Harvard University
By Gregg Easterbrook, The Atlantic, October, 2004
By Gregg Easterbrook, The Atlantic, October, 2004
Today
almost everyone seems to assume that the critical moment in young
people's lives is finding out which colleges have accepted them.
Winning admission to an elite school is imagined to be a golden
passport to success; for bright students, failing to do so is seen as a
major life setback. As a result, the fixation on getting into a
super-selective college or university has never been greater. Parents'
expectations that their children will attend top schools have "risen
substantially" in the past decade, says Jim Conroy, the head of college
counseling at New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois. He adds, "Parents regularly tell me, 'I want whatever is highest-ranked.'" Shirley Levin, of Rockville, Maryland,
who has worked as a college-admissions consultant for twenty-three
years, concurs: "Never have stress levels for high school students been
so high about where they get in, or about the idea that if you don't
get into a glamour college, your life is somehow ruined."
Admissions
mania focuses most intensely on what might be called the Gotta-Get-Ins,
the colleges with maximum allure. The twenty-five Gotta-Get-Ins of the
moment, according to admissions officers, are the Ivies (Brown,
Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale), plus
Amherst, Berkeley, Caltech, Chicago, Duke, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins,
MIT, Northwestern, Pomona, Smith, Stanford, Swarthmore, Vassar,
Washington University in St. Louis, Wellesley, and Williams. Some
students and their parents have always been obsessed with getting into
the best colleges, of course. But as a result of rising population,
rising affluence, and rising awareness of the value of education, millions
of families are now in a state of nervous collapse regarding college
admissions. Moreover, although the total number of college applicants
keeps increasing, the number of freshman slots at the elite colleges
has changed little. Thus competition for elite-college admission has
grown ever more cutthroat. Each year more and more bright, qualified
high school seniors don't receive the coveted thick envelope from a
Gotta-Get-In.
But what if the
basis for all this stress and disappointment—the idea that getting into
an elite college makes a big difference in life—is wrong? What if it
turns out that going to the "highest ranked" school hardly matters at
all?
The researchers Alan
Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale began investigating this question, and in
1999 produced a study that dropped a bomb on the notion of
elite-college attendance as essential to success later in life.
Krueger, a Princeton economist, and Dale,
affiliated with the Andrew Mellon Foundation, began by comparing
students who entered Ivy League and similar schools in 1976 with
students who entered less prestigious colleges the same year. They
found, for instance, that by 1995 Yale graduates were earning 30
percent more than Tulane graduates, which seemed to support the
assumption that attending an elite college smoothes one's path in life.
But
maybe the kids who got into Yale were simply more talented or
hardworking than those who got into Tulane. To adjust for this, Krueger
and Dale studied what happened to students who were accepted at an Ivy
or a similar institution, but chose instead to attend a less sexy,
"moderately selective" school. It turned out that such students had, on
average, the same income twenty years later as graduates of the elite
colleges. Krueger and Dale found that for students bright enough to win
admission to a top school, later income "varied little, no matter which
type of college they attended." In other words, the student, not the
school, was responsible for the success.
Research
does find an unmistakable advantage to getting a bachelor's degree. In
2002, according to Census Bureau figures, the mean income of college
graduates was almost double that of those holding only high school
diplomas. Trends in the knowledge-based economy suggest that college
gets more valuable every year. For those graduating from high school
today and in the near future, failure to attend at least some college
may mean a McJobs existence for all but the most talented or
unconventional.
But, as Krueger has written, "that you go to college is more important than where
you go." The advantages conferred by the most selective schools may be
overstated. Consider how many schools are not in the top twenty-five,
yet may be only slightly less good than the elites: Bard, Barnard,
Bates, Bowdoin, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Bucknell, Carleton, Carnegie
Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Colby, Colgate, Colorado College, Davidson,
Denison, Dickinson, Emory, George Washington, Grinnell, Hamilton,
Harvey Mudd, Haverford, Holy Cross, Kenyon, Lafayette, Macalester,
Middlebury, Mount Holyoke, Notre Dame, Oberlin, Occidental, Reed, Rice,
Sarah Lawrence, Skidmore, Spelman, St. John's of Annapolis, Trinity of
Connecticut, Union, Vanderbilt, Washington and Lee, Wesleyan, Whitman,
William and Mary, and the universities of Michigan and Virginia. Then
consider the many other schools that may lack the je ne sais quoi
of the top destinations but are nonetheless estimable, such as Boston
College, Case Western, Georgia Tech, Rochester, SUNY-Binghamton, Texas
Christian, Tufts, the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at
Austin, the University of Washington, the University of Wisconsin at
Madison, and the University of California campuses at Davis, Irvine,
Los Angeles, and San Diego. (These lists are meant not to be exhaustive
but merely to make the point that there are many, many good schools in America.) "Any family ought to be thrilled to have a child admitted to Madison, but parents obsessed with prestige would not consider Madison a win," says David Adamany, the president of Temple University.
"The child who is rejected at Harvard will probably go on to receive a
superior education and have an outstanding college experience at any of
dozens of other places, but start off feeling inadequate and burdened
by the sense of disappointing his or her parents. Many parents now set
their children up to consider themselves failures if they don't get the
acceptance letter from a super-selective school."
Beyond
the Krueger-Dale research, there is abundant anecdotal evidence that
any of a wide range of colleges can equip its graduates for success.
Consider the United States Senate. This most
exclusive of clubs currently lists twenty-six members with
undergraduate degrees from the Gotta-Get-Ins—a disproportionately good
showing considering the small percentage of students who graduate from
these schools. But the diversity of Senate backgrounds is even more
striking. Fully half of U.S. senators are graduates of public universities, and many went to "states"—among them Chico State, Colorado State, Iowa State, Kansas State, Louisiana State, Michigan State, North Carolina State, Ohio State, Oklahoma State, Oregon State, Penn State, San Jose State, South Dakota State, Utah State, and Washington State.
Or consider the CEOs of the top ten Fortune 500 corporations: only four
went to elite schools. H. Lee Scott Jr., of Wal-Mart, the world's
largest corporation, is a graduate of Pittsburg State, in Pittsburg, Kansas.
Or consider Rhodes scholars: this year only sixteen of the thirty-two
American recipients hailed from elite colleges; the others attended
Hobart, Millsaps, Morehouse, St. Olaf, the University of the South, Utah State, and Wake Forest,
among other non-elites. Steven Spielberg was rejected by the
prestigious film schools at USC and UCLA; he attended Cal State Long
Beach, and seems to have done all right for himself. Roger Straus, of
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of the most influential people in
postwar American letters, who died last spring at eighty-seven, was a
graduate of the University of Missouri.
"[Students] have been led to believe that if you go to X school, then Y
will result, and this just isn't true," says Judith Shapiro, the
president of Barnard. "It's good to attend a good college, but there
are many good colleges. Getting into Princeton or Barnard just isn't a life-or-death matter."
That getting into Princeton isn't a life-or-death matter hit home years ago for Loren Pope, then the education editor of The New York Times. For his 1990 book, Looking Beyond the Ivy League, Pope scanned Who's Who entries of the 1980s, compiling figures on undergraduate degrees. (This was at a time when Who's Who was still the social directory of American distinction—before the marketing of Who's Who in Southeastern Middle School Girls' Tennis and innumerable other spinoffs.) Pope found that the schools that produced the most Who's Who entrants were Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Caltech; that much conformed to expectations. But other colleges near the top in Who's Who productivity included DePauw, Holy Cross, Wabash, Washington and Lee, and Wheaton of Illinois. Pope found that Bowdoin, Denison, Franklin & Marshall, Millsaps, and the University of the South were better at producing Who's Who entrants than Georgetown or the University of Virginia, and that Beloit bested Duke.
These
findings helped persuade Pope that the glamour schools were losing
their status as the gatekeepers of accomplishment. Today Pope campaigns
for a group of forty colleges that he considers nearly the equals of
the elite, but more personal, more pleasant, less stress-inducing,
and—in some cases, at least—less expensive. Institutions like Hope,
Rhodes, and Ursinus do not inspire the same kind of admissions lust as
the Ivies, but they are places where parents should feel very good
about sending their kids. (A list of the well-regarded non-elite
colleges Pope champions can be found at www.ctcl.com.)
The
Gotta-Get-Ins can no longer claim to be the more or less exclusive
gatekeepers to graduate school. Once, it was assumed that an
elite-college undergraduate degree was required for admission to a top
law or medical program. No more: 61 percent of new students at HarvardLawSchool last year had received their bachelor's degrees outside the Ivy League. "Every year I have someone who went to Harvard College but can't get into Harvard Law, plus someone who went to the University of Maryland and does get into Harvard Law," Shirley Levin says. For Looking Beyond the Ivy League,
Pope analyzed eight consecutive sets of scores on the medical-school
aptitude test. Caltech produced the highest-scoring students, but
Carleton outdid Harvard, Muhlenberg topped Dartmouth, and Ohio Wesleyan finished ahead of Berkeley.
The
elites still lead in producing undergraduates who go on for doctorates
(Caltech had the highest percentage during the 1990s), but Earlham,
Grinnell, Kalamazoo, Kenyon, Knox, Lawrence, Macalester, Oberlin, and
Wooster do better on this scale than many higher-status schools. In the
1990s little Earlham, with just 1,200 students, produced a higher
percentage of graduates who have since received doctorates than did
Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, Penn, or Vassar.
That non-elite schools do well in Who's Who
and in sending students on to graduate school or to the Senate suggests
that many overestimate the impact of the Gotta-Get-Ins not only on
future earnings but on interesting career paths as well. For example, I
graduated from Colorado College,
a small liberal arts institution that is admired but, needless to say,
is no Stanford. While I was there, in the mid-1970s, wandering around
the campus were disheveled kids whose names have since become linked
with an array of achievements: Neal Baer, M.D., an executive producer
for the NBC show ER; Frank Bowman, a former federal prosecutor
often quoted as the leading specialist on federal sentencing
guidelines; Katharine DeShaw, the director of fundraising for the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; David Hendrickson, the chairman of the
political-science department at Colorado College; Richard Kilbride, the
managing director of ING Asset Management, which administers about $450
billion; Robert Krimmer, a television actor; Margaret Liu, M.D., a
senior adviser to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and one of the
world's foremost authorities on vaccines; David Malpass, the chief
economist for Bear Stearns; Mark McConnell, an animator who has won
Emmys for television graphics; Jim McDowell, the vice-president of
marketing for BMW North America; Marcia McNutt, the CEO of the Monterey
Bay Aquarium Research Institute; Michael Nava, the author of the Henry
Rios detective novels; Peter Neupert, the CEO of Drugstore.com; Anne
Reifenberg, the deputy business editor of the Los Angeles Times;
Deborah Caulfield Rybak, a co-author of an acclaimed book about tobacco
litigation; Ken Salazar, the attorney general of Colorado and a
Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004; Thom Shanker, the
Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times; Joe Simitian, named to the 2003 Scientific American
list of the fifty most influential people in technology; and Eric
Sondermann, the founder of one of Denver's top public-relations firms.
In terms of students who went on to interesting or prominent lives, Colorado College may have done just as well in this period as Columbia
or Cornell or any other Gotta-Get-In destination. Doubtless other
colleges could make the same claim for themselves for this or other
periods; I'm simply citing the example I know personally. The point is
that for some time the center of gravity for achievement has been
shifting away from the topmost colleges.
Fundamental
to that shift has been a steady improvement in the educational quality
of non-elite schools. Many college officials I interviewed said
approximately the same thing: that a generation or two ago it really
was a setback if a top student didn't get admitted to an Ivy or one of
a few other elite destinations, because only a small number of places
were offering a truly first-rate education. But since then the
non-elites have improved dramatically. "Illinois Wesleyan is a
significantly better college than it was in the 1950s," says Janet
McNew, the school's provost, "whereas Harvard has probably changed much
less dramatically in the past half century." That statement could apply
to many other colleges. Pretty good schools of the past have gotten
much better, while the great schools have remained more or less the
same. The result is that numerous colleges have narrowed the gap with
the elites.
How many colleges now
provide an excellent education? Possibly a hundred, suggests Jim
Conroy, of New Trier; probably more than two hundred, Shirley Levin
says. The improvement is especially noteworthy at large public
universities. Michigan and Virginia
have become "public Ivies," and numerous state-run universities now
offer a top-flight education. Whether or not students take a public
university up on its offer of a good education is another matter:
large, chaotic campuses may create an environment in which it's
possible to slide by with four years of drinking beer and playing video
games, whereas small private colleges usually notice students who try
this. Yet the rising quality of public universities is important,
because these schools provide substantial numbers of slots, often with
discounted in-state tuition. Many families who cannot afford private
colleges now have appealing alternatives at public universities.
One
reason so many colleges have improved is the profusion of able faculty
members. The education wave fostered by the GI Bill drew many talented
people into academia. Because tenured openings at the glamour schools
are subject to slow turnover, this legion of new teachers fanned out to
other colleges, raising the quality of instruction at non-elite
schools. While this was happening, the country became more prosperous,
and giving to colleges—including those below the glamour level—shot up.
When the first GI Bill cohort began to die, big gifts started flowing
to the non-elites. (Earlier this year one graduate bequeathed Pitt's
law school $4.25 million.) Today many non-elite schools have
significant financial resources: Emory has an endowment of $4.5
billion, Case Western an endowment of $1.4 billion, and even little
Colby an endowment of $323 million—an amount that a few decades ago
would have seemed unimaginable for a small liberal arts school without
a national profile.
As colleges
below the top were improving, the old WASP insider system was losing
its grip on business and other institutions. There was a time when an
Ivy League diploma was vital to career advancement in many places,
because an Ivy grad could be assumed to be from the correct
upper-middle-class Protestant background. Today an Ivy diploma reveals
nothing about a person's background, and favoritism in hiring and
promotion is on the decline; most businesses would rather have a Lehigh
graduate who performs at a high level than a Brown graduate who
doesn't. Law firms do remain exceptionally status-conscious—some
college counselors believe that law firms still hire associates based
partly on where they were undergraduates. But the majority of employers
aren't looking for status degrees, and some may even avoid candidates
from the top schools, on the theory that such aspirants have
unrealistic expectations of quick promotion.
Relationships
labeled ironic are often merely coincidental. But it is genuinely
ironic that as non-elite colleges have improved in educational quality
and financial resources, and favoritism toward top-school degrees has
faded, getting into an elite school has nonetheless become more of a
national obsession.
Which brings us back to the Krueger-Dale thesis. Can we really be sure Hamilton is nearly as good as Harvard?
Some
analysts maintain that there are indeed significant advantages to the
most selective schools. For instance, a study by Caroline Hoxby, a
Harvard economist who has researched college outcomes, suggests that
graduates of elite schools do earn more than those of comparable
ability who attended other colleges. Hoxby studied male students who
entered college in 1982, and adjusted for aptitude, though she used
criteria different from those employed by Krueger and Dale. She
projected that among students of similar aptitude, those who attended
the most selective colleges would earn an average of $2.9 million
during their careers; those who attended the next most selective
colleges would earn $2.8 million; and those who attended all other
colleges would average $2.5 million. This helped convince Hoxby that
top applicants should, in fact, lust after the most exclusive
possibilities.
"There's a clear
benefit to the top fifty or so colleges," she says. "Connections made
at the top schools matter. It's not so much that you meet the son of a
wealthy banker and his father offers you a job, but that you meet
specialists and experts who are on campus for conferences and speeches.
The conference networking scene is much better at the elite
universities." Hoxby estimates that about three quarters of the
educational benefit a student receives is determined by his or her
effort and abilities, and should be more or less the same at any good
college. The remaining quarter, she thinks, is determined by the status
of the school—higher-status schools have more resources and better
networking opportunities, and surround top students with other top
students.
"Today there are large
numbers of colleges with good faculty, so faculty probably isn't the
explanation for the advantage at the top," Hoxby says. "Probably there
is not much difference between the quality of the faculty at Princeton and at Rutgers.
But there's a lot of difference between the students at those places,
and some of every person's education comes from interaction with other
students." Being in a super-competitive environment may cause a few
students to have nervous breakdowns, but many do their best work under
pressure, and the contest is keenest at the Gotta-Get-Ins. Hoxby notes
that some medium-rated public universities have established internal
"honors colleges" to attract top performers who might qualify for the
best destinations. "Students at honors colleges in the public
universities do okay, but not as well as they would do at the elite
schools," Hoxby argues. The reason, she feels, is that they're not
surrounded by other top-performing students.
There
is one group of students that even Krueger and Dale found benefited
significantly from attending elite schools: those from disadvantaged
backgrounds. Kids from poor families seem to profit from exposure to Amherst
or Northwestern much more than kids from well-off families. Why? One
possible answer is that they learn sociological cues and customs to
which they have not been exposed before. In his 2003 book, Limbo,
Alfred Lubrano, the son of a bricklayer, analyzed what happens when
people from working-class backgrounds enter the white-collar culture.
Part of their socialization, Lubrano wrote, is learning to act
dispassionate and outwardly composed at all times, regardless of how
they might feel inside. Students from well-off communities generally
arrive at college already trained to masquerade as calm. Students from
disadvantaged backgrounds may benefit from exposure to this way of
carrying oneself—a trait that may be particularly in evidence at the
top colleges.
It's
understandable that so many high schoolers and their nervous parents
are preoccupied with the idea of getting into an elite college. The
teen years are a series of tests: of scholastic success, of fitting in,
of prowess at throwing and catching balls, of skill at pleasing adults.
These tests seem to culminate in a be-all-and-end-all judgment about
the first eighteen years of a person's life, and that judgment is made
by college admissions officers. The day college acceptance letters
arrive is to teens the moment of truth: they learn what the adult world
really thinks of them, and receive an omen of whether or not their
lives will be successful. Of course, grown-up land is full of Yale
graduates who are unhappy failures and Georgia Tech grads who run big
organizations or have a great sense of well-being. But teens can't be
expected to understand this. All they can be sure of is that colleges
will accept or reject them, and it's like being accepted or rejected
for a date—only much more intense, and their parents know all the
details.
Surely it is impossible
to do away with the trials of the college-application process
altogether. But college admissions would be less nerve-racking, and
hang less ominously over the high school years, if it were better
understood that a large number of colleges and universities can now
provide students with an excellent education, sending them onward to
healthy incomes and appealing careers. Harvard is marvelous, but you
don't have to go there to get your foot in the door of life.
Posted 星期五, 07/09/2010 - 22:18by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com (hypathway@hotmail.com).
