How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning

[Demovictory9]

How College Became a Ruthless Competition Divorced From Learning
It is a truth universally acknowledged that elite parents, in possession of excellent jobs, want to get their kids into college.


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Educational hierarchies invite ruthless competition: Only one of us can get ahead, just as only one woman could land Mr. Darcy. So we scratch and claw to get places in the exclusive schools and colleges whose graduates fill the top jobs.

The most obvious pitfall of this competition is that only the privileged can reliably access the lifetime of schooling needed to win: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale together typically enroll more students from households in the richest 1 percent than from the entire bottom half. But even for rich applicants, a 5 percent admissions rate makes the odds of winning the college lottery much longer than Elizabeth Bennet’s odds of marrying well. The pressure to beat these odds drives even the most well-resourced applicants and their families to immoral and self-destructive schemes. In the recent Varsity Blues scandal, sophisticated and otherwise sensible people with family wealth to spare paid bribes to arrange fraudulent athletic resumes and rigged test scores for their children. Setting moral principle aside, what besides an overwhelming fear of losing caste could lead parents to think that their children’s development is best served by giving them, behind their backs, false credentials? Is this any less foolish than Mrs. Bennet’s sending a daughter off to visit a possible suitor through a rain that makes her dangerously ill, in the hope that the bad weather will force him to take her in and fall in love?

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Another pitfall of competitive education is that it distorts students’ choices of what skills to acquire. When schooling is the path to income and status, students study the subjects that yield the highest wages and the greatest prestige, inducing too many people to study finance and law and too few to study education, caregiving, or even engineering. But private wages are not the same thing as the public interest. Child-care workers, for example, give much more to society than they take from it, generating almost 10 times as great a social product as they capture in private wages. Bankers and lawyers, by contrast, capture private wages that exceed their social product—they take more than they give. The distortions reach beyond specific jobs. Art, culture, and community all make the world a much better place, but they are notoriously difficult to monetize in the market. Competitive schooling therefore drives students away from these fields. No surprise, then, that the rise of competitive education has been accompanied by a steep decline in student interest in the humanities.

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A social and economic order based on the immense labor incomes of extravagantly educated workers traps high-achieving students in a pitiless competition to attain meaningless superiority. The more completely people embrace education’s competitive face, the further they retreat from its deeper place in human self-actualization; no matter how skilled they get at capturing status, they never acquire a deep self-knowledge. And in this sense they remain forever uneducated. Simultaneously, the schools that focus their training on the quest for competitive advantage betray every plausible ideal of academic excellence. Instead of understanding students as people to be cultivated, competitive schooling treats them as assets to be managed and exploited. These perversions are today’s analogs to the boredom, loneliness, and disenchantment that Elizabeth Bennet feared would accompany an instrumental marriage.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/marriage-college-status-meritocracy/618795/

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Interesting.

Now read Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives and Looking Beyond the Ivy League. Pope focuses on the small liberal arts colleges that actually provide an education. I'm fortunate in that I stumbled across both those books around the time I was beginning to think about college for my oldest son. I'd already had a strong bias against the huge mega-Universities that are now so common. These two books totally opened my eyes to new possibilities.

[moondust]

2. Buying expensive diplomas?