The common denominator (belying any hope that an elite university education helps students develop a self) is that they [students] are not treated as competent grown-ups, starting with the first law of adulthood: first attend to your priorities, then you get to play.
Later,
Is this any way to run a meritocracy? Ivy admissions policies force teenagers and their mothers into a potlatch of conspicuous leisure and virtue. The winners go to an exorbitant summer camp, most of them indifferent to the outstanding facilities of scholarship and research that are bundled with it. They can afford this insouciance because the piece of paper they leave with serves as a quarter-million-dollar IQ and Marshmallow test. The self-fulfilling aura of prestige ensures that companies will overlook better qualified graduates of store-brand schools. And the size of the jackpot means that it’s rational for families to play this irrational game.
Pinker’s main suggestion is to de-emphasize factors other than aptitude test scores in admissions. However, I do not think that the worst problem with elite schools is the oddity of their admissions process. I think it gets back to not treating students as grown-ups. Part of that is rewarding students for reciting politically correct catechisms rather than for thinking.
Bear with me. Tim Tebow posted a 38.5″ vertical leap at the NFL combine. That shows an athletic aptitude. But the knock on him is that he never developed the “pro-style” quarterback skillset, partly because he was busy being the best college player (not quarterback btw, but player) ever.
Can we develop an education system that does more than just measure potential but measures the ability of a kid to develop “pro style” complex skills?
“However, I do not think that the worst problem with elite schools is the oddity of their admissions process. I think it gets back to not treating students as grown-ups. Part of that is rewarding students for reciting politically correct catechisms rather than for thinking.”
Actually, in the working world for which college students are preparing, they will also be rewarded for reciting politically correct catechisms, rather than thinking, and, increasingly, will not be treated as grown-ups. So maybe the colleges are well preparing their students for their future.
> I think it gets back to not treating students as grown-ups. Part of that is rewarding students for reciting politically correct catechisms rather than for thinking.
You’ve also got the problem of college-as-a-rite-of-passage, which is not unique to elite universities. But elite universities would seem to select for tiger moms and helicopter parents, which then presumably selects for less independent students. The rite-of-passage problem is that college is overwhelmingly the very first time students are living on their own, and so there is a temptation for the institution to take outsized responsibility for their well-being.
Add the selection for tiger moms and helicopter parents, and now you have outsized external pressure on elite institutions to provide the same infantilizing, unhealthy environment.
You have the age-old tension between helping someone reach higher and higher plateaus only to leave them unequipped to survive at the rarefied heights, versus watching them struggle and possibly fail to meet expectations on their own. There is a pendulum here that swings with fashion, involving signaling and network effects. There is no right answer, though maybe a sweet spot, but the pendulum effect society-wide is disconcerting for observers who spot the massive clusters which can never seem to find the sweet spot.