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[quote=Anonymous][quote=baltimoreguy]Interesting article, but I find pieces of it overstated, like:

"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."

And:

"So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error."

In some ways, that description sounds more like the parents of these kids than the kids themselves.[/quote]

It's true of the kids as well, but the elite schools have been struggling with their admissions policies for years now and will continue to do so.   Once they were largely schools for the children of the economic and social elite.  Then they became more overtly meritocratic, starting in the late 1960s.  Then the admissions directors became concerned that the schools were getting too many kids who knew how to check off all the boxes, so they started claiming that they were looking for kids "with a passion," which led to applicants who had to check off an additional box for "passion."  And, in reward for their diligence, they'll get some snot-faced professors who periodically toss it all back in their face and put them down as robots.

Whatever.  I had a good enough time at an Ivy in the 80s, when the schools were somewhat less pretentious than they are now (and certainly easier to get into), but I'm happy to see my kids go to state schools where the academics are pretty good and there's a lot less navel-gazing.  [/quote]

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