things get better once she gets to college?

The evidence says they do not. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the twenty-five-year history of the study. In another recent survey—summarized by the American Psychological Association under the headline “The Crisis on Campus”—nearly half of college students reported feelings of hopelessness, while almost a third spoke of feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months.” College counseling services are being overwhelmed. Utilization rates have been climbing since the mid-1990s, and among the students who show up, the portion with severe psychological problems has nearly tripled, to almost half. Convening a task force on student mental health in 2006, Stanford’s provost wrote that “increasingly, we are seeing students struggling with mental health concerns ranging from self-esteem issues and developmental disorders to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-mutilation behaviors, schizophrenia and suicidal behavior.” As a college president wrote me, “we appear to have an epidemic of depression among younger people.”

If anything, the already dire situation in high school deteriorates further in college, as students suddenly find themselves on their own, trying to negotiate an overwhelming new environment and responsible for making decisions about their future that their childhood has left them unequipped to handle. An increasing number cope by going on antidepressants or antianxietals (not to mention relying on stimulants like Adderall to help them handle the pressure); others by taking leaves of absence—or at least, by dreaming about it. “If the wheels are going to come off,” a Pomona student has put it, “it’s going to be in college.”

I have heard about this kind of misery again and again. From a graduate instructor at Princeton: “I just had an undergrad thesis-student faint in my office the other day because she was feeling so much pressure from her academic life.” From someone who was in the process of transferring out of Stanford: “For many students, rising to the absolute top means being consumed by the system. I’ve seen my peers sacrifice health, relationships, exploration, activities that can’t be quantified and are essential for developing souls and hearts, for grades and resume building.” From a student at Yale: “A friend of mine said it nicely: ‘I might be miserable, but were I not miserable, I wouldn’t be at Yale.’ ”

Isolation is a major factor. “People at Yale,” a former student said, “do not have time for real relationships.” Another told me that she didn’t have friends in college until she learned to slow down a little senior year, that going out to a movie was a novel experience at that point. A recent article in Harvard Magazine described students passing their suitemates like ships in the night as they raced from one activity to another. Kids know how to network and are often good at “people skills,” but those are very different things from actual friendship. Romantic life is conducted in an equally utilitarian spirit: hookups or friends with benefits to scratch the sexual itch, “pragmantic” “college marriages,” as Ross Douthat puts it, that provide stability and enable partners to place career first. “I positioned myself in college in such a way,” said a University of Pennsylvania student who was recently quoted in the New York Times, “that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too.”

But the compulsive overachievement of today’s elite college students—the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can—is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn’t capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they’re the only one who’s suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everyone thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are.

Students at Stanford talk about “Stanford Duck Syndrome”: serene on the surface, paddling madly underneath. In a recent post titled “Meltdown” on an MIT student website, a sophomore confessed her feelings of shame and worthlessness and often “overwhelming loneliness.” The post went viral, eliciting recognition and gratitude from students at at least a dozen other schools. “Thank you for sharing,” said one comment. “We all feel this way more often than we would care to admit. Thank you for being brave enough to put this into words.” Students at Pomona, which prides itself on being ranked the “fourth-happiest” college in America (whatever that means), have told me of the burden that comes with that very self-image, as well as from the regimen of group activities with which the college seeks to reinforce it: the pressure that they feel to satisfy the happiness police by projecting an appearance of perfect well-being.

Isolated from their peers, these kids are also cut off from themselves. The endless hoop-jumping, starting as far back as grade school, that got them into an elite college in the first place—the clubs, bands, projects, teams, APs, SATs, evenings, weekends, summers, coaches, tutors, “leadership,” “service”—left them no time, and no tools, to figure out what they want out of life, or even out of college. Questions of purpose and passion were not on the syllabus. Once they’ve reached the shining destination toward which their entire childhood and adolescence had been pointed, once they’re through the gates at Amherst or Dartmouth, many kids find out that they have no idea why they’re there, or what they want to do next.

As Lara Galinsky, the author of Work on Purpose, expressed it to me, young people are not trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to. “You cannot say to a Yalie ‘find your passion,’ ” a former student wrote me. “Most of us do not know how and that is precisely how we arrived at Yale, by having a passion only for success.” According to Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, “Too many students, perhaps after a year or two spent using college as a treadmill to nowhere, wake up in crisis, not knowing why they have worked so hard.” One young woman at Cornell summed up her life to me like this: “I hate all my activities, I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how it’s going to be for the rest of my life.”

If adults are unaware of all this, that’s partly because they’re looking in the wrong direction. Getting A’s no longer means that everything’s okay, assuming that it ever did. “We have students, who, no matter what else is going on in their lives, know how to get those grades,” Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Stanford’s university chaplain, has said. “It’s important for us to take away the blinders that keep us from seeing their distress.”

Mainly, though, these kids are very good at hiding their problems from us. I was largely unaware myself, during my years at Yale, of the depth of my students’ unhappiness. Only now that I am no longer in a position of authority do some of them feel comfortable enough to open up. The student who told me that she had no friends until her senior year had seemed, if anything, unusually healthy: funny, friendly, “real,” not obnoxiously competitive or on the make, and a brilliant student, to boot. Another kid, equally great, equally well-adjusted for all that I could see, later confessed that she’d been miserable in college, depressed or stressed-out all the time. By the time they finish high school—after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents’ friends—elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers. Polite, pleasant, mild, and presentable; well-mannered, well-groomed, and well-spoken (not to mention, often enough, well-medicated), they have fashioned that façade of happy, healthy high achievement.

• • •

It would be bad enough if all this misery were being inflicted for the sake of genuine learning, but that is quite the opposite of what the system now provides. Our most prestigious colleges and universities love to congratulate themselves on the caliber of their incoming students: their average SAT scores, the proportion that comes from the top 10 percent of their high school class, the narrowness of the admissions sieve that lets them in, all the numbers U.S. News & World Report has taught us to worship. And make no mistake; today’s elite students are, in purely academic terms, phenomenally well prepared.

How could they not be, given how carefully they’re bred, how strenuously sorted and groomed? They are the academic equivalent of all-American athletes, coached and drilled and dieted from the earliest years of life. Whatever you demand of them, they’ll do. Whatever bar you place in front of them, they’ll clear. A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single kid got every single line correct, down to the punctuation marks. Seeing them write out the exercise in class, she said, was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track.

The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They’ve learned to “be a student,” not to use their minds. I was talking with someone who teaches at a branch campus of a state university. His students don’t think for themselves, he complained. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves.

I am far from alone in this perception. A friend who taught at Amherst mentioned a student who came to her for extra help with his writing—but only because he had already been admitted to medical school and now felt free to actually learn. If he were a freshman or sophomore, he said, he wouldn’t have taken the time. Another friend teaches fine arts at a prestigious liberal arts college. His kids are eager to accept creative challenges, he’s told me, but only as long as it will help them get an A. “I cannot imagine a Yale undergraduate spending an entire weekend lying in bed reading poetry or glued to a keyboard writing a breakthrough iPhone app,” said a former colleague in the computer science department, who went to college in the late 1970s. “Yet, when I was an undergraduate, people did things like that all the time; passionate weirdos were all over the place, and they were part of what made college interesting.”

Students simply don’t have time for that kind of headlong immersion. The frenzy of extracurricular activities has expanded to fill the available space, displacing intellectual pursuits as the focus of student energy. David Brooks and other observers have spoken about the death of the late-night bull session, the scarcity of spontaneous intellectual discussion. I’ve heard similar complaints from students at Brown, Penn, Cornell, Pomona, and Columbia. “I’ve never been able to justify to myself why I feel so much ‘smarter’—more productive, more creative, more interesting (and more importantly, more interested)—during the summers than I ever do during the school year,” a Princeton senior wrote me. A young woman from another school told me this about her boyfriend at Yale:

Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he’s painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don’t give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he’s “networking” enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he’s incurious, but because there’s a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them.

There are exceptions, of course: seekers, thinkers, “passionate weirdos,” kids who approach the work of the mind with a pilgrim spirit, who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience in college tends to make them feel like freaks. “Yale,” one of them said, “is not conducive to searchers.” Another said, about a friend of hers who’d transferred out, “She found Yale stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.” Said a third, “It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

My examples tend to come from Yale, since that is mainly where I taught, but I do not mean to single out that institution. If anything, I think it probably deserves its reputation as the best among elite universities (as distinct from liberal arts colleges) at nurturing creativity and intellectual independence. Notoriously pre-professional places like Penn, Duke, or Washington University, or notoriously anti-intellectual ones like Princeton or Dartmouth, are clearly far worse. But that’s precisely what’s so frightening. If Yale is the best, then the best is pretty bad.

• • •

Yet if I have learned one thing in the last few years, it is that today’s elite students do not arrive in college as a herd of sheep or army of robots, with a few rebel intellectuals off at the edges. Most of them are somewhere in the middle: idealistic and curious, like kids before them, hungry for purpose and meaning, like kids before them, but beset by psychological demands that are inevitable products of the process that propelled them into college in the first place.

“Every educational system,” wrote Allan Bloom, “wants to produce a certain kind of human being.” Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite: the grades, the scores, the trophies. That is what you’re praised for; that is what you are rewarded for. Your parents brag; your teachers glow; your rivals grit their teeth. Finally, the biggest prize of all, the one that draws a line beneath your adolescence and sums you up for all the world to see: admission to the college of your dreams. Or rather, not finally—because the game, of course, does not end there. College is naturally more of the same. Now the magic terms are GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright, MCAT, Harvard Law, Goldman Sachs. They signify not just your fate, but your identity; not just your identity, but your value. They are who you are, and what you’re worth.

The result is what we might refer to as credentialism. The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume. Hence the constant sense of competition. (If you want to increase participation in an activity, a Stanford professor told me, make entry to it competitive.) Hence the endemic academic corner-cutting that Douthat describes in Privilege, a memoir of his time at Harvard, where all that intellect is put to the service, not of learning as much as possible, but of getting away with doing as little as you can. Hence the vogue for double majors. It isn’t enough anymore to take a bunch of electives in addition to your primary focus, to roam freely across the academic fields, making serendipitous connections and discoveries, the way that American higher education was designed (uniquely, among the world’s systems) to allow you to do. You have to get that extra certification now, or what has it all been for? I even met a quadruple major once. He seemed to think it meant that he was very smart.

With credentialism comes a narrow practicality that’s capable of understanding education only in terms of immediate utility, and that marches, at the most prestigious schools, beneath a single banner: economics. In 1995, economics was the most popular major at three of the top ten universities or top ten liberal arts colleges on the most recent lists in U.S. News. In 2013, it was the biggest at a minimum of eight and as many as fourteen. Among the universities, it was the biggest at Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, and probably Columbia and the University of Chicago (determinations are sometimes difficult because of changes in reporting). It was the biggest at four of the top ten liberal arts colleges, places that are supposed to be about a different sort of education—Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, and Claremont McKenna—and probably also at Amherst, Swarthmore, Carleton, and Wellesley. It was almost as popular among the next ten schools on each list, the rest of the top twenty, representing the largest major at as many as six of the universities and six more of the colleges, for a grand total of 26 of the 40 schools on the two lists combined. Sixty-five percent, for just a single major: a stunning convergence.

Meanwhile, not coincidentally, finance and consulting have emerged as the most coveted careers. In 2007, about half of Harvard seniors who had full-time jobs lined up for after graduation were going into one of those two industries. The numbers softened a bit after the financial collapse, but not by much and not for long. By 2010, nearly half of Harvard graduates were still going into one of those fields, as well as mo...