The New York Times writer David Brooks wrote an extraordinarily tin eared piece last weekend. It was about how hard it was to be young and privileged.
His thesis was that kids who got into Ivy League schools now faced intense competition to get into the right clubs, get just the right summer internships and then nail down the right highly lucrative job. If you’re finding it hard to work up a lot of sympathy for these folks, I’m with you.
But because Brooks lives in this world he sees it as some sort of crisis. Here’s the worst paragraph in a bad column:
“And in this column I’m not even trying to cover the rejections experienced by the 94 percent of American students who don’t go to elite schools and don’t apply for internships at Goldman Sachs. By middle school, the system has told them that because they don’t do well on academic tests, they are not smart, not winners. That’s among the most brutal rejections our society has to offer.”
That’s just simply wrong. It assumes that everybody wants to go to Harvard and intern at Goldman Sachs. But the truth is that the 94% of kids who don’t go to elite schools, not to mention the larger group who never planned to go to college at all, do not feel like — and are not — losers. I know, for example, a young guy who went to the UW La Crosse. He’s building a successful career as a midlevel (for now) executive at a food company, he and his girlfriend bought a house and they’re planning to be married soon. He sure seems successful to me and he never planned to go to Yale.
I know another “kid” — he’s in his 40’s now, but it’s all relative — who washed out of the UW, but got a job as a tile installer. He worked hard, bought a house, is raising a successful family and will, someday, take over the business. I don’t think he feels like a loser.
Last week I had dinner with three friends. We all went to the UW. We’ve all had successful careers and long-term marriages. A couple of us have raised a total of six successful children. And yet, we didn’t go to Harvard or aspired to. In fact, we grew up at a time when middle class kids like us didn’t shop around for schools. Nobody went on a tour of campuses. We could afford the UW, so that’s where we went.
My point is that people like Brooks — and I like Brooks’ perspective about 90% of the time — live in a world that is sealed off from the lives lived by 95% of Americans who don’t live or die by their GPA, their SAT scores or the dream of an Ivy League education.
And because I suspect that the people who run the two major parties, the major media outlets, most of Hollywood and much of the big corporations live in Brooks’ world, they don’t get most of America. So, they’re trying to provide leadership, public policy, news, entertainment and products to people they fundamentally don’t understand.
I’ve written before about the idea that the cause of the current wave of populism is the yawning economic and cultural gap between elites and everybody else. Brooks has provided another example.
America would be far better off if it were run by more people who went to state schools or, better yet, didn’t go to or finish college at all. Donald Trump? Penn. J.D. Vance? Yale Law. Steve Bannon? Harvard. Elon Musk? Penn.
Point? Made.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Palmer Luckey 2028.
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Ok, you’ve stumped me again. Palmer Luckey?
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Billionaire inventor profiled on 60 minutes last night. Never graduated college. He’s 32 years old.
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I read that piece and also felt it was pretty tone deaf in its focus on the struggles of Ivy-Leaguers, but that was not the sole point of the article, and I do think his broader point was an interesting one worthy of greater discussion. That being: in the internet age because you can, for example, apply to jobs much more easily you end up applying for a lot more jobs, and competing against way more people for those jobs than you ever would have before. In turn, you end up by default getting rejected over, and over, and over again. Same thing on social media, dating sites, etc. And that level of repeated rejection may be making some kind of psychological scars on younger people today.
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Yes, I did agree with that point. It’s the curse of Indeed, I guess.
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Yep –– one thing that struck me when I got to UW in 2006 was how my friends from Wisconsin were not subjected to the rat race college admissions mentality that was pervasive in the NYC area. Valedictorians who had never considered going to a non-UW school, etc.
Brooks is probably right that this elite rat race makes people miserable, but as you say, he is wrong to conclude that the rest of us must be even more miserable.
But let’s extend your reasoning to Madison schools…we are we focused so much on how well students are doing on standardized tests that have little to do with real-world job skills?
Also one nit to pick: you mention the “much larger group that never planned to go to college at all.” There are relatively few young people who “never planned” to go to college. The great majority start college; many drop out.
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Do standardized tests really have little to do with the work world? Aren’t basic math, language and writing skills important in any job?
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I don’t think most jobs require a command of algebra.
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Actually, algebra helps kids learn to think logically. Nobody needs calculus, however.
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I agree that the paragraph you highlighted from Brooks is insane. “they are not smart, not winners.” OMG just imagine who can write that, and the editors that let it pass. It’s disqualifying to taking anything this guy says seriously.
One problem related to this topic is the current framing that “elites” are typically liberal. This blog falls into that trap sometimes, and it’s a major component of MAGA propaganda. So much so, as is pointed out in the conclusion of this blog post, that the elite status of the members of the administration are rarely noted.
To me, the words “liberal” and “elite” are mutually exclusive. If one is elite, they are by definition conservative. I view “liberal elites” as people who advocate that the slaves be whipped not as often.
I interpret Brooks’ concern as a longing for the past, when simply being admitted to an Ivy League school was a ticket to getting rich without having to work very much. As we’ve moved closer towards meritocracy in the past few decades, and merited non-WASP applicants have gotten admitted to these schools, these privileged children of the rich have found competitors. Where a rich kid didn’t used to have to worry about getting better than gentleman’s C, and none of their peers were going to look down on them for their lack of merit, and they’d be guaranteed an easy rich person job, now these merited working class kids are upending the system.
The current attacks on DEI are not a “return to merit.” DEI is about providing fair chances to merited people of all backgrounds. That is what Cons and “liberal elites” are trying to stop. They want the days of old, where rich WASPs got to coast along, and whenever a minority was given a chance it was an act of benevolent charity.
Real DEI isn’t handouts, it’s equal opportunity. That’s exactly what all elites are against. So the liberal elites treat DEI like a charity drive, giving a couple spots to these poor unfortunate ones for a chance to bask in the joy of elitism, and conservative elites just want to stop letting these poor unfortunate ones in at all.
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