honestly the best description about american elitism in higher education i've ever seen. I'm taking a gap year and there are many remarkable lessons here reminding me of the questions i should keep in mind when i go back to college. why i want to goto college and how i want to spend that experience.

I read this partially out of class/status anxiety, and partially with the intention to warn myself about parenting styles. It was helpful for that.

I think I have read a large amount of the book already from essays the author has written. It's that plus some padding.

As far as actual book content, it's one of those books by liberal arts people that misuse statistics, contradicts itself, and otherwise is largely written to incite debate and talk about "the truth", rather than truth. It does not provide any real answers, but talks a lot about finding your own way and other stuff. I mean, I actually do think that fucking up a bit will lead to more inner peace. The huge mistake the author makes is that helping people find inner peace will solve the world's problems. Sorry.

This book is divisive and I found myself disagreeing with a lot of the angry opinions expressed by the author. However, so much of the book also touched a nerve. Last night a friend posted the following on LinkedIn:



In a way this reinforces the author's main point: What is the purpose of prestige chasing? Many students fear commitment to one discipline and instead constantly pursue degrees/consulting jobs that allow you to remain a generalist. The author asserts the choice between specialization and generalized prestige is false, and it is instead between following a passion or having none.

However, it also exposes what I think is his argument's greatest weakness. He advocates for making the Western cannon required reading for everyone from any background and broadening access to an elite education. The issue, I believe, goes deeper than giving access to elite degrees to people from diverse backgrounds, though that certainly would be preferable from the current scenario where, at Harvard, 53% of students come from the top 10% family incomes. In a way, this has the potential to build a new (though more diverse!) elite class. Broadening the group of people who are entitled to discuss Kant and believe they deserve a six-figure starting salary for making PowerPoints will ultimately just shuffle the cards of the unequal deck that is being dealt today. Instead of encouraging more Great Books Programs, perhaps we should seek to expose students to worlds outside elite bubbles and ideals. In this way, we could encourage a more equitable education system that teaches students how to live impactful lives.

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I can't stop thinking about this book. Reading this book felt like a warm cup of Coco after going on a winter camping trip.

The second half is pretty simple. Frustrating even. More humanities classes will lead to better people. Pay teachers more. Don't be obsessed with status. The system is inherently biased. Feel good fluff that on the surface I think most people would agree with. But also a disappointment after how strongly I felt about the first half of the book. I wanted real answers. But it seemed like the author fell into the trap of extrapolating his personal experience onto everyone. Do you really think Madoff would have changed his life if he had just read Bonfire of the Vanities? It felt cheap.

The first half of the book though. It..... Well.... It felt like someone hit me with a lightning bolt. Multiple times. A brutal portrayal of myself and many people I know. Ivies, UChicago. Econ and Business majors. It felt like someone held up a mirror and for the first time I saw where I stood and what things looked like. Prejudices I had but was unaware of. Driving motivations I hadn't noticed. All laid out. It was like getting glasses for the first time. The world had been slightly blurry, and I just thought that's how things were. But then, one magical day, you're whisked off to the Optometrist and when you leave everything is in focus.

I could see why I've been so frustrated the past 8 years. Knowing at some level, but unable to express the cause of this frustration. This perpetual hamster wheel of achievement. The overwhelming fear of reducing life's optionality. And this crushing letdown of getting somewhere and going "is this it?" How institutions set the bar so high to get in the door, but once you're in, it's a massive letdown. From job interviews to college applications. Everyone is telling you to do more, be a leader, gain the certificates, have experiences. But this tyrannical gremlin on your shoulder keeps pushing you to commoditize and market those experiences, so you do. And you get to the next rung on the ladder and after that theres another fucking rung. And you keep climbing. And there's always another rung. And then you die.

And I guess that's why it felt like a letdown to hear that the conclusion to this new way of seeing the cycle I had been so frustrated with, this understanding of myself I had been blind to, was to read more literature. To focus more on liberal arts. To get B's for once to fight the system.

This is a difficult book for me to rate. I think he has some excellent points that we as a society should be thinking more about, but I don't think he backed up his points very well. He made a lot of pronouncements and used a lot of anecdotes. I think it would have worked better if he wrote it in a more traditional "argumentative writing" style - gave us his hypothesis then argued why based on his research and discussion with students.

He is absolutely correct that to get into an Ivy League school you usually need to be an "excellent sheep" - one small blemish on your record due to not giving your teachers exactly what they want, experimenting, and taking courses outside of your skill or comfort zone, and you aren't getting in. I would have liked a little more explanation of why that is and how we got here.

I also would have liked more discussion on why so many people WANT to go to Ivy League schools, beyond the prestige. From lots of reading I have done, they seem to be not the greatest places for undergraduate education. People in academia advise parents to think carefully before sending your kids there - there are many better options for academically talented kids. Yet the applications keep pouring in. Is it because students figure the crappy supports and teaching are worth it because you are surrounded by so many smart people, and you will learn most things from your peers anyway?

The last part of the book was my favorite. It seemed more organized, and it included some pretty damning stats about the makeup of elite schools. It was fascinating/horrifying to me to learn about the different ways students are treated at different sorts of schools. At the elite schools, it is easy to get extentions (this was even true back in my day), but at public schools and lower tier schools you are much less likely to be given slack even though your excuses are likely to be much more legitimate.

The brief section about how something like a quarter of Harvard's students come from 100 schools and only 6 of those schools are public hit me. The son of a friend of mine is at Harvard. When he got to orientation, he asked his parents to stay for dinner for the first night before hitting the road because "everyone here already knows each other." His mother thought that was ridiculous at the time - people come from every corner of the country to attend Harvard. As time went on though, she realized that there was some truth to what he was saying, and this book explains why.

An indictment of the American higher education system.

In Excellent Sheep, Deresiewicz makes a claim that "If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less. That is itself a kind of freedom." He is speaking about choosing a "lesser" college to attend or a shunning a major centered around wealth, but the implication is clear. "Yale snubbed me, and I am still doing fine, so I know what it is like to do without what you want! Students do not need to attend a good university or pursue a money-making major! Ignore my family of Ivy League grads!" Deresiewicz is the elite he claims to despise, even if he attempts to make the case that the humanities are for everyone. This defense of liberal arts, of course, is spoken by a man who has no idea about anything outside of the upper class and is so beyond normal society that he has no idea how to have a conservation with his plumber. The sort of elitist condescension where only university graduates can tell Americans what it is really like to live a "good life" is one we are all tired of hearing.

While critiquing the system of elite education that creates "excellent sheep" instead of well-rounded human beings, Deresiewicz makes sure the reader never forgets that he went to Columbia and attended elite institutions throughout his education. Why? Outside of the obvious reasons (his insecurity), he tells the story of how he was denied tenure by Yale after ten years teaching at the college. Had he been granted tenure in 2008, one wonders about the existence of this book. It seems that for ten years, he did not have much of a problem with the assembly line education of elite colleges and was happy to be a cog in that machine. Did Deresiewicz have a change of heart after being fired? Possibly. Likely? Probably not.

The criticisms of the upper class are all things we have heard before. "They are overbearing!" "They push their children too hard!" "Admissions favor the wealthy over the poor!" The same criticisms about parents of bright students would fit with parents of athletes or talented musicians. Maybe the problem is the insistence on ultimate success over becoming happy people. Deresiewicz attempts to explain this issue:

“You’re told that you’re supposed to go to college, but you’re also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn’t self-indulgent? Going into finance isn’t self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn’t self-indulgent? It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It’s selfish to pursue your passion, unless it’s also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn’t selfish at all.”

Again, Deresiewicz misses the point. The reason parents are leery of their children going into a career in music or art history is that they know the pain and struggles that those professions entail. Going into finance or law is recommended because of the guaranteed financial security of possessing a professional degree from an elite college. For those who can fall back on a trust fund while pursuing their career in history, that is a viable option, but for the kid from a family making $45,000 a year that hit the jackpot of a Yale admission? The priorities are different. One of the biggest problems in Excellent Sheep is how unaware Deresiewicz is of this scenario. Every student that attends the Ivy League is not a member of the upper class, and they do not have the ability to make decisions like "pursuing a degree in English" so casually. Their parents are attempting to direct their lives for the greatest individual good of their child.

One thing to keep in mind is that Deresiewicz is not concerned about these institutions being populated with the wealthy or favoring certain ethnicities over others, just the idea that the wealthy aren't getting a good enough education once they get there. The question then becomes: who is the intended audience of this book? The helicopter parents of the upper class? The middle class does not have time for his irrational diatribe against the elite colleges that have let him go. It seems the actual audience of this book are the institutions themselves for not recognizing the dedicated and brilliant teacher William Deresiewicz.

Excellent Sheep reads like the same paranoia touted for years by the likes of Harold Bloom and Mortimer Adler. "The liberal arts are dying!" "We need people with a moral center!" "Kids just don't read all the books of the Western Canon anymore!" It is as if Deresiewicz thinks no one has ever seen Dead Poets Society. "Look upon the state of the Ivy League ye mighty, and despair!" This screaming into the abyss about "real education" will pass once again as it did with Adler and his Great Books series. Then, Deresiewicz will invent something new to direct his outraged. As a matter of fact, I can picture his next book already:

"Entitled Brats: Millennial Humanities Majors and the Decline of STEM"