While a bit too much of a polemic for polemic sake and the whole "whoa is us in the humanities" schtick was laid on a bit thick at times, "Excellent Sheep" is a fun read for those teaching today's flock. Deresiewicz saves his best rants for the educational elite and the system they've built to convince everyone else to join their ranks.

I both liked and disliked this book. I felt like this book tried to cover too much material and be too many things at once which ended in the book having some very good parts and some parts that were hard to read. While I found the author's style a bit annoying, as it contained a lot of generalizations and rants, while lacking a lot of research and hard facts, I think he made some very good observations in his book. The higher education system is corrupt and in need of change, and he shines some clarity as to why that is and what can be done to change it. I also liked his section talking about recognizing what college is for and make sure you are ready for it before you enroll in college and how to get a meaningful experience out of college. Overall, I'd recommend only reading parts of this book if you're interested in this subject.

Very eye-opening. The author's basic premise is that elite education disincentivizes good teaching and intellectual rigor while perpetuating privilege.

I'm in agreement here, but I disagree with his proposed solutions. He suggests fixing the problem is just a matter of having colleges refuse to coordinate with US news and world reports, and for students to opt out of the system by going to mid-level liberal arts colleges. It's not a realistic solution for colleges and students to just stop buying into the process. It was frustrating that he implied that doing so would be easy.

I also disagree with his strong focus on the humanities. Certainly humanities are important, but his implication was that if everyone was just an English major, we'd all be more human and moral. Exposure to philosophy, writing, ambiguity and intellectual rigor are all very important, but can happen in any field. He implies that small English classes are the solution, really small anything classes are the solution.

Finally, I think he undervalues how elite universities teach students to lean on networking. He writes this off as "teaching students how to be wealthy" or as entitlement and privilege. I agree that that graduating from a Harvard, Yale, or Princeton and reaching out to another alumni for a job looks and feels like cheating. But these schools don't just put you into a network, they teach you how to build networks. They teach you to reach out to folks you know for help and use those folks to get to other folks until you get to the place where you need to be. That's a really useful skill, and while it allows folks with elite educations to get in the back door, that back door opens to anyone who knows how to use networks whether or not they have the "right pedigree."

I revised this review because I watched a video of Deresiewicz outlining the principles behind his book, and I was reminded of how much I agree with his central contentions. Among them, he said that being a leader often means being willing to be unpopular; that colleges breed and demand conformity—which does not a leader make— and that (paraphrasing another), on college campuses, being a leader means being a very good follower. I want to emphasize that I don't believe it is his assertion (as I originally believed it) that the fault lies with millennials for being too compliant (or too sheep-like, that is). It is not (only) a failure of the students. It is the failure of the culture. The point of college, as he says, is to build a self.

Some quotes in his article in the The American Scholar from which this book was born:

"Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. 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 second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value."

"There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail."

"Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls 'entitled mediocrity.'"

"Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade…Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.  There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. 'I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, 'even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.'"

"Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there."

"There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude."

"The life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system."


Original review:

I am enjoying this thus far, which surprises me, as I read the author's article on the same subject matter and found it banal in terms of its (vulgar) treatment of "millennial entitlement."

If I had a coin for every adult on the internet who incautiously blathers on about the many faults of my generation I would be very wealthy indeed...

We are too lazy and absorbed in electronics, or, we are efficient, but too mechanical and soulless. Too much or too little. Jump through hoops, but not those hoops!

Hence my tendency to absolutely disregard the constructive criticism of adult generations.

So much for being a sheep.

The strongest part of this book is an impassioned defense of a liberal arts education...but not until the last few pages of the books does the author consider that this soul-defining, humanity-producing experience should perhaps be available to more than the handful of young American adults who attend the top hundred or so colleges. The meat of the book mentions these non-elites sparingly and primarily in an "eat your vegetables, there are children starving elsewhere" way; the author admonishes elite kids that the fact that everyone doesn't get a privileged education doesn't mean that *you* can waste your privilege. Which may be true, but it focuses on a narrow part of a much larger problem.

The parts that draw on statistical evidence aren't terribly convincing, as there's little depth - no list of sources, even - on the assortment of topics discussed. There's a bit about parenting, a bit about the mental health of students, a bit about college costs, etc. The role of money in particular was underplayed. The author mentions a roughly tenfold increase in tuition in the decades since he was in school, but he doesn't seem to appreciate how much of an impact this can have on students and their families. There's a slightly snide remark about Harvard offering tuition for students from families making up to 180K. While these families are certainly middle class and likely quite comfortable, even at that income, 240K for four years of Harvard isn't trivial. While implying that Harvard is out of touch for giving aid to these students, the author himself comes off as out of touch with the financial decisions students have to make...which is a shame, because exploring this could have added another dimension to the discussion of why students are more frequently majoring in economics and business and why they're more frequently favoring highly-paid finance and consulting jobs immediately after graduation.

The tone is largely that of an older generation criticizing a younger one: tending towards nostalgic when discussing the past, tending towards critical when discussing the present. The author isn't above starting a sentence with "Kids today..." There are moments where he shares letters from his students, and his care for them comes through, but he generally sounds more like a lecturer than a mentor. Most of the book reads like a David Brooks column, and Brooks himself is quoted a number of times. Perhaps fittingly, the overall tone is, well, elitist.

an important wake up call. unfortunately i sleep through my alarms

Amazing book. Lots to think about.

Any book about college is going to get personal and the number one way to get a bad Goodreads review is to get political. I'm a little surprised the reviews here weren't more raged filled. I'm even a little peeved at a recent New Yorker article that made a positive reference to this book and led me to check it out of the library, thankfully I didn't buy this.

Deresiewicz divides his book into four parts and the first part, aptly titled "Sheep", starts off with an excellent critique of the Ivies and Ivy League parenting. I graduated from Columbia in '03 and this all rang true. Despite some modicum of post grad success there's plenty of angst for me. Working tangentially in the financial industry I'm aware of the Ivy League parenting, tiger moms, and private-like public schools that feed into the US News and World Report driven frenzy that is our higher education system. Deresiewicz cites a lot of terrific books throughout - my favorite was The Marriage Plot, so his book is worth perusing just for the references. His writing style is enjoyably conversational. Conversational like you are having coffee with him right off an Ivy League campus, not like if you are the plumber trying to fix his sink - note that this book originated from an earlier Deresiewicz article inspired by the author's inability to converse with his plumber.

After diagnosing what's wrong, Deresiewicz turns to the "Self" in the second part by posing the much-debated question "what is college for?" He gives an exposition on the classic debate between academic versus vocational training, understanding that vocational in our knowledge-based economy means courses that prepare students for specific white-collar jobs like accounting or computer science, not like welding or plumbing. Deresiewicz bemoans the shift away from the academic humanities like English and towards the crasser vocational majors like Economics, although Economics itself is completely academic and often just glorified calculus, students majoring in it think they are preparing for a life on Wall Street. His distinctions between English and Economic departments isn't much different than the distinction people make between Brown and Columbia, which we did, foolishly, and which Deresiewicz derides, rightfully.
Deresiewicz's argument for the humanities echos the well-worn arguments that have been made since Mortimer Adler and Lionel Trilling. What Deresiewicz adds is the argument that a young person should try to create a secular religion out of the humanities. Getting religious is probably worse than getting political if you want a good GoodReads review. However, this isn't a bad way to view the humanities. Religion has been present throughout human existence, if you are going to do with the Abrahamic God, like the Gods of the Greeks, then something has to fill that vacuum, it might as well be the humanities, although Deresiewicz isn't a fan of the Western Cannon like I am.

However, Deresiewicz presents a false choice here. There are enough credits (120+?) to go around at college to take both humanities courses and more vocational-like courses. For example, at my Alma Mater, everyone had to take the same core curriculum for basically their first two years, which was a crash-course in the humanities surveying the great works of Western Civilization, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, Mozart and Michelangelo included. So, what I think he's really upset about is college politics, fewer majors in English looks bad when it comes to budgeting. It doesn't mean students are not taking courses in the humanities or that they have to choose between English and Economics, really you could major in both, which is even idea Deresiewicz mentions, the double major, and shoots down. Deresiewicz wants more English majors because he's an English professor.

The next two parts really go off the rails. The third part reviews the type of schools out there that one could apply to besides a top ranked research university. Deresiewicz advocates for second tier small liberal arts colleges. These are not perfect institutions and are often filled with the less successful versions of affluent students who fill the first tier. This contradicts or ignores Deresiewicz's other argument that the greatest influence of a college on students are the other students, which is his argument against massive online courses, and argument I agreed with. However, the author is just an Ivy League professor and hasn't spent significant time at any of the other institutions he romanticizes. Advocating for second tier liberal arts colleges looks like a case of the grass being greener.

Deresiewicz is inconsistent with his views on second tier state colleges. When bashing massive online open courses, a critique where he’s spot on, he argues there’s a huge difference between Stanford and Fresno State, the students, but then later he favors second tier state schools as an Ivy alternative. I can’t keep track of the state school hierarchy. Does it matter? We are not supposed to make too much of the distinctions between Yale and Stanford but we should distinguish between Michigan State and directional Michigan? Towards the end this section he cheers Cleveland State for making an A student a C student because the student handed in her paper a few hours late because she was waiting tables. That’s horrible. Yes, we got extensions all the time at Columbia and guess what, we get them all the time at work too. The same privilege continues. Someone is always late to a meeting, clients miss mandated deadlines, managers make up fake deadlines because they anticipate the work being late, and there’s the old joke is software developers are 90% done 50% of the time. He just may be annoyed with the extension culture, but maybe Deresiewicz should call his plumber more often, repairmen and deliveryman are notoriously late and construction seems to always take twice as long as planned if you're lucky.

The author thinks that the teaching quality is better at second tier schools because the professors don’t generate as much research grants, so they are there more for the love of higher education than the research careerism. This is like saying triple A baseball players love the game more than major leaguers because they play the same game for less money and prestige.

The final part is a dumpster fire in a train wreck. First, Deresiewicz argues against the notion of Ivy League kids doing service for the poor and instead argues that they should work service jobs like waiting tables. Who can be against charity? Ignoring the fact that some students do wait tables and it doesn't make them any better, when I took principles of economics, one of the first questions we were asked is 'why doesn't Michael Jordan mow his own lawn?' It's because although he could physically do the job, his talents and skills are better applied elsewhere. Likewise, Ivy-League students have better skills to teach for America than to wait tables, a point the author would agree with himself. Any menial service job for an Ivy Leaguer is simply temporary and the student always knows they have much more privilege and social capital than their menial service peers. Deresiewicz thinks the problem is that Ivy students are entitled because they're over praised, but that's a problem of society at large (i.e. everyone gets a trophy). Books like Strangers in Their Own Land and White Fragility, detail the sense of entitlement that pervades working class whites and whites in general. Why would entitlement be only for the Ivy League set? Deresiewicz seems to think that working alongside working class people will decrease the sense of entitlement, but just tell those people you're going to live on welfare and watch the entitlement ensue.

It's ironic that Deresiewicz recommends menial service, because one of the characters in The Marriage Plot goes to Calcutta to help Mother Teresa and is not positively changed for it at all and he ends up the only character who still has no post-graduation plans fourteen months later, which also refutes Deresiewicz argument for a gap year.

But that's not all. Deresiewicz begins his last chapter by offering extreme outliers as examples of "bad" Ivy League graduates. These outliers are all politicians. Like President Obama, who is bashed by the author. After attacking Elaine Kagan and Condi Rice, Deresiewicz goes on the offensive against Michael Dukakis. Dukakis is considered a failure even though he was Governor of Massachusetts and won the Democratic presidential nomination, accomplishments that very few Ivy League grads can claim. The forces behind his loss in the '88 election had more to do with the anti-intellectual tradition, racism (i.e. Willie Horton), and fear of the unknown, than the rise of the technocrat. These three forces are major currents in our society that Deresiewicz never addresses because it makes non-Ivy Leaguers less romantic. In Deresiewicz's catalogue of bad celebrity grads, he even brings up Bill Clinton who didn't go to an Ivy. The whole notion of picking a few celebrity grads is ridiculous, they are like the 0.0001% and Deresiewicz in an earlier chapter argues that those celebrity grads are not at all representative of their colleges. Dishonestly using outliers is bad, kicking someone when they are down is a shame.

Deresiewicz thinks the educational system is to blame for our society, but I don't think that's the case and besides a bad case of sour grapes, that's his biggest flaw. Our economic system is the problem. The historic restrictions on social mobility have upped the stakes for the college admissions rat race. It's the lack of mobility and economic uncertainty that makes more vocational degrees more attractive. Our society is facing never before seen income inequalities because of the structure of the economy and not because of the rise of research universities. If you want to de-escalate the college admission arms race, bring back the humanities, and offer a better undergraduate experience, you need to implement big structural changes in the economy and social welfare systems (e.g., student loan forgiveness, single payer health care, affordable state college tuition, abolishing Balkanized school districts, etc.). Trying to change elite higher education in the plutocracy of late-stage capitalism is like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

And so, this book was much like that boat, started off in a righteous and grand manner, but ended up sinking catastrophically. Like most of life, college is what you make of it, an Ivy League education may be the best thing that happens to you and you may have time of your life, or not, and that's why it's hard to offer meaningful advice to a mass audience and easy to throw stones instead.