I just finished reading through The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz in a Summer 2008 exhortation of The American Scholar. You might imagine that an elite education by sheer definition would be beneficial to you as a student and seeker of truth, beauty, and goodness, but Deresiewicz is determined to shatter your preconceptions.

“The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.”

The problem which most have talking to strangers is that people in general have difficulty talking to people who aren’t like them. If two students went to the same University, it’s the same as two people from the same town or city transplanted elsewhere. I guarantee that if I (now in NYC) bump into someone who lived in Sexsmith, Alberta we would be able to break the ice as easily as if I run into another Cornellian.

“The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”

If you want to measure “worth” objectively you will arrive at some education versus income charts and begin to understand that the marketplace places worth on your elite education. If the marketplace considers you a more valuable asset, by what other valuation can you claim that a reasonable sense of self-worth is false? Students at elite universities have the opportunity to receive the best education possible in their fields.

“The final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. [...] Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas.”

OK, maybe us engineers are boring as all hell, but I promise you there are students in the Arts and Sciences whose curiosity exceeds even my own. Deresiewicz probably doesn’t consider athletic pursuits to be intellectual, but athletes share a common passion, if a different object. Besides academics and jocks on campus, we also boast republicans, anarchists, musicians, dancers, poets, writers, engineers, chemists, etc. All of them passionate about their field of study and self-improvement. Whether considering passions of the mind, body, or soul, the human endeavor cannot be reduced and limited to Deresiewicz’s notion of intellectualism.

In the end, Deresiewicz’s point–that the modern student lacks the passionate imagination and curiosity to innovate or engage complex ideas–could be equitably applied to students from so-called “elite (read: ivy league) universities” or those studying at public institutions. The determination “elite education” rather than education in general needs significant improvement betrays the author’s bias. The piece, littered with unsubstantiated jabs at prestigious universities, goes down tasting of sour jealousy. And, if Deresiewicz were to be believed, as a lifelong ivy-league academic (5 degrees in 13 years from Columbia University followed by a professorship at Yale) by his own admission he must lack the faculties to introspect and condemn the elite education he himself has been a part of.

If you must read, treat the premise as an assessment of the current apathy present in all higher education. Grade inflation, student apathy, “dumbing down,” the culture of standardized testing, etc are all symptoms of an increasingly unhealthy academic culture. To the degree in which they present variously in different institutions, they are problems in all of them–Cornell included.