Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

“From someone who was in the process of transferring out of Stanford: ‘For many students, rising to the absolute top means being consumed by the system. I’ve seen my peers sacrifice health, relationships, exploration, activities that can’t be quantified and are essential for developing souls and hearts, for grades and resume building.’ From a student at Yale: ‘A friend of mine said it nicely: ‘I might be miserable, but were I not miserable, I wouldn’t be at Yale.’’”

These two quotations from students’ firsthand experience illustrate one of the strengths of the book. Deresiewicz has ample experience with the Ivy Leagues, having been both a student and a professor, but he doesn’t rely on his own stories. While researching the book, he talked to many students at universities across the country, amassing a large quantity of personal anecdotes from a wide range of people. To this, he adds data from research to support his points.

“Isolated from their peers, these kids are also cut off from themselves. The endless hoop-jumping, starting as far back as grade school, that got them into an elite college in the first place—the clubs, bands, projects, teams, APs, SATs, evenings, weekends, summers, coaches, tutors, ‘leadership,’ ‘service’—left them no time, and no tools, to figure out what they want out of life, or even out of college. Questions of purpose and passion were not on the syllabus. Once they’ve reached the shining destination toward which their entire childhood and adolescence had been pointed, once they’re through the gates at Amherst or Dartmouth, many kids find out that they have no idea why they’re there, or what they want to do next.”

These are some of the details that form the picture Deresiewicz creates. Students are so busy building their resume and working to get accepted at the right school that they have no time think about the process or what they really want out of it. They’ve focused solely on the destination, not the process, which leaves them wondering what it’s all about.

“What then, finally, is it all for? Our glittering system of elite higher education: students kill themselves getting into it, parents kill themselves to pay for it, and always for the opportunities it opens up. But what of all the opportunities it closes down—not for any practical reason, but just because of how it smothers you with expectations? How can I become a teacher, or a minister, or a carpenter? Wouldn’t that be a waste of my fancy education? What would my parents think? What would my friends think? How would I face my classmates at our twentieth reunion, when they’re all rich doctors or important people in New York? And the question that exists behind them all: isn’t it beneath me? So an entire world of possibilities shuts, and you miss your true calling.”

In a nutshell, Deresiewicz poses the problem of the system. It would be one thing if all the hard work students put in paid off in a rewarding way. Instead, they feel restricted and empty, facing a narrow array of options preventing them from forming a unique self and pursuing a path that is right for them.

“External factors like globalization and even U.S. News are only the smaller part of the story. The main thing that’s driving the madness is simply the madness itself. ‘The resume arms race,’ as it is invariably called, is just like the nuclear one. The only point of having more is having more than everybody else.”

In more than one place, the author highlights the insanity of the college admissions competition. It’s driven by fear, and there’s really no point to it. Parents in the upper-middle class see elite colleges as the only option—the only ticket to the club necessary to living the good life. Because this has intensified in America and has been augmented by international students thanks to globalization, they fight for a shrinking number of spots. This fuels the “resume arms race” (39).

“It’s one big system, after all. Those thirty-three thousand students who are now turned away from Harvard each year go somewhere else. As of 2012, sixty-five colleges and universities could boast acceptance rates of 33 percent or less. Add another two or three dozen places that are close to the line, or whose rates are higher for one reason or another (women’s colleges, for instance, which necessarily draw from a smaller pool), and there are maybe a hundred schools that can plausibly be said to belong to the elite.”

This quotation, in part, defines what Deresiewicz means by “elite education.” More than that, however, it shows how the problem is trickling down to include more and more students. Because of the limited space at Ivy League schools, colleges at the level or two just below in rank have almost the same requirements. Thus, more students enter the race.

“It doesn’t matter if your parents aren’t crazy, I’ve been told again and again, because the environment is. Other people’s parents are crazy, so the whole school is crazy. And however well-intentioned teachers often are, principals and other supervisors tend to work against them.”

This illustrates how the system is self-reinforcing. It’s out of the control of individual actors, be they parents, teachers, or principals. Therefore Deresiewicz’s ideas at the end of the book for bringing about change involve wholesale changes at the societal level; anything less would be ineffective.

“Perfectionism, Levine explains, is a desperate attempt to stave off criticism—which, as practiced in ambitious households, is not the disapproval of a child’s actions, but the condemnation of her very self. It is the inverse of praise; it fosters self-hatred by telling the child that he isn’t worthy of his parents’ love.”

Here, Deresiewicz touches on the theme of mental health in young people. He’s referring to Madeline Levine’s book The Price of Privilege, which he uses to analyze the dynamic of demanding parents like “tiger mother” Amy Chua. He shows how the parent-child relationship is perverted by the outsized ambition of the parents, which makes a parent’s love contingent on accomplishments.

“What pays is in; what doesn’t is under the gun. Instruction is regarded as a drain on resources. ‘Efficiency’ in the transmission of knowledge, not the unscalable craft of teaching, has become the cardinal value. Professors are being replaced by adjuncts and other temporary, low-wage workers, the cost to educational quality be damned. Academic ‘units’ (that is, departments) are seen as ‘revenue centers’; the ones that can’t pull their weight—much of the liberal arts—are slated for downsizing or outright elimination.”

This quotation shows how institutions are integral to the problem. Over at least the past 30 years, there has been a trend to run universities like businesses, and this is the result. The bottom line is all important. This is antithetical to the author’s idea of what education should be because the area he feels is most important—the liberal arts—get hit the hardest since they’re not moneymakers.

“In the spirit of the SATs, in fact, we might propose the following analogy. U.S. News rank : schools : : SAT score : students. . . . Colleges, in other words, are now being terrorized by the same sort of numerical regime they have long inflicted on high school students.”

Deresiewicz uses this analogy (in the form of those found in the SAT test) to present another pressure being brought to bear on the system: the U.S. News & World Report’s annual issue of college rankings. This first came out in 1983 and has increasingly caused colleges and universities to actively work to up their score as determined by the magazine’s equation. Deresiewicz points out, however, that this flawed and external scoring system often works at cross-purposes to providing a true education.

“Yet a commercial relationship is exactly the opposite of a pedagogical one. You give your customer what they want, but you don’t have any interest in their long-term welfare. It is precisely because you do have an interest in your students’ long-term welfare that you don’t give them what they want. You question them, and the thing you question them about the most is what they want. Teaching, said Socrates, is the reeducation of desire. If that sounds paternalistic, it is. Professors should be mentors, not commodities or clerks. Education isn’t something you consume; it’s an experience that you have to give yourself over to. But colleges don’t think like that anymore. They see themselves as supplying a market, not guarding a public trust. If they no longer know what the education they offer is about, that’s because they’re waiting for their students to tell them.”

Deresiewicz explains in this chapter how universities have become more like businesses. Part of that, he writes, is offering things to students rather than demanding things from them. Students are customers, and they must be attracted with an ever-increasing array of benefits (e.g. amenities rather than humanities). In his opinion, this dangerously warps the relationship between institutions and students, as everything about schools, including their curriculum, is shaped by market forces.

“Of course money matters: jobs matter, financial security matters, national prosperity matters. The question is, are they the only things that matter? Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for.”

Here, Deresiewicz addresses the idea of getting a “return on your investment” in college in the financial sense. His argument is clear: money is not the sole gauge of worth. The value of being educated runs deep—to the very question of what it means to be a human being. It is not, he asserts, simply being a skilled worker.

“The heart feels, he says, and the intelligence is educated by reflecting on that feeling. Everyone is born with a mind, but it is only through this act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. And that is what it means to develop a self.”

This quotation refers to John Keats’s idea that the world is “a vale of Soul-making,” which gets to the heart of Deresiewicz’s main theme regarding the purpose of education. Learning to think allows one to reflect, and only reflection can lead to developing a self. Deresiewicz argues that a liberal arts education is crucial to this process, with an experienced professor leading students, seminar-style, through the texts that promote critical thinking and reflection.

“Being a quadruple major does not make you interesting. Editing the college newspaper while singing in an a cappella group, starting a nonprofit, and learning how to cook exotic grains—this does not make you interesting. Interesting is not accomplished. Interesting is not ‘impressive.’ What makes you interesting is reading, thinking, slowing down, having long conversations, and creating a rich inner life for yourself.”

Deresiewicz contrasts the collection of external credentials with a self-directed inner life. He uses this in the chapter on what college is really for to argue that today’s students need to form selves that consist of the latter. Quantity is not as important as quality, and a checklist of things attained by skill is not the same as a meaning of self attained through reflection.

“‘We think it odd that a man should devote his life to writing poems,’ the critic Dwight Macdonald said some years ago, ‘but natural that he should devote it to inducing children to breakfast on Crunchies instead of Krispies.’”

Deresiewicz uses passages like this—cleverly conceived and worded—not just to support his points but also to make the reader stop and think. In a way, he’s modeling what good professors do when they prompt students to challenge doxa. The second career option is certainly the kind of thing American society pushes without anyone blinking an eye: a good marketing job. But juxtaposing it with the true notion that wanting to write poems somehow seems odd or suspect causes the reader to reflect on assumptions about society.

“Never to have failed is a sign not of merit but fragility; it means your fears have kept you from doing or becoming what you might have. ‘Fail better,’ Samuel Beckett famously wrote. If your standards are as high as they should be, you will fail again and again. That is the difference between mere success—getting the A, measuring up to some generic benchmark that may not actually be very high at all—and true excellence.”

This comes from the chapter on inventing one’s life, in which the author suggests ways to create a unique path and find one’s identity. Part of what prevents students from doing so is fear of failure. They have been early inculcated with the idea that failure will prevent them from achieving their goals—in other words, it’s not an option. On the contrary, Deresiewicz writes, failure provides lessons important in obtaining true excellence.

“What they mean is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm, or running a department at a leading hospital, or becoming a senator or chief executive or college president. Being in charge, in other words: climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. Winning an impressive title, so the school can brag about you on its website. I think of the wealthy donors who always seemed to be among the honorary degree recipients at Columbia each year—CEOs, mainly, with nothing in particular to recommend them, but invariably described as ‘business leaders.’ Leadership, in this conception, is essentially devoid of content.”

This quotation addresses leadership—something all elite universities claim to want in their students. The point Deresiewicz makes is that the term is bandied about without any clear idea of its meaning. Indeed, in the current context, it has no meaning. It is facilely used to describe one who works their way to the top, which in a bureaucracy simply means following others and not making waves. Such people, he argues, lack moral courage and conviction necessary for true leadership.

“The humanities put back everything the social sciences, by way of necessary simplification, take out. Economics, for example, the most authoritative of the social sciences today, informs us that people are rational actors, forever seeking to maximize their material self-interest—an assertion that would come as news to the author of King Lear, let alone The Brothers Karamazov.”

The author argues that the study of humanities is the best way to get a true education because they teach students to think. As the quotation indicates, part of this is examining nuances found in the great texts of the humanities. Life is complex, so it requires the ability to deal with complex ideas. This gets to the book’s main theme—the purpose of education to create fully human individuals.

“Thinking is a skill—or rather, a large and complex set of skills. In terms of what they take to learn, they aren’t any different than manual ones—than hitting a ball or throwing a pot. You do not learn them from a book or video or website. You learn them directly from another person. You learn them through incessant repetition and incremental variation and extension under the close supervision of an experienced practitioner. You learn them in classes that are small enough to allow for individual attention, supplemented by one-on-one instruction tailored to your own specific aptitudes and needs.”

Here, Deresiewicz is making the point that a textbook or a MOOC is not enough for students to become truly educated. It requires intensive work with an experienced teacher acting as a mentor. A key phrase is “repetition and incremental variation and extension.” Repetition can take place when one is alone, but only a skilled teacher can guide students to push the boundaries of their thinking little by little so that they reach deeper insights and personal growth.

“But every minute spent on teaching is a minute that is not devoted to research. Good teaching isn’t simply undervalued; especially at elite universities, it is actively discouraged, because it’s seen as raising doubts about your seriousness as a scholar. ‘Winning the campus teaching award,’ said Ernest Boyer, vice president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, ‘is the kiss of death when it comes to tenure.’”

This quotation is one of those Deresiewicz presents that really drives home the higher education situation he’s discussing. It illustrates the contradiction between the ideal role of a university and reality. Therefore, Deresiewicz advises students to go to a small liberal arts school as undergraduates, where teaching is still valued.

“This is your chance to become, not the person that you want to be, not the person you’ve decided that you’re going to be, but the person that you never could have dreamed of being. By far the most important factor, when you go to college, isn’t the college. It’s you.”

This is Deresiewicz’s conclusion to Chapter 10, in which he discusses how students should go about choosing a college that is right for them. If the purpose of education is learning how to think, as he argues, then they should avoid the Ivies and seek out smaller liberal arts colleges where the focus is on teaching the humanities. However, he wants students to know that they have agency in the process. There is no single institution that is best for them; instead, being proactive in seeking what they want is the most important factor in their education.

“But it isn’t simply that there aren’t more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to, and it’s not even clear that they’d want to. They need a critical mass of full payers, they need to tend to their donor base, and they need to serve their primary constituency, which is not the nation so much as the nation’s—and increasingly, the world’s—upper and upper middle classes: the classes from which their alumni come, to which their administrators belong, and for which their graduates are destined.”

Here, Deresiewicz explains how elite universities contribute to the problem of inequality in society, one of the book’s themes. He writes that their policies tend to promote it since they focus on grooming the next generation of wealthy donors to add to their considerable endowments. This naturally creates an insiders’ club with little incentive to challenge or change the status quo.

“Students at schools like Cleveland State also don’t get A-minuses just for doing the work. The most egregious thing about grade inflation is how uneven it has been. As of the 1950s, the average GPA was comparable at public and private institutions, about a 2.5. Then the numbers began to diverge. By 2007, the average grade had risen to a 3.01 at public schools, but at private schools it had risen to a 3.30, and at highly selective private schools, a 3.43. Only in the Ivy League and places like it does the A-minus constitute a sort of default setting, the point from which one either rises or sinks. It’s not a grade so much as a metaphor, the emblem of entitled mediocrity. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.”

The author uses this to show the inequality in education. Research has indicated that students from different class backgrounds are taught in different ways. At elite colleges, he claims, the students are coddled and protected as part of a “club.” Grade inflation is only one example of this.

“Is it any wonder that our country has itself appeared to lose all sense of purpose, when our leaders have none of their own? Once, we dreamed of eradicating poverty, winning the Cold War, reaching the moon, ensuring racial justice, creating a more equitable society. Now—what? What large national project are we pursuing, or even talking of pursuing? So much freedom. So much wealth and power. Such technological sophistication. But in the end, to what end?”

This passage echoes a speech given by George W. Bush at the 2000 Republican convention, in which he posed similar questions about Bill Clinton (“So much promise, to no great purpose”). Deresiewicz uses it here to criticize the current vacuum of leadership American society. He argues that, like Clinton, the meritocracy has not lived up to its promise.