You’re Messing Up Your Kid’s Future: Summary of Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz
If your child is a high school junior, this book will be especially useful. Even if the book doesn’t change your mind about anything, it will force you to revisit your assumptions about what a “good” college is and why. That exercise is particularly useful for juniors as we head through winter into spring, when we start to delve into possibilities for your child’s college list.
In case you don’t have time to read the book, I’ve done my best to capture the book’s main points.
Chapter One / Students
Today’s students are super achievers, but they are more stressed-out and overpressured than ever. The problem is that students are learning to get results rather than to think and learn. There are not as many “passionate weirdos” and “searchers” who are trying to get an education. Instead, there is a culture of credentialism: getting the next grade, trophy, diploma or other outward indicator of success. Students then move from elite schools to careers at elite firms in finance and consulting, thus maintaining their place on the prestige pathway. Students are told over and over of their unlimited potential, and these career paths in finance and consulting keep all their options open; these students are often unprepared to think for themselves about what their path should be, so they go the safe route. Risk-averse students are chasing gold stars without stopping to think about why. Elite education is training students for high-paying jobs rather than helping them develop the courage and imagination to find their true calling.
Chapter Two / History
Elite schools such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton used to base admissions on criteria such as character (and in doing so gave unfair preference to members of certain religions and graduates of certain boarding schools). That emphasis on character has since shifted to include more merit-based measures such as grades and test scores. Today’s elite students have to do it all: show character through sports, leadership, and service, and also demonstrate academic excellence. College rankings have exacerbated this problem. Today’s elite students must be great in one area and good in many others.
Chapter Three / Training
We are all familiar with the idea that a college degree, especially from a prestigious school, is useful for social mobility. Upper-class and upper-middle-class families are so focused on prestige that they become overprotective; we have helicopter parents who deny their children independence and indulgent parents who tell their children they are wonderful no matter what their children do. These parenting styles prevent children from actually growing up and force the child to become an extension of the parents’ desires for achievement or freedom. Parents might tell their children to do their best, but what they often really mean is that their children can do better if they try harder. A notable example of this approach is Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which the author describes her extreme focus on pressuring her children to achieve. The underlying idea is that the child is an extension of the parent. Even if a child’s parents aren’t caught up in this emphasis on achievement, other children’s parents are, and that creates an environment that is intellectually harmful. The result is joyless perfectionism. The child is not confident that he is good enough; instead, he is only as good as his last achievement. When he achieves, he is the best; when he fails, he is nothing. The child wavers between grandiosity and depression. Students view experiences as commodities, as instruments to achieving larger goals, and they become cynical. The system is rewarding people who join activities and people who have a desire to climb to leadership positions.
Chapter Four / Institutions
The universities are aware of all the problems their system perpetuates, but they are not helping their students get real educations. The American university system is trying to balance two competing objectives: preparing students for professional life and introducing questions about purpose and value. This is the tension between the liberal arts college and the research university. In the latter, professors are rewarded for research, not for teaching. Instruction is viewed as a drain on resources. Universities have become more vocational and less focused on general education. Professors and students have come to a tacit understanding: students will not bother professors about spending more time on research than on teaching so long as professors award high grades. Students devote less time to studying but cannot tolerate honest feedback. Therefore, professors lower their standards and inflate grades. Students are customers to be satisfied rather than learners to be challenged. The relationship between university and student has been commercialized. To get a real education where a student will be challenged, he or she must fight for it and seek out the right opportunities. Colleges might be incentivized not to help their students see beyond the high-paying careers such as law, medicine, finance, or consulting; these fields produce wealthy alumni.
Chapter Five / Self
Is “return on investment” the proper way to measure the value of college? Money matters. Is it the only thing that matters? Students need to get jobs, but they also need to get lives. Many important things, such as having children, are worth doing for their own sake. If we accept that the only measure of a college’s value is its ability to prepare students for jobs, we are accepting a view of society that says a person’s value is equivalent to his potential financial contribution to the market.
College is about learning a habit of skepticism. None of us is a blank slate. Each of us lives bathed in opinions, and the function of college is to help us recognize and question the opinions that we have taken as fact. College is the chance to think and reflect on life before adulthood begins. College is the chance to “build a self” and conduct self-discovery. A true education both prepares students to contribute to the GDP and trains them to think carefully about who they are and what others are demanding from them. It is more than just career preparation.
Chapter Six / Inventing your life
Knowing yourself is a practical endeavor because it allows you to find the career that matches your interests. Vocation is Latin for “calling.” Rejecting the usual and expected career paths requires moral imagination. “What are you going to do with that major?” and “Instead of finding yourself, how about finding a job?” are attempts to make you feel self-indulgent for following your curiosity. Is following a career to make money any less self-indulgent? To find your calling, it helps to understand what leads to happiness: a certain level of material comfort, feeling connected to others, and engaging in meaningful work. You’ll do better if you’re engaged in work that you’re interested in. Purposeful work is not necessarily high-income work. You have the gift and burden of freedom to find yourself and find your own path. But our education system is not preparing students to do this. We no longer discuss ideals such as justice, beauty, goodness, and truth. To invent your life, you must overcome fear of failure. Failures and mistakes shape us. Is it a virtue to have always played it safe, to always have been sure of yourself? The other part of “find your passion” is “be prepared to suffer.” The challenge of credentialism is that there is never enough status; you can never reach the top. Consider how you can make work itself, not success, your goal. All this being said, you still have to face the reality of money. Your financial circumstances, including debt, will affect your college choice. There is pressure to pursue status, especially in immigrant families, and this is in part because immigrants, who are less acculturated than their children, cannot see the full range of options. Becoming an adult means disloyalty, learning to do without parental approval. To live an adult life, you have to break up with your parents. If you’re not sure how to proceed, take time off before college with a gap year, or during college. You don’t need to have everything all planned out; you just need to head in the right direction. Inventing your life doesn’t mean believing you can be whatever you want, writing your own rules, or slacking off; it means finding the way to work that’s right for you.
Chapter Seven / Leadership
Elite universities want leadership, but what they often mean is not changing the world for the better, but rather making it to the top. The problem is that making it to the top is not just about excellence; it’s about maneuvering and playing politics. It’s about not questioning the system. Today, leadership means sharing the values of the people in charge; it no longer means duty, honor, courage, and selflessness. More important than training “leaders,” in the author’s opinion, is training independent thinkers with the courage and imagination to resist accepted ideas and challenge the consensus -- whatever those ideas or consensus might be. The dissident impulse is part of American history, but who today is thinking about the structure of society? Changing society requires political involvement. Technology is great, but real change is through politics. Service is great, but not if it’s about charity at the expense of justice. It’s not that every student should be a revolutionary, but every student should learn to think. The point is to use intelligence to some greater end. True preparation for leadership starts with questioning what kind of education you are getting.
Chapter Eight / Great Books
The liberal arts include disciplines where knowledge is pursued for its own sake. The point is to understand how knowledge is created, including how we know something is true, what assumptions are being made, and what questions it raises. The liberal arts develop critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving skills that employers value. The fact that certain majors lead to lower salaries is misleading; it often reflects the person’s decision to enter a lower-paying field, not the person’s actual earning potential. Many graduate schools value students with liberal arts foundations, too. True, the specifics of what a student learns through a liberal arts curriculum might not matter on the job, but learning how to think does. Liberal arts are more than vocational training; they are preparation for citizenship. Art helps students make sense of themselves and gives name to their experiences. Art, including literature, forces students to understand the experiences of others, and to see that the world feels different to everyone. The point is that it’s important for students to focus on more than just specializing in a certain field; students should seek out a general education that allows them to experience the humanities. “Life” and “work” are not separated into two sections. They mingle. Thinking about more than work is inevitable, and the liberal arts cultivate a habit of reflection. No matter how specialized you plan to be, you will operate within a system -- for example, a heart surgeon works in a hospital -- and those systems require your input on whether they are as they should be.
Chapter Nine / Spirit Guides
Good education requires good teachers. Thinking - which includes analyzing and formulating arguments - is a complex skill that must be learned from another person. This can happen by writing a paper and receiving feedback or by participating in a collaborative discussion. Look for professors and mentors with whom you can make a connection. When you find a professor who teaches about the subject matter and about life itself, you’ll know you’re on the right path. Given the pressure on professors to conduct research, good teachers are hard to find. You will have to work at it.
Chapter Ten / Your Guide to the Rankings
You can’t get the same education at Fresno State that you can at Stanford, but there are many options in between. One possibility is a public university, especially those with honors colleges or programs. Another is a liberal arts college, though these are often small and isolated. Also, the top-tier liberal arts colleges have begun to resemble the top national universities in that both types of schools are sending a large proportion of their graduates to high-paying fields, such as finance and consulting. Second-tier liberal arts colleges, Colleges That Change Lives, the Hidden Ivies, and colleges that appear on the Washington Monthly rankings are all worth considering. Look for colleges that offer freshman seminars that cross disciplines and ask bigger questions about life.
Chapter Eleven / Welcome to the Club
Elite education is reproducing the class system in America by exacerbating inequality and perpetuating privilege. By some counts, over 65% of students at elite colleges come from the top quarter of income distribution. This is hardly surprising because preparing a child for an elite education -- tutors, test prep, and more -- is extremely expensive. Performance on the SAT is highly correlated with family wealth. Colleges need wealthy students who will become donors. Elite colleges, by giving preference to legacies and athletes, groups typically consisting of upper-income students, are promoting a less equal society. Socioeconomic diversity is rare at elite colleges. The admitted students have done well and worked hard, but many of their lower-income competitors never had a chance to begin with. Elite education is isolating the privileged from everyone else in society. Most of all, elite educations offer instruction in how to be wealthy: “Welcome to the club.” Once you’re in the door, it’s very hard to get kicked out. Many people say, “We’re not entitled, we work hard.” Yet many are working just as hard and not receiving the opportunity of an elite education. You cannot think your way to an understanding of people of different backgrounds. You have to meet them as peers. You are not more valuable than other people, but elite education tells you the opposite, that you are the best.
Chapter Twelve / The Self-Overcoming of the Hereditary Meritocracy
Meritocracy purports to work for the good of all. The affluent and the powerful have merit. Our country has so much potential, but what is the great purpose for which we are striving? Leaders are brilliant but risk-averse. The technocracy can solve the problems in front of it, but it cannot decide which problems are worth solving. More now than ever, politicians are graduates of elite universities; more now than ever, politicians are legacies at elite universities. Education can mitigate the class system by ensuring that privilege is not handed down. Colleges can take the lead by instituting class-based affirmative action, ending preferences for athletes and legacies, weighting SAT scores for socioeconomic factors, limiting the number of activities kids can list on their applications, discounting opportunities students gain by virtue of their parents’ wealth, and refusing to cooperate with U.S. News. Colleges need to reconsider their definition of merit to allow for students who have failed at something. How can they find the brilliant and restless minds instead of the bland, straight-A students? Elite colleges can only go so far, however, in opening their doors to the poor and middle class. We need to create a society where you don’t have to go to a private college to get a great education. We need to invest more in free, first-rate public higher education. We can spend money on education instead of defense. It is not just the 1% who benefits from the current system; it’s the top 10%. Starving public universities makes private colleges more desirable, and that means kids have to jump through more and more hoops to gain admission at private colleges, which means that it costs more to achieve and that students become more miserable. If you want to make society better, stop hogging the resources. We need to love our neighbors’ children as we love our own.
Final Thoughts
I discussed this book with my wife, Christa, who is eminently pragmatic. She said, “There’s nothing wrong with being an ‘excellent sheep.’ Excellent sheep make good money and have comfortable lives.”
This is true. And my reason for suggesting this book is not because I think elite education is useless. Rather, I am suggesting this book because it opens up options for a certain type of student -- specifically, the smart student in the top 25% of his or her class who just isn’t drawn to consulting, finance, engineering, medicine, or law. For this type of student, I think it’s encouraging to know that there’s a wide range of options beyond the “Top 25,” including honors colleges at public universities and liberal arts colleges. Even if this book doesn’t convince you of anything, it will help give your family peace of mind about why your child is applying to certain colleges but not others.