Elite Colleges Are Promoting a Culture of Selfish, Cutthroat Behavior & We Are All Paying the Price

from AlterNet:



Elite Colleges Are Promoting a Culture of Selfish, Cutthroat Behavior and We Are All Paying the Price

By Peter Schmidt, AlterNet. Posted May 23, 2009.

The results are campus environments where disregard for society is socially accepted, where misguided students are encouraged to become worse.




Like many of us, the nation's elite colleges and universities have taken a financial beating over the past year.

Among them, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford all watched their endowments shrink by about 20 percent as a result of investment losses.

Despite all their brainpower, such institutions appear to have failed to learn what every simple farmer knows: you reap what you sow. Elite colleges and professional schools bear a share of the blame for the economic crisis that now plagues them, because it is they who educated and bestowed academic credentials upon many of those who got us into this mess.

It should come as no surprise to them that many on Wall Street and in Washington have proven ethically bankrupt and without regard for people of lesser means, because their admissions policies have done much to ensure such a result.

In determining which applicants they will admit and put on the fast track, most elite higher-education institutions systematically favor people from privileged backgrounds who display selfish, cutthroat behavior. The results are campus environments where disregard for society is socially accepted, where bad people are encouraged to become worse.

Consider, for starters, how most such institutions rely on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, even though they know perfectly well that the nation's massive test-preparation industry has severely compromised the reliability of such instruments, turning them into tools for measuring, as much as anything, wealth and willingness to seek unfair advantage. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/140202/elite_colleges_are_promoting_a_culture_of_selfish%2C_cutthroat_behavior_and_we_are_all_paying_the_price/

First of all, I'm not sure what the author means by "elite" colleges: Private universities? Harvard? Yale? Does it include institutions like Berkeley's law school?

Does "elite" = money spent, or hard to get into?

Secondly, to my knowlege, "elite" private universities, at least, consider the SAT as the least of three important factors. They consider overall performance in high school, over those four years, as most important, and they are looking for improvement and consistency. Secondly, they look at letters of recommendation and consider other peripheral achievements.

The main point is, I didn't find my classmates to be immoral, selfish or cut-throat. I wasn't, and I'm not.

This is too generalized an attack on higher education for me to accept it as worth taking seriously.

I'm not sure why it belongs here: Don't liberals or Democrats teach at or attend universities anymore?

I do wish he'd taken more care to define "elite," and not implied that test scores are the primary way colleges determine admissions, when he knows a lot else is taken into consideration. I don't doubt the playing field is tilted toward the wealthy and well-connected. But that doesn't mean everyone admitted to an elite school, whatever that is, falls into that category.

For example, he omits the fact that when "children of employees" receive preference, or even free tuition, that applies not only to the kids of the faculty and administration, but of the rest of the staff as well. Secretaries. Janitors. Cafeteria workers. All of them.

You don't have to be a well-connected, wealthy student to gain admission to a good college. If anything is a problem for students today, it's this:

1. Finding the money to pay for the cost of the education
2. Being able to do anything with their degrees once they finish them (which is damn difficult in a crappy economy, and IS made easier if you're wealthy and well connected)

The article makes a lot of assumptions and generalizations that probably wouldn't stand critical analysis. In fact, if we look to systems where the admission to academically elite schools is based solely on testing (financial considerations are removed by automatic 100% public financing for all accepted applicant), the percentage of accepted students from lower income brackets becomes comparable to the percentage from upper income brackets. Of course that single stat is no more conclusive than the arguments presented in the article, but it does negate the presumption that testing is the problem.

and participated in joint graduate-undergraduate organizations, I must say that some of the students from affluent families were truly ignorant of how the rest of the country lived.

They routinely referred to the (middle-class, upwardly mobile) African-American neighborhood nearby as "the jungle." They looked down on people who went to less prestigious colleges in the same area. Hearing some of them talk, I realized how many "poor little rich kids" there were: in other words, people who had never known material want but who had been brought up by a rotating cast of hired help while their parents acted out their own soap operas. There were rumors of blatant cheating and cutthroat competition, too, especially by those students who were trying to get into medical school or MBA programs.

There were some admirable students, too, but I know exactly what the OP is talking about.

opened up their Graduate Schools (at least) to those who weren't "Legacy." Even then it depended on "who you knew" to get ahead and brown nosing and the rest contributed.

But, I can see where some naysayers might feel that "to get ahead" one needs to "play the game" when one is allowed into the "Private Circles of American Elite." It doesn't come without a price.

After the 70's the wheel tilted to the Sons and Daughters of International Potentates...Saudi's, Koreans, Indians and Chinese. It was done in the name of Democracy and keeping the Free World safe for Democracy.

In many ways we we became the training ground for the World's Elite...and that is probably not a bad thing in one way...but in another way it has it's downside like Globilization.

It's always a "trade off." But, the "Elite Schools" really make their reputations on finding those who get into the leading Think Tanks, Corporations and Power Circles. If you got in there and weren't make of the cloth that would be recognized by the "Powers that Be" you knew it...and if you made it to graduation as a "Non-Legacy" without great political skills...you really would have been better going to a good university in the state you grew up in.

And we wonder why our financial markets collapsed?

The culture of greed and privilege coupled with institutionally-encouraged disregard of ethics and fairness has cost us dearly.

:dem:

-Laelth

by the time they enter college, the college isn't going to give it to them.

I think the behavior we saw and are seeing was cemented in most of these people long before they finished grammar school -- and not by the schools.

They don't consider him a sociopath, just a huge success. They will continue to do so, because his sociopathology only brings rewards to him and his friends, never punishment.

In college, cheaters DO prosper.

And, that's maybe good for them...but maybe not so good for our socieity going forward. But, then, it was never about what us peons learned in American History...waving the flag. The smartes and most unscrupulous amongst us knew that.

But, isn't life about the survival of the fittest? Even if it's corrupt? :shrug: You get your chance as one of the "lesser" and if you can't be a "team player" then you are OUT... Like those Reality Shows run by Donald Trump...the bankrupt loser who keeps going by tooting his horn to the gullible.

The legacy kids do neither, the extent to which they are in control is inversely purportional to how likely our civilization will survive.

I've worked a lot with them too, hence my lack of respect, with only a very few exceptions.

Ivy League or not, American families are getting very pissed off at the college educational system - and those who run it.

Each student body has completely different expectations of what they expect and how to get it.

:kick: