Stuck in the Ivy League Mentality? Go Make Something.
Originally posted on Strikingly Stories.
On the New Republic, ex-Yale professor William Deresiewicz has an article on how the Ivy League, and the entire college admissions system for top-tier elite schools, entice superstar high-school students with the promise of affluence and prestige, and then make them insecure, confused, and purposeless. Students become so preoccupied with landing investment banking offers and figuring out their lucrative professional careers, instead of focusing on what college should be for: “to build a self” — to have ideas to be passionate about, to carve out a path of personal discovery.
The Ivy Trap
What the admissions system does, additionally, is to turn “experience” into a parody of itself — it’s more about padding your resume with community service than actually helping others, and caring about other people. “Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.” Ivy Leaguers then become — a memorable turn-of-phrase — “out-of-touch, entitled little shits.” This syndrome, he notes, is remarkably incurable.
Deresiewicz is refreshingly forthright. But he bemoans these changes without an effort to explain how they came about. His perspective is jaded, and (not his fault) the answers don’t really help. One potential way out is to get more people to act on their “entrepreneurial impulse” — to get students to throw themselves wholeheartedly into something new and unsettling, as so to break the vicious cycle of peer pressure and self-doubt. I also contend with Deresiewicz that entrepreneurship, unlike other lucrative career options, makes you a more interesting person.
Great Expectations
Deresiewicz harps on premature professional anxiety at some length, but doesn’t give examples, or insight into its roots. In fact, the reason for Ivy Anxiety seems to be the diversification of the student body. While the rich may have a stronghold, 52% of students receive need-based financial aid at Yale, for example. For meritocratic measure, graduating from a top school hasn’t been a guarantee of a smooth-sailing professional life for several decades. A liberal education, at once mind-expanding and a process to acclimatize students into upper-class gentility, no longer serves the last function. The escalating sticker price of college, then, has escalated the urgency of learning applicable skills, and the significance of graduate outcomes. This generation shouldn’t be handed the blame.
The rhetoric of Deresiewicz’s article falls prey to another form of elitism: that what school you go to determines your character. As he acknowledges, no school’s a fit for everyone; that’s kind of the point. For every Yale freshman confused about carving out a niche in a sea of valedictorians, there’s another in a less selective school, frustrated with the lack of institutional support in their choice of program. However, he overplays the homogeneity of campus culture. A university can comfortably accommodate different social circles: there are econ majors banking on their trust funds, and theater kids rallying about social justice. College, a time of newfound independence, can alter you in vastly different ways. Still, it’s true that the spectre of post-grad career choices scarily looms.
By way of suggestions, Deresiewicz names higher public school funding, and revamping the college admissions system: advice that I’m sure he knows is reliable, hackneyed, and useless. He also asserts, more radically, that top students should avoid the Ivies in favor of “second-tier liberal arts colleges”. If the problem is cultural, it is insidious and pervasive, and exist in society at large.
Triumph, then, can only come from personal defiance. If the upper class perpetuates its own distorted measure of success, it takes an openness to experience for a bright student — with vested financial, and social rewards in the “elite college system” — to subvert it. Let’s face it: if you’re the type who considers a less selective college for the educational rewards, you probably would have succeeded in your own way at an Ivy, too. And entrepreneurship is a natural outlet for these people because it rewards, and nurtures, this kind of decisiveness, this skill of inner mastery.
A Whale Ship as Your Harvard
On Slate, Osita Nwanevu rightly calls out Deresiewicz for idolising the college experience. “Wherever you decide to go, don’t take out loans to buy into the idea that life on campus has more to offer than life off of it.” It’s off-campus where a different sort of learning takes place, when experiences begin to significantly diverge.
Career outlets that Deresiewicz bemoans — investment banking, consulting, law, etc. — succeed in handling large amounts of responsibility, work and financial reward to fresh young graduates. In return, graduates lose their autonomy — they’re filled into a mould, and feel cheated when these prestigious, tried-and-true paths turn out to be more soul-sucking (mostly fixing up minutae on Powerpoint presentations) and less lucrative than they think.
Entrepreneurship is the obverse of a career. There is no hierarchy to negotiate with, no tangible monkey ladder before you to climb. The entrepreneur proceeds not in positions, but in skills, relationships, and insight. This can be even more terrifying. Enthusiasm, in search of achievement, can soon be replaced by stress, schisms, and aimlessness.
But then, entrepreneurship succeeds upon uncertainty. “If you’re troubled by uncertainty,” says Y Combinator head Paul Graham to startup founders, “I can solve that problem for you: the startup will probably fail.” Entrepreneurship is a process of constant reinvention — or to use another of Graham’s aphorisms, the startup process is like being thrown off a cliff, and trying to build yourself an airplane during freefall.
Silicon Valley is by no means immune from “entitled little shits” — it’s known for its superiority complex, insular self-regard, and causing social inequalities. There are too few minorities and women in tech, for example. But technology is acting as a huge democratising force. With a computer access, internet, and the plethora of online resources from Codecademy, one can write up a hello world program in seconds. You’re judged not by who you are, but what idea you have. You convince people to give you money when you make something happen.
Haters Gonna Hate
What Deresiewicz seems to think is that entrepreneurial projects are usually selfish: “It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker.” He also implies that they’re another symptom of faux-leadership, often just codenames for resume padders, a stepping stone to a consulting gig.
The rebuttal would be that such resume padders either inspire their founders to some passion, or become incredibly easy to see through. If entrepreneurship needs a flame, it is that of desperation — to escape a toxic workplace, to impress others. These are not always healthy urges. But by making a tangible product out of it, among the difficulties, second-guesses, and recognitions, provides a real accomplishment. The arduous process grants you strength.
There’s no denying that startups can be socially beneficial, as seen from the technocratic effectiveness of social ventures like DonorsChoose and Moneythink. But if making a name for yourself is necessarily selfish, isn’t liberal education — enriching your private consciousness — also “selfish” in that sense? There’s a virtue in humility and conscience, in philanthropy and social work, but also some in ambition and conflict, in changing people’s minds.
Another kind of attack, dominantly from east-coast literary-minded publications, is that startups provide “superficial solutions”, according to George Packer on the New Yorker, or are kept alive by “boring, aphasic human beings”, as a Stanford humanities professor claims on the New York Review. As they see it, startups are a fad, run by a frivolous bunch of expert engineers and smooth-talking salesmen. Startups make boring people.
If it were so, why have startup narratives — particularly their founding stories, from Microsoft, Apple, Facebook to Tencent — been so gripping? Amidst the technocratic optimism and is a deep appreciation for the individual self. A startup is small enough for it to work like a classical drama — you can author your own struggle. By making sense of the noise of markets and opinions, by being in the position to decide yourself, even if your company has only two people and looks almost doomed — you gain an invaluable sense of self-mastery.
Starting a company won’t solve your problems, but it precipitates both learning and discovery. Which school you go to doesn’t matter. If you have what it takes, go build something that you can actually be proud of.
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