Let me say first off that I read this book for a class. I am extremely glad that I did. It is an excellent read, that points out many of the problems for today's generation, the government, and higher education itself. Anyone working at a university (whether faculty or Student Affairs) needs to read this. Anyone who is going to send their child one day to college? They should read it to.

One complaint I did have, is that even though I know from the title that the book is about the American Elite, for someone who is not of that class, sometimes it feels like we do not exist. But overall that is the point. The elite do not know us. They cannot relate to us. Their schools do not involve us. So to talk about the elite, in many portions of this book, we must be left out.

And to think I once dreamed of Harvard.

This book should be required reading during every freshman's first semester if not before. It brought up a number of issues I have complained about before, including rampant grade inflation and the destruction of learning in academic atmospheres.

j’ai eut beaucoup de mal à finir ce livre.Ce livre n’était pas du tout ce que je pensais qu’il aillait être.Je croyais que l’auteur aillait parler de l’éducation en général mais il se concentre seulement sur l’éducation dans des universités comme Harvard Yale,etc
Le livre a plusieurs bons points comme le fait que l’université doit nous aider à développer notre esprit critique et nous découvrir en tant que personne(en laissant en arrière les idées qu’on nous a inculqué depuis qu’on est jeune).Le reste du livre était simplement agaçant.Mon plus gros problème avec ce livre est le fait que l’auteur pense que les seuls domaines où on peut développer notre esprit critique ou développer une passion c’est le “liberal arts”.
Selon lui ,les gens qui étudient en économie ou en finance ne les font pas par passion(un autre concept avec lequel j’ai beaucoup de mal après avoir lu “so good they can’t ignore you”de Cal Newport),mais pour la simple est bonne raison qu’ils veulent s’enrichir.
Selon moi ,c’est possible d’avoir une éducation plus technique comme le génie informatique ou l’économie qui nous préparent à pratiquer un métier,mais d’ajouter des cours de philosophie et de littérature pour complèter son éducation.De plus,maintenant avec l’internet, on a accès à tellement des ressources qu’on doit même se demander si on a besoin d’aller à l’université.
L’auteur n’était pas nuancé et j’ai l’impression qu’il a écrit ce livre pour montrer l’importance d’une éducation en “liberal arts” sauf qu’il n’a pas utiliser la bonne méthode pour prouver son point.

Having just graduated from one of the elite universities that Deresiewicz mentions in this book, I am punching myself over and over again for not reading this book four years ago, when I was about to start my freshman year. Full disclosure: I am one of Deresiewicz's excellent sheep. I might come at this with a lot of bias, and I do disagree with many of his points, but I absolutely love this book nonetheless.

I was scrambling to highlight every other page as I read this on my Kindle. So many of his points, I have thought about throughout my college education, but my thoughts were fragmented with no real basis of support except for my own experiences and those of my immediate friends. To witness Deresiewicz turn my unstructured and at times, inconsistent, thoughts and give them substance and anecdotes that confirmed my suspicious about the failures of my education felt like immense relief.

I grew up in the Bay Area, specifically in Cupertino, where 80% of the students at my high school were Asian, and everyone had their eyes set on the Ivies. Most students (and more so, their parents) all operate by the same formula - score a perfect SAT score, take as many AP tests as possible, and fill afterschool time and weekends with as many extracurriculars as possible. While we're at it, win a few science fairs and math competitions, win an art competition, and spend a few weeks of vacation performing "service" in a foreign country. This is exactly the type of student Deresiewicz talks about. My peers in high school know exactly how to "trick" the system to get an A or how to schmooze your way to leadership in an org, but very few learn to use their minds.

I fell into the same trap, despite how hard I tried to escape it. I filled my time with so many extracurriculars because I was scared of boredom and being stuck in my own mind. I took as many classes and tests as I could because I was genuinely curious about learning, but no one ever taught me how to learn. High school, then college, was about the accumulation of information. Math, physics, history in high school, then "cultural capital" in college as I shopped around for classes to take that would allow me to converse with my prep school peers. Classes in philosophy because I hadn't completed in debate in high school, art history so I could become part of the "upper middle-brow," and read book summaries for my sociology classes like the Yale student the author describes because "there's a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them."

In my time at Harvard, I've often voiced my frustration to peers about how everyone is going into one of finance, consulting, medicine, or tech. And if not those, then delaying one of those options for a year to pursue a fully-funded fellowship or travel opportunity. Deresiewicz sums it up well:

Elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things... the result is a violent aversion to risk.

In chapter two, as Deresiewicz delves into the history of the elite education system in America, I was suddenly struck by how thoughtfully the Harvard computer science system is designed. The value of attending a school like Harvard is that it encourages students to get a liberal arts education. While many students still major in economics to signal their interest in finance or consulting, computer science as a gateway to software engineering, or one of seven biology concentrations to fulfill premed requirements, the Harvard faculty has been careful not to overwhelm these concentration requirements. It's a shame that in computer science, many of my peers who fulfilled their 10 class requirements turned to mathematics or statistics to "gain more knowledge" and make use of their undergraduate years, but what I hope Harry Lewis and other computer science faculty were trying to encourage is for us to explore the breadth of other fields out there. When students from other schools, companies, or even pre-frosh interested in computer science criticize the dearth of practical computer science classes and lack of offerings, I've never thought that it might have been designed this way on purpose to push us towards getting the most of our liberal arts degrees.

I've always understood getting an education to be the accumulation of knowledge. Which is why I scoffed at government classes that assigned more reading than was possible within a school-week, thinking that professors are overestimating their students as well as philosophy classes that made us recount Descarte's and Hume's arguments that seemed completely outdated and irrelevant. Only in this book did I realize that it was precisely these classes that were supposed to be teaching me the value of a college education, to develop "the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice." Deresiewicz hits it right in the gut: "If you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again."

For many of my peers, who mostly study scientific fields, here's one of the best quotes I have found regarding the value of a humanities education. "When we engage in humanistic inquiry - when we think about a poem or a sculpture or a piece of music - we ask, not how big is it, or how hot is it, or what does it consist of, but what does it mean. We ask of a scientific proposition, "Is it true?", but of a proposition in the humanities we ask, 'Is it true for me?'" Literature allows us to escape into whole universes and the lives of other characters into whom we can project our own experiences. Art gives names and concreteness to experiences.

Finally, Deresiewicz tears into the American political elite, and though he wrote this before the Trump administration came into office, it may shed some light on the era of populism in the United States. "If Romney seems like an extreme example of our out-of-touch elite, consider the two Democratic nominees who preceded our current president, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly unable to communicate with the larger electorate. In fact, consider our current president... who despite his race, his oratorical skills, and his years as a community organizer, is equally incapable of making an emotional connection with the people he calls 'folks'."

In the same way that we transitioned from a aristocratic elite to a meritocratic one, how can we transition from a meritocracy to (what Deresiewicz calls) a democracy?

3.5 stars. There are a lot of phenomenal ideas in here. Where this book lost some of my favor is in the tone and in the rambling middle. The beginning and end are the most important and thought-provoking parts for me.

Excellent Sheep - The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life. William Deresiewicz
Well, it was a perfect time for me to read this book and I recommend it to any friends and their kids who are on the way to college or even there already. It really gives you a lot to think about in terms of what it means to get an education. And, why we think/believe the ivys and the other top 20 or so schools are the only way to ensure our children succeed in life.
Deresiewicz spent many years being educated by the ivy league and then teaching there, and he is not happy with what he learned about those schools and the kids who attend them. He is disturbed by the fact that entry to these schools requires families with money to help the kids with tutors, service trips, extracurricular activities, test prep and then money to pay tuition. That the meritocracy perpetuates itself through elite education and access to it and then churns out kids who go into finance, consulting, law or medicine to ensure the wealthy remain wealthy and elite. He is sad that there are so few kids who are different or extraordinary doing off-beat, creative things, and that students are not taught to think any longer. Students just ride the tide to one of the major professions and get a vocation instead of an education. Also, the schools prioritize research, which brings in money and big names, but makes teaching secondary. Why are the schools not teaching kids how to learn for the sake of learning? Why are they not allowed to figure out what they are really passionate about, instead of doing what is proscribed for them? Even doing good or community service if for resume building. Of course not every kid fits in this mold but given the huge class inequality in this country that this system perpetuates, his book is timely and necessary. He's not the first to say these things but he is the first to take time to talk to the kids when he is touring and in the book.
He says -
Don't be a conformist. Don't be mediocre. Be a skeptic, build your mind and not your resume. Learn to learn in college to be able to use creativity and take risks in order to really lead. He points out that many businesses are now looking for graduates with liberal arts backgrounds because it is that kind of education -- in small seminars with teachers there teaching instead of grad students -- that teach these kids how to look at the big picture and consider different ways to solve problems.
There is hope if:
Kids focus on the liberal arts offered - history, comparative religion, literature and the arts - if the class size is small to encourage conversations and debate. Even at the big schools kids should find a way to take courses outside of their proscribed area - don't focus just on economics or the sciences without adding the arts.
The bigger problem is the perpetuation of the system that supports the elite and produces risk adverse, uncreative kids with an enormous sense of entitlement, focused on individual aggrandizement. We see this on Wall Street and in politics and the gap between rich and poor. You can't know the other if you are never exposed to them and at the elite institutions diversity does not include class difference.
Deresiewicz does offer solutions, but they are going to be hard to swallow - more money to public colleges to make them accessible to all, along with national equal funding for public K to 12 so that everyone has an opportunity to get a higher education from the beginning. Let's not exacerbate inequality anymore. Let's not retard social mobility or perpetuate privilege. Let's make it acceptable to give more so that others have options in life as well. Quite the read.

Wow! Interesting ideas and so much more than a critique of the elite college system. The last chapter pretty much sums up all the problems of our current American society - and provides a solution - if only those in power would extract themselves from the elite greed mentality and realize it's better for everyone. 5* for the ideas presented, 3* for the actual writing (and expletives).

I learned nothing about how to improve wool yields or overall wellbeing of my flock; based on the content of this book, I honestly doubt there's anything excellent about William's sheep (if he even has any).

• True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognizing, despite all you’ve been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being. It means deciding for yourself what constitutes success.
• Schools have lots of reasons for stroking their students’ egos. It makes for happy customers. It primes the donation pump.
• There is nothing wrong with taking pride in your intellect or achievement. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulations that elite schools connive at from the moment that the fat envelopes arrive in the mail