Class Warfare in Education: A call for a truce

At a brunch with a couple of exceptionally bright students we talked about what they were going to do now that college graduation is on the horizon. One of them talked about all the pressure she feels from her family to land a name brand Fortune 500 job. Before long there were tears. We were in a public space but the pain was too much for her hold in. The smiling confident joking persona failed. Trying to please parents, find a job, keep up with honors projects and multiple activities have taken a mental toll.

Another former student called from New York. This student has been out for 2 years at one of the top 4 consulting firms. From the outside all looks great. The City, the job, money, and prestige. The student broke down and confessed to going through nearly unbearable depression. The hours, the travel, the expectations from parents to make it big, the constant competition from friends who work with the big banks, and a feeling that the work it took to get to this place did not prepare for the emptiness of it all, and the soulless emphasis on profits. The student cares about social justice and sees politics and profit over all else mentality here and abroad as creating misery for far too many. The student sees the consulting company focused on money money money. The student hates this ideology but is so depressed that looking for alternatives seems akin to climbing Everest in a winter ice storm. Now in intense counseling the student has thought dark thoughts.

Another student talked about the academic program she’s in. She is doing very well but virtually all of her peers are slackers. They make her feel like a nerd or like someone who does not know how to join the group and have fun. She feels alone and feels untethered as she is from another country and has no family to turn to. Her tears came in a public place. She wants to make her family proud, wants her friends to like her, wants to learn even though she has to spend massive amounts of time to do assignments native speakers can do in a few minutes. They put pressure on her to go out and enjoy when all she can think about is keeping up. She’s rethinking the wisdom of going abroad because some of her peers don’t understand how hard it is to immerse into another culture and language

These are just 3; unfortunately, there were several more conversations like this over the course of the past week. I am sure there are many conversations a lot like these going on at every campus in the US on most days and perhaps most hours. The level of pressure on students is the highest I have seen in 3 decades. More students seek counseling, more students are depressed, more students are worried they can’t find 'real' jobs than before when a degree from a prestigious school virtually assured some open door-- real jobs that require great skills and not jobs that don’t require a college degree.

Why am I writing this? I am trying to evoke some emotion. I don’t expect readers to cry, but I do hope they will learn a bit about the struggles that many are going through right now on campuses across the US. There is, however, another reason I am writing this. I hope I can convince at least a few people to think about the way they categorize the students who apply for admission to highly selective schools works.

Let me start with some quotes from someone who is now a professor:

For most of my life, I have taken for granted how my upbringing and my loving, educated, and involved parents made it possible for me to strive for excellence. Nearly everything has worked in my favor well beyond whatever natural gifts I possess. I attended excellent schools in safe, suburban neighborhoods with healthy tax bases. I had teachers who encouraged my talent and creativity. I had parents who supplemented what I was learning in school with additional studies…

In high school, I attended boarding school in New Hampshire…My senior year, I received an acceptance letter to an Ivy League college. I was in the campus mailroom. Everyone was buzzing as they learned of their fate. I opened my letter and smiled. I had been accepted to all but one of the schools to which I applied. I allowed myself a quiet moment of celebration.

How do you feel about this student? Do you feel she is the embodiment of what we encourage students to do to reach their potential? Or do you feel a bit judgmental because she has had advantages that most do not have and that these advantages have given her a tremendous boost in getting accepted to an Ivy?

I ask these questions as I have read a number of things recently that lead me to believe that students like this are often looked at negatively by some in education. To me, I think we should be holding students like this as models to follow.

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The one writer who has achieved some fame talking about students who attend elite schools is William Deresiewic z. His book Excellent Sheep and New Republic article depict the vast majority of students as unthinking drones who jump through hoops in order to get into elite schools and once there do little except to pad resumes and lead unexamined lives. While I strongly disagree with his categorization of most of the students at elite schools as excellent sheep (go here for some of the reasons why), I do think his portrayal of the internal state of many students at top schools is accurate:

Look beneath the fa?ade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation.

We all know about the stressed-out, overpressured high school student; why do we assume that things get better once she gets to college? The evidence says they do not. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the twenty-five-year history of the study. In another recent survey —summarized by the American Psychological Association under the headline “The Crisis on Campus”— nearly half of college students reported feelings of hopelessness, while almost a third spoke of feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months.” Deresiewicz, William . Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

These words support what I have found in talking with students who have excelled in virtually everything they have tried. Many of them have been working non-stop their entire lives. They have been pushed by parents and by others around them who also want to excel. They tend to be in schools that stress achievement and provide rigorous academic opportunities in APs, honors or IB classes. I would hope that some reading Deresiewicz ‘s words would then feel some sympathy for what these students have to do in order to stand out in an increasingly selective process to get accepted to top schools. The competition is now global (as with almost everything else in life) and each year the acceptance rates to top schools drops down and now hovers well under 10% at the most selective schools. These students have to be nearly perfect to get in and it often takes a huge psychic toll to accomplish this.

Unfortunately, there are far too may people in and out of education who don’t have much sympathy for these students. Instead there seems to be some shadenfreude going on. There is, if not glee, in hearing about the suffering of these students, there isn’t much going on in the media that comes across as supportive.

The reason that many don’t seem to feel both supportive and sympathetic toward these students is that instead of understanding how much work it takes to stand out in order to get accepted to elite schools many focus far more on how much money it often takes. Educators and pundits comment daily it seems on how these students from wealthy backgrounds have received a huge boost from parents who seem to care little about anything except the name of the school their child gets in and how they can buy whatever it take to get them there.

If you think I am overstating my case, here are some things that have been said by well respected writers and educators about students accepted to elite schools that lead me to believe that the ideology of class warfare has clouded their vision when it comes to understanding what these students are really like and how they live their lives:

“Most of the entering class at very selective universities (like the Ivy Leagues) had the advantages of very wealthy parents who have no problem opening their wallets to university foundations, private tutors and nannies, SAT summer camps, never having to work a part-time job in high school, and the best private schools - any mediocre talent can get into an Ivy League university with all of those advantages (any many do.” Comment from an educator on a discussion group about selective admission

“If you were shut out of an elite school, that doesn’t mean you’re less gifted than all of the students who were welcomed there. It may mean only that you lacked the patronage that some of them had, or that you played the game less single-mindedly, taking fewer SAT courses and failing to massage your biography with the same zeal.

A friend of mine in Africa told me recently about a center for orphans there that a rich American couple financed in part to give their own teenage children an exotic charity to visit occasionally and mine for college-application essays: admissions bait. That’s the degree of cunning that comes into this frenzy.

Maybe it tells you merely that these colleges attract the budding plutocrats with the greatest concern for the heft of their paychecks. Is that the milieu you sought?” Frank Bruni, NY Times Columnist

And here are some quite different comments from the person who I started with, William Deresiewicz:

"It almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all…

Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else….

Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely."

I have a whole lot more comments like this and almost included the whole group I collected from comments over the last few days but have decided that these 3 will do so long as readers know that these comments are common and represent what I would call the knee-jerk reaction to the way that students get accepted to highly selective schools. In other words, I am not as the logicians say, cherry picking data that does not represent a fairly large group of people. I still find it odd that the reaction on the part of so many to students who work hard is so negative. I have written about this issue a number of times and in a number of ways, but I have not had many who seem to agree with me that the comments and opinions above should be looked at with a critical eye and that perhaps it is time to question whether critiquing the parents and students who do all they can do develop skills and passions and talents should not be the ones we look down upon.

Each of the comments I have quoted raises the same thing in slightly different way: wealth, patronage, and buying a place at a selective school.

Based on these comments it would seem that there is a strong belief that rich kids can buy their way in to schools. While there are a few students like this who are accepted each year, the number is very small (Malcolm Gladwell says he has heard it takes 20 million to get a place. I don’t think he has data to back this up but even if it were true the number of families that could drop 20 million for a child is tiny.) Anyone running data on the Ivies and donations from parents with college going kids could find out how many 20 million contributions came in in any given year. I would be willing to bet that the number would be smaller than the number of fingers I have.

Gladwell asserts 20 million gets students in

What’s far more important, however, than tracing the tiny number of super trust fund kids who get in, would be to get a somewhat agreed upon definition of what privileged means. The medium income (in 2011) for those at the top 1.5% in the US is $250,000. Is anyone above this percentage above amount to be categorized as rich? A thought experiment might help. If a family has two children and they live in a city with poor public schools they will likely make the sacrifice to send their children to private schools. The prices can range from 10,000-30,000. Boarding school is about 50,000. In addition, living in large cities costs are great deal of money as does living in some areas outside the cities in nice suburbs with great public schools. While these families are not suffering economically, I think it is not accurate to say they can buy their way in to elite schools. Even the top .1% of income earners wont find it easy to drop 20 million to buy a space (assuming this statement by Gladwell is even remotely accurate). The number of parents who have high school seniors and who make 250,000 is small. It is one of the reasons colleges have had to import many full paying international students. There simply are not that many rich kids to go around given the costs of schools these days. The elite schools have more than enough students, from all income levels that they can admit, but I think it is inaccurate to assume that families who make less than a very high sum are busying their children's way in to schools. (Here is one data point to support my contention, taken from Jeffrey Selingo’s book, College (Un)Bound, which is well worth reading as it is a treasure trove of data that isn’t published many places: " At the top is the total number of eighteen-year-olds, some 4.3 million in 2009. The ones that filter out at the bottom are those with above-average SAT scores and family incomes over $ 200,000 a year, who also want to attend small, private colleges in the mid-Atlantic or Northeast regions. That number in 2009, according to Lundquist? Just 996 students." Selingo, Jeffrey J. College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students)

While these stats do not apply to the Ives for example, they include all the top and less than top small liberal arts schools that proliferate in these regions. The fact is that there are not that many rich kids, even kids who are near the bottom of what some would call rich. It’s worth noting at Harvard for example 1 out of every 5 students in Pell Grant eligible, meaning the student comes form the bottom of the income distribution, Colombia’s low-income percentage is even higher. These skills are not filled with only students from penthouses and villas and who take private jets to get to campus. Not even close.

The second issue I have with the class warfare comments is that each of them seems to assume that parents care first and foremost about buying places in college. I don’t know how many of the commenters I have quoted above have spent untold hours with the parents of students at some of the top private and public schools in the US, but I have spent hundreds. I have continued my interaction with students and parents outside of school settings around the world and have logged in thousands of hours talking with students. And I also have personal experience with my own child negotiating through the application process for selective schools and most of her peers came from the top income distribution. In all that time, I found that parents were not plotting to buy their kids a spot. Did they try to encourage their children to play instruments, to play sports, to learn to do service? Yes. But it never seemed that the reason they were doing so was to buy a kid in. Most parents, of any income bracket, want their children to succeed. Those with means will try to find options that will help develop their children that may make them productive citizens. Are there a few who think money is the only thing that matters? Yes. Are there many? I certainly have not met many of them. I think that most parents want to give their children opportunities to learn first and foremost. I think it would be na?ve of me to think that some of the things they support might be thought of as helpful in admission. But most do not start every act or expense they make for their children as something that will end up being listed on an admission application. The cynicism on the part of educators about parents who make more than most seems overstated and not based on data.

Finally, I want to highlight what seems to be a disconnect between what people know about students who attend elite schools and yet what they perceive them to be. Deresiewic z . And anyone who works at a selective school knows, that the stress level among students is alarmingly high. Counseling centers are overwhelmed, students are depressed in record numbers, tons are on medications. Educators know this and yet it doesn’t seem that this elicits much concern in the public. Rather than attempting to address these issues it seems many would rather define these students as, to use Mr. Deresiewicz’s phrase, “entitled little shits.” If so many of those attending elite schools are psychically wounded do the all really feel like entitled little shits too. Are they both? Maybe there are some of both on campuses but my experience this past week and over many years leads me to conclude there are many more of the former than the latter. If I am right about this, then there ought to be a lot more comments and published pieces about helping the brightest students in the land negotiate their years in college in ways that will produce learning and health. If most teachers at colleges, if most who work in offices at universities, if most of the country thinks these kids are shits, don’t you think this attitude filters down to them? These kids are, I think it fair to say, not dumb. They can perceive the snarky remarks that come their way and these actions don’t help to bridge the gaps in income culture or experience in any useful way. The years when it was assumed that college is the best 4 years” seems to be over. Kids have to work timelessly to try to find the jobs they hope will bring them security for the future. Just because a student seems to have everything together on a resume or even speaking in public, it does not take much to see that underneath are young adults struggling to define themselves. Calling them shits won’t help them and won’t help anyone else either. It’s time to rethink the discourse that is being used by too many in education today.

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I began this entry by talking about my bad week, and here is where I will end. There are a lot of exceptional students who love to learn and work tirelessly to succeed some because they want to and others to please parents but many of these students are struggling. They are depressed, have eating disorders or worse. Some don’t know if they can get through school despite having all the numeric rubrics that predict success. My plea is for people who think that anyone who has money has it easy should spend some hours talking to some of these “rich kids” before saying things in public in the media or behind closed doors that purports to tell the truth of what these students are like and what lives they lead. I think if there would be more communication between educators and these students who work as hard as they can to do well and take full advantage of the support of parents there might be less of what I would call contempt for them.

Am I saying that there are not rich kids who are jerks? Of course not. But there are poor jerks too. Most students I know are good people who care and try as best as they can to do well. I tend to know students who have achieved exceptionally well and the group has been a huge resource for me in terms of learning about the world. I am honored that they talk to me about their struggles and fears. For those who don’t know many of the overachievers personally I would suggest looking over a number of interviews I have conducted with these kinds of student on this blog. Enter the word interview and then spend a few hours reading about students, most of whom are full payers, who have done things in their lives that I never could, in and out of the classroom, and almost all of these things have nothing to do with money. These students have chance to make positive change in ways few do. Why not try to give them some respect and support rather than contempt and inaccurate stereotypes? Name calling does not help them one bit and it won’t help the others who don’t have the chance to do what some of these students might if they had the support of people around them. These kids are under enough stress. Do they need to feel that most dislike them because they don’t have to go into debt to get an education? That seems counterproductive at the very least. It also seems mean-spirited and small-minded.

The person’s story I quoted from above who had supportive parents, lived in great neighborhoods and went to boarding school has some more detail I will add here :

My senior year, I received an acceptance letter to an Ivy League college. I was in the campus mailroom. Everyone was buzzing as they learned of their fate. I opened my letter and smiled. I had been accepted to all but one of the schools to which I applied. I allowed myself a quiet moment of celebration. A young white man next to me, the sort who played lacrosse, had not been accepted to his top choice, a school to which I had been accepted. He was instantly bitter. He sneered and muttered, “Affirmative action,” as he stalked away. I had worked hard and it didn’t matter. I was exceptional and it did not matter. In that moment, I was reminded of my place.

This African American student earned her spot. Yet at the moment she should have been celebrating she was insulted. I bring up this story, as I wanted to ask a question. Would the writers who call people from good incomes and attend boarding schools lots of names also call her an excellent sheep or an entitled little shit who waltzed into an Ivy? Probably not. Her race means she has had to overcome many things the rest of us have not. But she is still part of the community of students who attends these schools and has the backing of parents. To paint anyone who attends an elite boarding school and who then goes on to an Ivy entitled little shit would include this student and thus add insult to injury.

If a white or Asian student had just received great news from an Ivy and someone said right then and there, ‘entitled little shit and stalked off, I imagine that would hurt too. Or is there a part of you that thinks there are kids who deserve this epithet and that it feels just a little bit good to say it? ??While this last epithet is not at all the same thing as a racial epithet, each still dehumanize and categorize people into a group. I thought the educators were dedicated to changing this kind of thinking. These students, or at least most that I know, are vulnerable, insecure and still have a lot of growing up to do. But almost all of them have worked incredibly hard, and have earned their spots too. Instead of judging them negatively from the start, it might be useful to them and to the rest of us to keep the discourse civil and thoughtful.

Maria Popova sums what I have tried to say here clearly and succinctly: "To assume that one’s voice and cultural contribution don’t count because one was born into “privilege” is as narrow and toxic as to deny one’s voice because one was born into poverty."