The piece leads with the story of a New Trier student’s journey to college. The young man wanted Michigan, but ended up at Indiana University. Ultimately he landed the same great job upon graduation at Boston Consulting Group as another NTHS classmate who went to Yale.
In this corner, Harvard
Citing several more anecdotes Bruni concludes that, “…the nature of a student’s college experience…matters more than the name of the institution attended.” It’s hard to argue with that, especially when he throws in the Fortune 100 CEO’s who graduated from schools such as Central Oklahoma and University of Arkansas and managed to rise to the top.
And in this corner, University of Arkansas
But competing opinions are not hard to find. The New Republic’s Nick Romeo kind of nailed it: [Bruni’s book] “is not a bracing cure; it’s a soothing balm for upper-middle class parents whose children do not quite manage to scale the highest peaks of prestige. It’s a book that wants to dismiss the importance of status without questioning the validity of status-seeking motives.”
In other words, we’ve all been on this hamster wheel since nursery school. The right birthday party invite, the right travel team, the part in the children’s theatre production, a spot in the orchestra, the dance team, the field hockey team, and, oh, it’s exhausting…Why should anyone expect finding a college to be any different?
As for Bruni’s argument that a spunky go-getter from the University of Arkansas has just the same chance at CEO stardom as a grad from, oh, say, the Wharton School, I don’t know, are we buying that? Jonathan Wai at Quartz dissects Bruni’s premise about CEO’s who went to lesser-prestige schools with actual charts and stuff. It turns out 38% of the top 500 CEO’s did go to the very highest-tier schools—actually an astonishingly large percentage.
I think what Bruni is really trying to say is parents need to stop freaking out their kids so much about this. And that is good advice.
It’s not clear if he has teenagers of his own, or I think he would know they do a pretty good job of freaking each other out. My 22-year-old daughter recently told me about a subset of her high-school friend group who had the “35 club”—for those who got a certain score or better on their ACT (she wasn’t in it). You think there isn’t peer-imposed pressure and competition? My god, these kids took an obscure game of “Paranoia” a few years ago and, as only New Trier kids can, elevated it into a full-blown school-wide war game complete with betting pools, their own blogs and a Lagniappe skit. As far as colleges go, a kid doesn’t have to be an aspiring Yalie to feel the pressure. Another academic level of student might seek admission to DePaul as her top choice and experience the anxiety of waiting to get in—that’s life.
Whatever one’s level of academic achievement, it does matter where you go to school. Schools matter in terms not just of the academics, the research opportunities, the facilities (think about STEM in particular), the intellectual quality of the students around you, the diversity of the student body, the career services, the support services, but in terms of happiness. Yes, teenagers are adaptable. No, you cannot plop them onto any college campus and assume they will “get used to it” and rise to the occasion. Close to one-third of all college students will transfer. This is not a tragedy, but why not get it right the first time?
Frank Bruni, by the way, was educated at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.