![]() Our system of elite education manufactures young people 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. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. ![]() These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. It was a thing of wonder, she said, like watching thoroughbreds circle a track. Nearly every single kid got every single line correct. A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize 30 lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. 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 a serene self-assurance that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. “Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them-the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. We listened, asked questions, dove into a letter or two, then voted up or down. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars-the “brag”-were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. The junior officer in charge, a young man who looked to be about 30, presented each case, rat-a-tat-tat, in a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. ![]() Huge bowls of junk food were stationed at the side of the room to keep our energy up. Our task for the day was to adjudicate among the twos. The ones had already been admitted, and the threes and fours could get in only under special conditions-if they were a nationally ranked athlete, for instance, or a “DevA,” (an applicant in the highest category of “development” cases, which means a child of very rich donors). The applicants had been assigned a score from one to four, calculated from a string of figures and codes-SATs, GPA, class rank, numerical scores to which the letters of recommendation had been converted, special notations for legacies and diversity cases. We-that is, three admissions staff, a member of the college dean’s office, and me, the faculty representative-were going through submissions from eastern Pennsylvania. In the spring of 2008, I did a daylong stint on the Yale admissions committee. ![]()
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