PART 1 Sheep

PART 1 Sheep

One The Students "Super People," the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: they have mastered them all, and with an apparent effortlessness, a serene self-assurance, that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. Today's elite students, says David Brooks, project a remarkable level of "comfort, confidence, and competence." In Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom, the kids at a prestigious liberal arts college "seemed cheerfully competent at everything." Such is our image of these enviable youngsters, who appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality—as I have witnessed it among my former students, heard about it from the hundreds of young people who have written to me over the last few years or whom I have met on campuses across the country, and read about it in places where these kids confide their feelings—is something very different. Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today's elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. We all know about the

stressed-out, overpressured high school student; why do we assume that things get better once she gets to college? The evidence says they do not. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the twenty-five-year history of the study. In another recent survey—summarized by the American Psychological Association under the headline "The Crisis on Campus"—nearly half of college students reported feelings of hopelessness, while almost a third spoke of feeling "so depressed that it was difficult to function during the past 12 months." College counseling services are being overwhelmed. Utilization rates have been climbing since the mid-1990s, and among the students who show up, the portion with severe psychological problems has nearly tripled, to almost half. Convening a task force on student mental health in 2006, Stanford's provost wrote that "increasingly, we are seeing students struggling with mental health concerns ranging from self-esteem issues and developmental disorders to depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-mutilation behaviors, schizophrenia and suicidal behavior." As a college president wrote me, "we appear to have an epidemic of depression among younger people." If anything, the already dire situation in high school deteriorates further in college, as students suddenly find themselves on their own, trying to negotiate an overwhelming new environment and responsible for making decisions about their future that their childhood has left them unequipped to handle. An increasing number cope by going on antidepressants or antianxietals (not to mention relying on stimulants like Adderall to help them handle the pressure); others by taking leaves of absence—or at least, by dreaming about it. "If the wheels are going to come off," a Pomona student has put it, "it's going to be in college." I have heard about this kind of misery again and again. From a graduate instructor at Princeton: "I just had an undergrad thesis- student faint in my office the other day because she was feeling so much pressure from her academic 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.' " Isolation is a major factor. "People at Yale," a former student said, "do not have time for real relationships." Another told me that she didn't have friends in college until she learned to slow down a little senior year, that going out to a movie was a novel experience at that point. A recent article in Harvard Magazine described students passing their suitemates like ships in the night as they raced from one activity to another. Kids know how to network and are often good at "people skills," but those are very different things from actual friendship. Romantic life is conducted in an equally utilitarian spirit: hookups or friends with benefits to scratch the sexual itch, "pragmantic" "college marriages," as Ross Douthat puts it, that provide stability and enable partners to place career first. "I positioned myself in college in such a way," said a University of Pennsylvania student who was recently quoted in the New York Times, "that I can't have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I'm always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too." But the compulsive overachievement of today's elite college students —the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can—is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn't capable of handling the pressure. These are young people who have always succeeded at everything, in part by projecting the confidence that they always will. Now, as they get to college, the stakes are higher and the competition fiercer. Everybody thinks that they're the only one who's suffering, so nobody says anything, so everybody suffers. Everyone feels like a fraud; everyone thinks that everybody else is smarter than they are. Students at Stanford talk about "Stanford Duck Syndrome": serene on the surface, paddling madly underneath. In a recent post titled "Meltdown" on an MIT student website, a sophomore confessed her feelings of shame and worthlessness and often "overwhelming loneliness." The post went viral, eliciting recognition and gratitude from

students at at least a dozen other schools. "Thank you for sharing," said one comment. "We all feel this way more often than we would care to admit. Thank you for being brave enough to put this into words." Students at Pomona, which prides itself on being ranked the "fourth- happiest" college in America (whatever that means), have told me of the burden that comes with that very self-image, as well as from the regimen of group activities with which the college seeks to reinforce it: the pressure that they feel to satisfy the happiness police by projecting an appearance of perfect well-being. 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. As Lara Galinsky, the author of Work on Purpose, expressed it to me, young people are not trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to. "You cannot say to a Yalie 'find your passion,' " a former student wrote me. "Most of us do not know how and that is precisely how we arrived at Yale, by having a passion only for success." According to Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, "Too many students, perhaps after a year or two spent using college as a treadmill to nowhere, wake up in crisis, not knowing why they have worked so hard." One young woman at Cornell summed up her life to me like this: "I hate all my activities, I hate all my classes, I hated everything I did in high school, I expect to hate my job, and this is just how it's going to be for the rest of my life." If adults are unaware of all this, that's partly because they're looking in the wrong direction. Getting A's no longer means that everything's okay, assuming that it ever did. "We have students, who, no matter what else is going on in their lives, know how to get those grades," Rabbi

Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Stanford's university chaplain, has said. "It's important for us to take away the blinders that keep us from seeing their distress." Mainly, though, these kids are very good at hiding their problems from us. I was largely unaware myself, during my years at Yale, of the depth of my students' unhappiness. Only now that I am no longer in a position of authority do some of them feel comfortable enough to open up. The student who told me that she had no friends until her senior year had seemed, if anything, unusually healthy: funny, friendly, "real," not obnoxiously competitive or on the make, and a brilliant student, to boot. Another kid, equally great, equally well-adjusted for all that I could see, later confessed that she'd been miserable in college, depressed or stressed-out all the time. By the time they finish high school—after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents' friends—elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers. Polite, pleasant, mild, and presentable; well-mannered, well-groomed, and well-spoken (not to mention, often enough, well-medicated), they have fashioned that façade of happy, healthy high achievement. It would be bad enough if all this misery were being inflicted for the sake of genuine learning, but that is quite the opposite of what the system now provides. Our most prestigious colleges and universities love to congratulate themselves on the caliber of their incoming students: their average SAT scores, the proportion that comes from the top 10 percent of their high school class, the narrowness of the admissions sieve that lets them in, all the numbers U.S. News & World Report has taught us to worship. And make no mistake; today's elite students are, in purely academic terms, phenomenally well prepared. How could they not be, given how carefully they're bred, how strenuously sorted and groomed? They are the academic equivalent of all-American athletes, coached and drilled and dieted from the earliest years of life. Whatever you demand of them, they'll do. Whatever bar you place in front of them, they'll clear. A friend who teaches at a top

university once asked her class to memorize thirty lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Every single kid got every single line correct, down to the punctuation marks. Seeing them write out the exercise in class, she said, was a thing of wonder, like watching Thoroughbreds circle a track. The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They've learned to "be a student," not to use their minds. I was talking with someone who teaches at a branch campus of a state university. His students don't think for themselves, he complained. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development, one that they directed by themselves and for themselves. I am far from alone in this perception. A friend who taught at Amherst mentioned a student who came to her for extra help with his writing—but only because he had already been admitted to medical school and now felt free to actually learn. If he were a freshman or sophomore, he said, he wouldn't have taken the time. Another friend teaches fine arts at a prestigious liberal arts college. His kids are eager to accept creative challenges, he's told me, but only as long as it will help them get an A. "I cannot imagine a Yale undergraduate spending an entire weekend lying in bed reading poetry or glued to a keyboard writing a breakthrough iPhone app," said a former colleague in the computer science department, who went to college in the late 1970s. "Yet, when I was an undergraduate, people did things like that all the time; passionate weirdos were all over the place, and they were part of what made college interesting." Students simply don't have time for that kind of headlong immersion. The frenzy of extracurricular activities has expanded to fill the available space, displacing intellectual pursuits as the focus of student energy.

David Brooks and other observers have spoken about the death of the late-night bull session, the scarcity of spontaneous intellectual discussion. I've heard similar complaints from students at Brown, Penn, Cornell, Pomona, and Columbia. "I've never been able to justify to myself why I feel so much 'smarter'—more productive, more creative, more interesting (and more importantly, more interested)—during the summers than I ever do during the school year," a Princeton senior wrote me. A young woman from another school told me this about her boyfriend at Yale: Before he started college, he spent most of his time reading and writing short stories. Three years later, he's painfully insecure, worrying about things my public-educated friends don't give a second thought to, like the stigma of eating lunch alone and whether he's "networking" enough. No one but me knows he fakes being well-read by thumbing through the first and last chapters of any book he hears about and obsessively devouring reviews in lieu of the real thing. He does this not because he's incurious, but because there's a bigger social reward for being able to talk about books than for actually reading them. There are exceptions, of course: seekers, thinkers, "passionate weirdos," kids who approach the work of the mind with a pilgrim spirit, who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience in college tends to make them feel like freaks. "Yale," one of them said, "is not conducive to searchers." Another said, about a friend of hers who'd transferred out, "She found Yale stifling to the parts of yourself that you'd call a soul." Said a third, "It's hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs." My examples tend to come from Yale, since that is mainly where I taught, but I do not mean to single out that institution. If anything, I think it probably deserves its reputation as the best among elite universities (as distinct from liberal arts colleges) at nurturing creativity and intellectual independence. Notoriously pre-professional places like Penn, Duke, or Washington University, or notoriously anti-intellectual ones like Princeton or Dartmouth, are clearly far worse. But that's

precisely what's so frightening. If Yale is the best, then the best is pretty bad. Yet if I have learned one thing in the last few years, it is that today's elite students do not arrive in college as a herd of sheep or army of robots, with a few rebel intellectuals off at the edges. Most of them are somewhere in the middle: idealistic and curious, like kids before them, hungry for purpose and meaning, like kids before them, but beset by psychological demands that are inevitable products of the process that propelled them into college in the first place. "Every educational system," wrote Allan Bloom, "wants to produce a certain kind of human being." Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite: the grades, the scores, the trophies. That is what you're praised for; that is what you are rewarded for. Your parents brag; your teachers glow; your rivals grit their teeth. Finally, the biggest prize of all, the one that draws a line beneath your adolescence and sums you up for all the world to see: admission to the college of your dreams. Or rather, not finally—because the game, of course, does not end there. College is naturally more of the same. Now the magic terms are GPA, Phi Beta Kappa, Fulbright, MCAT, Harvard Law, Goldman Sachs. They signify not just your fate, but your identity; not just your identity, but your value. They are who you are, and what you're worth. The result is what we might refer to as credentialism. The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can't put on your resume. Hence the constant sense of competition. (If you want to increase participation in an activity, a Stanford professor told me, make entry to it competitive.) Hence the endemic academic corner-cutting that Douthat describes in Privilege, a memoir of his time at Harvard, where all that intellect is put to the service, not of learning as much as possible, but of getting away with doing as little as you can. Hence the vogue for double majors. It isn't enough anymore to take a bunch of electives in

addition to your primary focus, to roam freely across the academic fields, making serendipitous connections and discoveries, the way that American higher education was designed (uniquely, among the world's systems) to allow you to do. You have to get that extra certification now, or what has it all been for? I even met a quadruple major once. He seemed to think it meant that he was very smart. With credentialism comes a narrow practicality that's capable of understanding education only in terms of immediate utility, and that marches, at the most prestigious schools, beneath a single banner: economics. In 1995, economics was the most popular major at three of the top ten universities or top ten liberal arts colleges on the most recent lists in U.S. News. In 2013, it was the biggest at a minimum of eight and as many as fourteen. Among the universities, it was the biggest at Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth, and probably Columbia and the University of Chicago (determinations are sometimes difficult because of changes in reporting). It was the biggest at four of the top ten liberal arts colleges, places that are supposed to be about a different sort of education—Williams, Middlebury, Pomona, and Claremont McKenna— and probably also at Amherst, Swarthmore, Carleton, and Wellesley. It was almost as popular among the next ten schools on each list, the rest of the top twenty, representing the largest major at as many as six of the universities and six more of the colleges, for a grand total of 26 of the 40 schools on the two lists combined. Sixty-five percent, for just a single major: a stunning convergence. Meanwhile, not coincidentally, finance and consulting have emerged as the most coveted careers. In 2007, about half of Harvard seniors who had full-time jobs lined up for after graduation were going into one of those two industries. The numbers softened a bit after the financial collapse, but not by much and not for long. By 2010, nearly half of Harvard graduates were still going into one of those fields, as well as more than half of those at Penn and more than a third at Cornell, Stanford, and MIT. In 2011, 36 percent of Princeton graduates went into finance alone. At Yale it was only about a quarter, between the two fields, in 2010, but as junior Marina Keegan put it the following year, in an essay that went viral on the Web, why should that be "only"? "In a place as diverse

and disparate as Yale, it's remarkable that such a large percentage of people are doing anything the same—not to mention something as significant as their postgraduate plans." And it is all the more remarkable, she went on, given that students arrive at college innocent of either intention. "I conducted a credible and scientific study . . . earlier this week—asking freshman after freshman what they thought they might be doing upon graduation. Not one of them said they wanted to be a consultant or an investment banker." The question, then, is why. Why do so many elite students end up choosing one of those two fields, and what does that tell us about their peer group as a whole? Greed alone is not the explanation. Remember that these kids have been conditioned, above all, to jump through hoops. That's what feels familiar; that's what feels safe; that's what feels like the right thing to do. In high school, everybody had the same objective, to get into the most prestigious college possible, and the hoops were all lined up to lead you there. But once you get to college, things are not so certain anymore. Directions multiply, and many of the paths are foggy. As Keegan suggested, being a musician does not have an application form. How do you become a social entrepreneur, a politician, a screenwriter? How do you get to work at the State Department, in Silicon Valley, for the New York Times? How many options are there that you haven't even heard of, and how does getting a job work, anyway? It isn't any wonder, as graduation draws near, that a lot of students scurry frantically around, looking for another hoop to jump through. And speaking of options, these kids have all been told that theirs are limitless. Once you commit to something, though, that ceases to be true. A former student sent me an essay he wrote, a few years after college, called "The Paradox of Potential." Yale students, he said, are like stem cells. They can be anything in the world, so they try to delay for as long as possible the moment when they have to become just one thing in particular. Possibility, paradoxically, becomes limitation. "My friends and I didn't run sprinting down a thousand career paths, bound for all

corners of the globe," he wrote. "Instead, we moved cautiously, in groups, plodding down a few well-worn trails so as to ensure that two or four years down the road, we could be stem cells again, still undifferentiated, still brimming with potential." That's the situation that consulting firms, especially, have learned to exploit. Their recruiters descend upon elite campuses in force. They make it easy to apply—but they also make it hard to get selected, which is even better. The job looks great on your resume, and you aren't foreclosing any options, since you can still do anything you want to after you leave. As for the work itself, it's pretty much like college: rigorous analysis, integration of disparate forms of information, clear and effective communication. You don't even have to have studied economics; firms are often happy to hire humanities majors. They're looking only for exactly what the colleges were: intelligence, diligence, energy—aptitude. And of course, they offer you a lot of money. A former student wrote me this: The real problem is that Yalies and our peers now feel like they're somehow wasting their degree by taking a job that doesn't pay 100K the first year, or ever. I think consulting in particular appeals to this perverse fantasy that most Ivy Leaguers harbor deep down inside, which is that someone should pay them for simply having gone to Yale or Harvard or wherever. All of the various reasons I've been given by my peers to explain why they're consulting next year boil down to the same thing: "because I can." Few people have the balls to walk away from that. Nor is it consulting firms alone. Most of what is true of them is also true of the investment banks. "What Wall Street figured out," another student wrote me, "is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next." Nor is law school essentially different, even if the financial rewards are delayed for several years. Nor, in many ways, is Teach For America, by far the most popular postgraduate destination among the nonprofits: heavy recruitment, clear path, competitive application process, limited

time commitment, looks great on your resume, doesn't foreclose options, very impressive, another gold star—and you can always do Bain or Morgan afterward, as some alumni of the program do. TFA is worlds away from Wall Street, morally speaking, but the overriding problem, when it comes to the kinds of choices that elite students make after college, is not greed; it is inertia. If love of money tends to win out, that is largely because so many kids leave college without a sense of inner purpose—in other words, of what else might be worth their time. The irony, then, is this. Elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, teaching, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science. It is true that today's young people appear to be more socially engaged, as a whole, than kids have been for several decades: more concerned about the state of the world and more interested in trying to do something about it. It is true, as well, that they are more apt to harbor creative or entrepreneurial impulses. But it is also true, at least at the most selective schools, that even if those aspirations make it out of college—a very big "if"—they tend to be played out within the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, and prestige. What I saw at Yale I have continued to see at campuses around the country. Everybody looks extremely normal, and everybody looks the same. No hippies, no punks, no art school types or hipsters, no butch lesbians or gender queers, no black kids in dashikis. The geeks don't look that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Everyone dresses as if they're ready to be interviewed at a moment's notice. You're young, I want to say to them. Take a chance with yourselves. Never mind "diversity." What we're getting is thirty-two flavors of vanilla. I am not lamenting a bygone era of student rebellion; college used to be understood as a time to experiment with different selves, of whatever type. Now students all seem to be converging on the same self, the successful upper-middle-class professional, impersonating the adult

they've already decided they want to become. "However much diversity Yale's freshman classes may have," a former student wrote, "its senior classes have far less." Everybody does the same thing because everybody's doing the same thing. A former student talked to me about the "salmon run." A University of Michigan graduate spoke of the "conveyor belt." The operative principle is known as triangular desire: wanting something because you see that other people want it and assume that it must be valuable. "There was," wrote Michael Lewis about the salmon run of his own day, "a sense of safety in numbers." The key word there is "safety." Beneath the other factors—the entitlement, the lack of direction, the desire not to close down options— the force that drives the salmon run is fear. It is the exact fear (and more than fear: the panic, the often crippling anxiety) that lies behind that façade of serene achievement that elite college students learn to show the world. So extreme are the admission standards now, so ferocious the competition, that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They have been haunted their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents' fear of failure. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. That is one of the reasons that elite education has become so inimical to learning. As Harry R. Lewis, the former Harvard dean, has written, nobody wants to take a chance on a class they might not ace, so nobody is willing to venture beyond the things they already know and do very well. Experimenting, exploring, discovering new ways to look at the world as well as new capacities within yourself—the things a college education is supposed to be about—fall by the wayside. Nobody wants to let any of the dozen balls they're juggling drop; nobody wants to lag behind in the credentials race. When a student at Pomona told me that she'd love to have a chance to think about the things she's studying, only she doesn't have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an

A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion. Senior year is when this training in playing it safe meets the need to start making real decisions about your life, and that large population of kids in the middle begins to assume the shape of a herd. Remember what my student said before, about how difficult it is to make a different choice. And that's before you start to see that everybody else is making the same choice. Many kids have spoken to me, as they navigated their senior years, about the pressure they felt from their peers—from their peers—to justify a different kind of life. You're made to feel like you're crazy, they've told me: crazy to forsake the sure thing, crazy to think it could work, crazy to imagine that you even have a right to try. Nor does graduation make these issues go away. While some kids make a choice and don't look back—for good or ill, whether they have chosen from conviction or desperation—many continue to struggle with all the same feelings and pressures. I have seen students stumble for years, as many bright young people do today, unwilling to submit to doing something that they can't feel passionate about but still not knowing where their passion really lies. One spoke of continuing to struggle not only with anxiety and fear, but also with ambition: not, that is, with a genuine desire for excellence, but with the feeling of being a failure if you don't continue to amass the blue-chip names, the need to keep on doing the most prestigious possible thing—and the constant awareness, over your shoulder, of all the prestigious things that your former classmates are doing. Another student went to work some years ago for a consulting firm. He used to look me up every once in a while when he came back to campus on recruiting trips. Every time I saw him, he would tell me that he wanted to get out and do something creative instead, something meaningful, but that he didn't know how, any longer, because he couldn't imagine surrendering the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. In other words—I have heard this a lot—he'd become addicted to the money.

Yet another recent graduate, a talented writer who is sticking by her guns, and who had always been indifferent to the race for wealth and status, wrote me this: Every day, I fight a compulsion to find a good ladder and scurry up it for the next fifteen years, because I can tell from the dread in my gut that this is the wrong thing to do. If I became a senior editor at the New Yorker without having taken a circuitous and ultimately interesting route, I would be unhappy. And yet most days I am bombarded by little capsules of guilt, moments that explode and spread over me like a net. I must find some way to get away from the compulsion. It is so hard to think when it's on me, let alone write. I knew this kind of ambition afflicted other people at Yale, but it hadn't affected me until now. The whole elite predicament, it should be said, is not confined to the United States. The system is global and in many ways, at this point, interconnected. About a tenth of students at America's most prestigious colleges come from overseas today. Our admissions standards have diffused across the world; kids in Shanghai, Seoul, and Mumbai now are jumping through our hoops. I have heard from people in Canada, the United Kingdom, and especially South and East Asia: India, Singapore, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Japan. "I wanted to thank you for writing the most perfect, damning indictment of modern education," said one correspondent. "I'm at medical school here in Canada and your sentiments apply beyond the Ivy League." "We have our own Ivy League in India," said another. "We call them Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIM). Every single thing you mentioned I have witnessed happening in practice." Unaddressed, these issues ultimately lead to the kind of midlife crisis that is typical of high achievers. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard's longtime dean of admissions, has put it this way: It is common to encounter even the most successful students, who have won all the "prizes," stepping back and wondering if it was all worth it. Professionals in their thirties and forties—physicians,

lawyers, academics, business people and others—sometimes give the impression that they are dazed survivors of some bewildering life- long boot camp. Some say they ended up in their profession because of someone else's expectations, or that they simply drifted into it without pausing to think whether they really loved their work. Often they say they missed their youth entirely, never living in the present, always pursuing some ill-defined goal. 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. That is, if you even have an inkling what your calling is. "You cannot say to a Yalie 'find your passion.' Most of us do not know how." It is indeed reasonable to say, as many students have, that you might as well go to Wall Street and make a lot of money if you can't think of anything better to do. What is not reasonable is that we have constructed an educational system that produces highly intelligent, accomplished twenty-two-year-olds who have no idea what they want to do with their lives: no sense of purpose and, what is worse, no understanding of how to go about finding one. Who can follow an existing path but don't have the imagination—or the courage, or the inner freedom—to invent their own.

Two The History How did we get here? How did the college admissions process, the fulcrum on which the system turns—casting its shadow back over childhood and adolescence and forward over college and career, shaping the way that kids are raised and thus the people they become—how did it assume its present form? It is not a phenomenon of the last ten or fifteen years. The difference between today's elite students and those of twenty or forty years ago, despite what many like to think, is only one of degree. If we want to understand where the system comes from—which means, where we come from, because at this point most of the American professional class has gone through it, most of its upper middle class, most of its leadership class, the people who direct our government, our economy, our culture, and our institutions—then we need to go back to the start. In fact, we need to go back before the start, to the Gilded Age, the last decades of the nineteenth century. Contrary to popular belief, the Ivy League colleges were not always the rich-boys' finishing schools they later became. Before the Civil War, they were relatively small, relatively local institutions. The few young men who went were certainly gentlemen's sons, and gentlemen-in-training themselves, but a lot of rich boys didn't bother, and besides, in a largely agricultural society that

was still fragmented into regional economies, there weren't that many rich boys to begin with. After the war, as E. Digby Baltzell tells the story in his classic study, The Protestant Establishment, things began to change. Industrialization exploded, creating new fortunes and a new plutocracy. The railroad knitted the country into a single economy. The old regional elites became aware of themselves as a national elite and began to take steps to reinforce their class identity. New money needed to be socialized into gentility; all money needed to defend its social boundaries against the great unwashed, many of them Catholics and Jews, who were flooding the cities from Southern and Eastern Europe. Anti-Semitism and anti- Catholicism took hold in the upper class. The caste that Baltzell would eventually make famous as the WASPs, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants —another phenomenon we regard as eternal, but that dates, in fact, from this time—began to crystallize. "Anglo-Saxon" was very much part of the point: the English aristocracy, which the nation had rebelled against a century earlier in the name of equality, became the model for a new, American aristocracy. The WASPs created a whole range of institutions for themselves. Exclusive resorts like Bar Harbor and Newport were up and running by 1880. The first country club was founded in 1882. Groton, not the first New England prep school but the first to be established in emulation of the venerable English public (that is, private) schools, opened its doors in 1884. The Social Register began publication in 1887. The Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in 1890. Soon the aristocracy was fleeing the cities for new suburban enclaves like the Philadelphia Main Line. The country day school movement followed. One institution the WASP aristocracy did not create but did transform. Now was the time when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton assumed the moneyed shape of legend: the Harvard of the "Gold Coast" of private dormitories; the Yale of Stover at Yale, a famous campus novel of the time; the Princeton of F. Scott Fitzgerald (which gentrified its name from the College of New Jersey in 1896). Elite colleges, where affluent young men could mingle with their peers from across the country, played a crucial role in inculcating mores, establishing connections, and certifying graduates as members of the leadership

class. As colleges sought to entice a new kind of customer by dispelling their bookish image, extracurriculars—especially athletics, and most especially the "manly" sport of football, which was invented in its current form at elite schools at exactly this time—began to play a central role in campus life. Business boomed; Harvard expanded from 100 students a year in the 1860s to more than 600 by 1904. Academics were out— something only "drips" or "grinds" would bother with. Parties, pranks, and snobbery were in, as social life was taken over by the prep school crowd, which came to dominate numerically, as well. The Big Three, as they were baptized in the 1880s, became "iconic institutions," in the words of Jerome Karabel, setting the fashion for campuses across the country. But soon there was a problem, as Karabel explains in The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Admissions were based on entrance exams. On the one hand, kids from feeder schools would often be let in no matter how badly they did. (Of the 405 Grotonians who applied to Harvard from 1906 to 1932, the school rejected three.) On the other hand, because the subjects covered, particularly Greek and Latin, were not available in public schools, the majority of high school graduates—and back then, there weren't that many to begin with—were automatically excluded. The social tone was preserved, but academic standards plummeted. By 1916, all three colleges had dropped their classical language requirements. Enrollment from public high schools soared—but public high schools, especially in the big cities, were increasingly populated by Jews. Columbia, the cautionary example, cut its proportion of Jews almost in half, from 40 percent, in two years, but not before experiencing a permanent exodus of upper-class families. The Big Three were not going to let that happen to them. A whole new set of admissions criteria was developed to hold back the Semitic tide by making sure that the "right sort" of student got in: letters of recommendation, alumni interviews, the preference for athletes and "leaders," special treatment for sons of alumni (that is, "legacies"), an emphasis on geographic distribution, and a devaluation of pure academic ability. Better midwestern Protestants, even if they weren't all the sharpest tools in the shed, than "greasy grinds" from Brooklyn.

Princeton started requiring applicants to submit a photo, since you couldn't always tell from the name. "Character" became the explicit ideal: manners, looks, tone, being a "Yale man"—all once guaranteed by where you went to school, now enforced through a subjective process of evaluation (and the admissions offices that had to be created to conduct it). The system endured, largely intact, until the 1960s. The Big Three continued to be dominated by prep school graduates; most of their students still came from wealthy families; unofficial quotas kept the Jewish numbers down; the old-boy, handshake, feeder-school culture remained in place. As late as 1950, Harvard received only thirteen applications for every ten spots, while Yale's acceptance rate was 46 percent. You knew if you were welcome, and if you weren't you didn't bother to apply. But already by the 1930s, forces had started to gather that would eventually destroy the old way of doing things. James B. Conant, newly installed as president of Harvard, began to take steps to raise academic standards, increase access, and tap the nation's talent pool. To identify the bright young men who would, to be sure, only supplement the school's existing clientele, he turned to a recently developed "psychometric" test: the SAT. Conant was a reformer, not a revolutionary. Change was incremental over the next three decades. The average SAT score at elite colleges before World War II was around 500, right in the middle of the distribution; by the early 1960s, it had risen to about 625. The revolution came at Yale that decade under Kingman Brewster. Like Conant, Brewster recognized that if the American elite was going to retain its position (and the country it led, its preeminence), it would have to make itself accessible to rising social groups—and that, if for no other reason than their own self-interest, the colleges that trained that elite would have to take the lead. Changes were happening in American life that the Big Three could no longer ignore. Within a couple of years of assuming the presidency of the university in 1963, Brewster had elevated academic promise to supremacy among admissions criteria, shunted aside the ideal of the well-rounded man in favor of the "brilliant specialist," reduced the preferences for athletes and legacies, eliminated

the checklist of physical characteristics that had played a role in the admissions process (resulting in a drop of nearly half an inch in the average height of the incoming class), ended the college's cozy relationship with its feeder schools, removed the Jewish quota, and instituted need-blind admissions. Affirmative action was introduced by the last years of the decade. In 1969, the school became coed. Brewster had demolished the old system at a single blow. The school's alumni forced him to reverse a few of his reforms, particularly those concerning athletes and legacies, but the point of no return had been passed. Nineteen sixty-five, the year of Brewster's revolution—which was also right around the time the baby boomers started to arrive on campus —can be taken as the pivot, in college admissions, from the old aristocracy to the new meritocracy: from caste, "character," and connections to scores and grades. And that is the origin of the system that we are still living with today. Yet things are not as different from the old procedure as they seem. Never mind the preferences for athletes, legacies, and others. Brewster, and everyone around the country who followed his lead, expanded access on a monumental scale, but they didn't really discard the old criteria, for the most part; they simply supplemented them. We don't ask applicants to do something different now; we ask them to do almost everything they used to have to do, plus a whole lot more. Think of what we want from kids today, if they're going to be admitted to an elite college. We want them to be, not athletes exactly, not performers at the highest level, but sportsmen, in the old term, people with a certain skill and grace—a demand they satisfy, in some cases, by playing games that derive from the prep school tradition (fencing, crew) and that exist nowhere else in American life. We want them to develop a measure of artistic ability, to engage in the kind of idiosyncratic self-cultivation that was a hallmark of the upper-class ideal, with its resources of leisure and culture. We want them to be personable—or as people used to call it, clubbable—so we still require an interview and letters of recommendation. We want them to demonstrate

a commitment to "service," which is nothing other than a modern echo of noblesse oblige, and generally undertaken in the same spirit of benign condescension. And we want them to be "leaders." It's not enough to participate in student government, say; you have to run it. You have to be president of the theater club, or captain of the baseball team. You have to come across, in other words, as an oligarch in training, just like the private school boys of a century ago. But to all this now, to an admissions process that was designed to select for an upper-class profile, we have added Brewster's requirements for academic excellence—which, as we saw, was decidedly not a part of the upper-class profile. Now we have the whole regime of SAT, AP, GPA, National Merit, and so forth. Now our kids must have the qualities of both an old aristocrat and a modern technocrat. No wonder they're so busy, and so frantic. The only thing that's changed since the mid-1960s is that everything has gotten inexorably worse: the admissions rates lower, the expectations higher, the competition fiercer, the pressure on students greater. Once the starting gun of meritocracy was fired, it was everybody off to the races. Already by 1968, acceptance rates at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had fallen to around 20 percent. By 1974, according to Nicholas Lemann in The Big Test, "a whole culture of obsession" with SAT scores had developed in American high schools (a fact that I remember well from the talk of my older siblings, who were going through the system at exactly this time). The expansion of the college- age cohort in the 1970s intensified the pressure, as did the number of students actually finishing their degrees, since the more BAs were out there, the more imperative it was felt to be to distinguish yourself by going to a big-name school. By the end of the decade, Lemann says, affluent families had started to game the system with SAT tutors, application-essay "advisors" (that is, ghostwriters), strategic alumni donations, and other tactics. Colleges were letting it be known that they wanted to see as many Advanced Placement courses as possible on high school transcripts—and if you were going to be ready for APs by junior or senior year, you had to start accelerating as early as middle school. As the baby boom passed out of the system in the early 1980s, colleges began to recruit prospective

applicants more intensively. The deregulation of the airline and telecommunications industries helped make the higher education market fully national, since now it was cheaper to send your child across the country and to stay in touch once she was there. Early admissions programs, which lock kids into specific schools, grew ever more important as a way for colleges to gain an edge against their rivals. Then came the earthquake: U.S. News & World Report, a weak third among American newsweeklies, debuted its college rankings in 1983. Admissions statistics had long been regarded as a measure of institutional prestige, but now there was a single set of figures that encompassed every college in the country, a single number that defined the status of a school. Already in 1987, a delegation of college presidents asked the magazine to stop, but it was too late, because it was too profitable. Now the madness shifted to a higher gear. The decade saw the explosion of the college admissions industry: test prep, tutors, guidebooks, consultants. The writer Caitlin Flanagan mentions a book called How to Get Into an Ivy League School (1985), among the first of its kind. According to Tom Wolfe, "the pandemic known as college mania" began "to show its true virulence" in 1988. The point is not which date is right. They're all right. Pick any moment over the last half century and things will be worse afterward than they were before. In the last couple of decades, the admissions pool has gone from national to global. The decline in the college-age population reversed itself in 1997, reaching boomer levels once again within a decade. Schools are ever more adept at juking their admissions stats, using aggressive marketing practices to gin up larger and larger numbers of applicants, many of whom they know they'll never admit (the so-called "attract to reject" strategy), just to lower their acceptance rates. Nor is it only a matter of status; schools, like other businesses, borrow money, and credit rating agencies take admissions statistics into account. No less than corporate profits, the numbers are expected to get better every year. Perhaps most crucial, in creating the feeling that the last couple of decades represent something new, is the fact that we're into the second generation now. The parents of the kids who have been going through the system since the early 1990s are products, increasingly, of the system

themselves. People who sent their children to elite colleges in the 1970s and '80s were much more likely to have gone to less prestigious, often public universities, or not to have gone to college at all. Now we're dealing with a cohort of meritocratic professionals for whom a different sort of life is inconceivable. What was once an opportunity has become a necessity. There is only one definition of happiness, and only one way to get it. Since 1992, admissions rates have fallen by more than a third at 17 of the top 20 liberal arts colleges in the current U.S. News ranking, and by more than half at 18 of the top 20 universities. They have fallen from 65 percent to 14 percent at Vanderbilt, from 45 percent to 13 percent at the University of Chicago, and from 32 percent to 7 percent at Columbia. Early applications rose at Duke by 23 percent in 2011 alone, on top of a 14 percent increase the previous year. In 2013, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, which each admit fewer than 2,500 students, all received more than 31,000 applications, over 50 percent more than they had only six years earlier. If those of us who went to college in the 1970s and '80s no longer recognize the admissions process, if today's elite students appear to be an alien species—Super People, perhaps, or a race of bionic hamsters— that is only because the logic of the system that was put in place in the 1960s, when the genteel bigotry of the old boys' network gave way to an egalitarian war of all against all, has been playing out for that much longer. When I graduated from high school in 1981, the kids who got into the most prestigious colleges took about three AP courses and did about three extracurricular activities each. Now the numbers are more apt to be seven or eight of the former and nine or ten of the latter. When I sat on the Yale admissions committee in 2008 (faculty members rotate through for a single day), kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the so-called "brag" in admissions lingo, it was the first thing the officer would mention when presenting a case—were already in trouble, because that wasn't nearly enough. In Privilege, Ross Douthat refers to a fellow student who had twelve, "a typically jam-

packed Harvard résumé." I once had a freshman advisee who had done eleven APs. None of this, I should say, is the fault of the admissions offices, which are acting on instructions from on high. During my day on the committee, I was deeply impressed by the staff. Admissions officers not only plow through thousands of folders during the long winter months; they are intimately conversant with the geographic areas for which they are responsible. We were doing eastern Pennsylvania that day in my subcommittee—suburban Philadelphia, essentially—and the junior officer in charge (it was only one of his regions), a young man who looked to be about thirty, was familiar, to a remarkable level of detail, not only with the high schools and the guidance counselors, with whom he had developed relationships over countless recruiting trips, but also with the alumni interviewers and outside readers who assisted with the territory. It was spring; early admissions had already been done. Applicants, each represented by a long string of figures and codes (SATs, GPA, class rank, numerical scores to which the letters of recommendation had been converted, special notations for athletes, legacies, diversity cases, and so forth), had been assigned a single cumulative score from 1 to 4. The 1's had already been admitted; when I asked to see an example during the lunch break, I was shown the winner of the Intel Science Talent Search, formerly known as the Westinghouse. Threes and 4's, which made up about three-quarters of the remainder, could get in only under special conditions: a nationally ranked athlete or a "DevA," an applicant in the highest category of "development" cases (that is, children of very rich donors, who get admitted under almost any circumstances). Now we were adjudicating, for the most part, among the 2's. In six hours of committee work, we disposed of somewhere between 100 and 125 cases, or about three or four minutes per applicant, looking for 10–15 admissions to fill out the rough allotment of approximately 40 for the region. The junior officer presented each case, rat-a-tat-tat, in a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. "Top checks": the top boxes had been checked in every category on the letters. "Good rig": the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. "Ed level 1": parents

have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. "Lacrosse #3": third on the coach's wish list. "MUSD": a musician in the highest category of promise ("Distinguished"), indicating a potential professional career. "T1": first letter; "E1": first essay; "TX": extra letter; "SR": guidance counselor. We listened, asked questions, dove into a letter or two, then voted up or down ("we" meaning three admissions staff altogether, a member of the college dean's office, and me, who mainly deferred to the pros). Huge bowls of junk food were stationed at the side of the room to keep our energy up. The dean of admissions—who looked like Ben Stein, and who could really spin an application folder—seemed to subsist on a diet of Doritos. With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, "PQs"—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the resume were usually rejected: "no spark," "not a team- builder," "this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us." One young man who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars, and who submitted eight letters of recommendation, was felt to be "too intense." On the other hand, the numbers and the resume were clearly indispensable. I'd been told in the orientation that morning that successful applicants could either be "well-rounded" or "pointy"— outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award. So almost everybody had to be well-rounded, but that means something very different now than it did in the days of Dink Stover. The older ideal, the prep school boy, was indeed displaced by Brewster's brilliant specialists. Now the colleges talk about assembling a well- rounded class by bringing together a variety of "well-lopsided" students: a junior journalist, a budding astronomer, a future diplomat, a language whiz. Those ten extracurricular activities that a typical admitted student has will not all go in ten different directions. Three or four or five will represent a special area of focus: math or art or student government. You have to be great at one or two things—but you also have to be really, really good at everything else: "well" as well as "lopsided." You may

already know that you aren't going to be a scientist or anything else that involves advanced mathematics, but you still have to sign up for calculus ("good rig"), and you still have to ace it (class rank, GPA). You might be one of those "passionate weirdos" who'd rather spend his time writing poetry or computer code, but you have to play your instruments and do your sports and join (or better yet, start) your clubs and rush around from thing to thing. You have, in other words, to do it all: get A's in all your classes, compete for leadership positions, pile up the extracurriculars—be a Super Person. That is why the college admissions process—and the people it produces —have become unrecognizable in recent years. 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. Nobody needed 20,000 atomic warheads until the other side had 19,000. Nobody needs eleven extracurriculars, either—what purpose does having them actually serve?—unless the other guy has ten. So like giraffes evolving ever-longer necks, our kids keep getting more and more deformed. Just what they're going to look like in another twenty years is anybody's guess. The system, it should be said, goes well beyond the most prestigious schools: the HYPSters (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford); or the eight members of the Ivy League; or the Golden Dozen, as Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus refer to them in Higher Education?, the Ivies plus Stanford, Duke, Williams, and Amherst. The greatest extremes—the fattest resumes and the most anorexic acceptance rates— will always be found at the same few schools, but as my travels and conversations over the last few years have shown me, the mania exists, albeit at lower temperatures, at a much larger pool of institutions. The students I met at the University of Virginia may not have had nine or ten extracurriculars on their resume, but they did have six or seven. The ones I talked with at the Honors College of the University of Mississippi

may not have done seven or eight APs, but they did do five or six. The logic and the values are the same across a wide array of schools, even if the level of ambition, or aptitude, or neurosis, or parental wealth is not. 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. But even that underestimates the size of the phenomenon. I have heard from people at a variety of regional liberal arts colleges—schools that are not "names" in any sense, but that enroll a lot of bright and ambitious students—and they have told me that the issues are the same there, too. James Fallows estimates that about 10–15 percent of high school graduates are caught up in the competition for spots at selective schools. That amounts to something like four hundred thousand kids a year. It is to the kind of childhoods those kids endure— the parents, the high schools, the inner life of excellent sheep—that I turn in the following chapter.

Three The Training Families are scared, and for good reason. Social mobility has stalled. The global playing field is getting ever more competitive. The middle class is hanging on by its fingernails, and the upper middle class seems harder than ever to reach. The future, since 2008, has looked more daunting, especially for young people, than at any other time in memory. A college degree, we hear incessantly, is absolutely indispensable, and—though this is more dubious—the more prestigious the college the better. If you live in a winner-take-all society, you're going to want your child to be among the winners. But let's not kid ourselves. The admissions frenzy has been raging, in good times and bad, for close to fifty years, not six. It is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper middle class itself. Fallows's 10–15 percent, the share of high school students who participate in the selective admissions process, may not correspond precisely to the upper 10–15 percent of the income distribution (there is still a certain proportion of strivers who manage to get through the door, especially from immigrant communities), but it does correspond pretty closely. In 2012, the top 15 percent of household incomes began at $117,000.

The college admissions game, in the affluent suburbs and well-heeled urban enclaves where it is principally played, is not about whether you go to an elite school. It's about which one you go to. It is Penn versus Tufts, not Penn versus Penn State. It doesn't matter that a bright young person can still go to Ohio State, become a doctor, settle in Bloomington or Dayton, and make a very good living. Such an outcome is simply too horrible to contemplate. Hence, in the words of a mother who wrote me, "this aggressive suburban wasting disease, this high-achievement addiction." "The pressure out here is ridiculous," another mother, from a Boston suburb, told me. "It is obscene." While the overbearing upper-middle-class parent is a familiar figure now, there is a contradiction in the usual account. We all know about the helicopter parent—hovering, pressuring, criticizing—and about the kind of structured, supervised, skill-building childhood they superintend. The governing word is "let's," as in, "Let's practice your piano now." We also know about the overindulgent parent—the kind who lets their kids run wild in restaurants, who's still tying their shoelaces on their eighth birthday, who constantly tells them what wonderful, unique snowflakes they are, how they can be anything they want when they grow up, how they should do what they love and follow their dreams. The two parental styles are not, however, antithetical. They spring from a common impulse. Coddling and pushing, stroking and surveillance, are both forms of overprotection. Each bespeaks a misguided belief that you can make the world safe for your children: that if you only do everything right, nothing will ever impede or harm them—that you can shield them, in the words of Peggy Orenstein, "from pain or failure or sadness." Helicopter parenting, as Anna Quindlen has said, originates in the illusion of control. One might add that it is a particularly middle-class form of that illusion: the idea that life can be rendered predictable, reduced to an orderly succession of achievements that will guarantee security and comfort. Pressuring your kids to get an A in calculus when they are seventeen is essentially the same as tying their shoelaces for them when they are eight. Both are ways of treating them as if they can't do anything for themselves. Both, in other words, are forms of infantilization. "They have not

grown up," writes Harry R. Lewis of the students he knew as dean of Harvard College, "and that is the way everyone seems to want it." ("From a psychoanalytic or therapeutic point of view," a former student wrote me, "the alliance that the university forms with parents is never benign, and for a lot of students at elite schools it can be monstrous.") It should not surprise us that so many kids move home after college—another trend that started long before the financial collapse. The only question is, how many of their parents are secretly glad when it happens? "We were going to do the right thing and raise perfect kids," a father said to me, conflating in one word these two contradictory impulses: "perfect" as in perfectly happy, "perfect" as in perfectly accomplished. As for why you'd feel the need to raise such paragons, or believe that it is possible, or think that trying to do so is desirable, perhaps the answer is that the only lovable children are "perfect" ones. Both kinds of parenting, finally, are forms of overidentification. The helicopter parent turns the child into an instrument of her will. The overindulgent parent projects his own need for limitless freedom and security. In either case, the child is made to function as an extension of somebody else. This is the essential fact of high-achievement parenting today. In The Price of Privilege, the clinical psychologist Madeline Levine speaks of parents "who fill up their own brittle selves with their children's accomplishments." In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace has his narrator remark that "it was a little bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter." (An acute observer of the elite mentality, Wallace writes elsewhere of the difference between feeling "valued," as a child, and feeling "valuable.") In the words of Michael G. Thompson, the author of many books on personality development, "The delegating family sends a child out, and the child believes that she is free and independent, but in fact she is on a mission for her parents that must be fulfilled." Many pressures converge here: status competition within extended families; peer pressure within communities; the desire to measure up to your own parents, or to best them; "family branding," as somebody put it to me. When your kid gets into a prestigious college, it's as if you got an A in being a parent. And nothing less than that, of course, will do. Nor is college the end of it, needless to say. "My office," Levine writes,

among the highest rates of depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders, somatic complaints, and unhappiness of any group of children in this country." "As many as 22 percent of adolescent girls from financially comfortable families suffer from clinical depression." Mental health problems "can be two to five times more prevalent among private high school juniors and seniors" than among their public school counterparts. When problems occur, she says, affluent parents are also less likely to acknowledge them, in part because academic success is seen as a sign of maturity and emotional health. Perhaps most disturbing of all, affluent teenagers feel less connected to their parents than do any other group of teens, including poor ones. Praise, Levine says, is not warmth, and the vaunted self-esteem that parents are so keen to instill is not the same as self-efficacy, the belief in your ability to get things done in the world. Hovering and criticism, adds William Damon, author of The Path to Purpose and many other books on child development, should not be confused with attention or guidance. High-pressure parents, as one of Levine's young patients puts it, are "everywhere and nowhere at the same time." They are intrusive, but they are not connected. Fortunately, one of those parents has blessed us with a perfect portrait of the type, Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. A lot of people denounced the book when it was published in 2011; a lot of people celebrated it, as its author intended we should, as a rebuke to our lazy American parenting style. Of course, it is nothing of the sort. Chua's "Asian" parenting is simply an extreme version of upper-middle-class practice—the unrelenting pressure as she hounds her daughters to excel, the willful disregard of everything except "achievement"—and it shows us all that's wrong with it and all that lies behind it. Perusing her book is like reading a novel with an unreliable narrator: she is constantly revealing things she doesn't realize about herself, is blind to the meaning of her own story. Chua champions filial obedience, but the father she reveres rebelled against his own parents, and she rebelled against him in turn: he by

leaving China for the United States, she by leaving California for the East Coast. (Both, it seems, were trying to get as far away as possible.) By her own admission, she made a long series of mistakes about her career, and for all the predictable reasons: trying to please her family, following the path of least resistance, not acknowledging her true desires. She holds up her mother-in-law as the archetypal example of the bad American parent—someone who believes in wishy-washy concepts like choice, independence, creativity, and the importance of questioning authority—yet this is a woman who produced a son whom Chua herself found worthy of marriage and who turned out to be successful even on his wife's own terms: accepted at Princeton, then Juilliard, then Harvard Law, a professor at Yale and a bestselling author to boot. But all of this is lost on her when it comes to raising her children. The needs that drive her reign of terror (the term is not too strong) are a compound of panicked perfectionism and an infantile sense of entitlement. Amid her reams of artless boasting—about herself, her kids, her husband, her sisters—the salient terms are "greatest," "famous," "said to be surpassed . . . only by," and so forth: status-mongering at its most unreflective. There is no middle ground; Chua's psyche seems to balance on a knife edge between glory and abjection. If you're not the best, you're a "loser." If you're not brilliant, you're worthless. It is altogether to the point that the book's most famous scene, the one where Chua rejects her daughters' birthday cards as showing insufficient evidence of effort, takes place at a "mediocre restaurant." The great Amy Chua deserves a nicer set of birthday cards, just as she deserves something better than "stale focaccia." No wonder she is willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that her daughters don't turn out to be "losers," too, fit only to be cast aside like stale focaccia, even if it means destroying their happiness. Neither one of them has friends, she tells us (or others tell her, at least, since she cannot seem to take the information in). Well, she says, "The truth is I'm not good at enjoying life"—so why then, is the implication, should her daughters be? Happiness is not the point; the point is control. "In Chinese thinking," she explains, "the child is the extension of the self." Parental narcissism does not get more explicit than that. But Chua does not finally seem like a parent at all. Still an extension of her own parents

—forever feeling their eyes upon her, incapable of questioning the values with which she was raised—she remains an eternal child, insatiable in her demands for love and attention. As for her own children, the fact that one has gotten into Harvard now is not a validation of her methods. It is a condemnation of Harvard's, and of the system as a whole. Of course her daughter got into Harvard: that is exactly the kind of parenting the system rewards. That's exactly what is wrong with it. My sense, as I have spoken with teachers at elite high schools, is that most understand what is wrong and wish they could do better by their students. Teachers at exclusive schools, one told me, are often "excellent black sheep"—people who were raised that way themselves, accumulated their share of accolades, then decided there was something more to life. Some have described the ways they try to smuggle different values into the classroom, like love of learning or service to the community. The problem is they don't have any room to operate. One teacher at a prep school in Westchester told me of a student breaking down in tears during a discussion of Catcher in the Rye. He didn't want to have to be a stockbroker, like his parents said. That very night, she got a call from the boy's mother: "Don't put any ideas into his head." Some localities have tried to take the pressure down. Ridgewood, New Jersey, an upscale suburb, has instituted a voluntary day off from homework and extracurricular activities, and other communities have followed suit. But it tells us everything we need to know about the state of things that the program involves taking off, not one day a week, but one day a year. But even that's too much for many people. A teacher at a private school has told me of parents refusing to allow their children to go on a field trip, because they couldn't afford to lose a day of academics —and of a lot of kids agreeing with them. 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. Teachers are trapped in the system, as well, as one of them told me. A

veteran of many years, she has watched her institution evolve in the direction of a customer-service mentality: give the parents what they want, no matter what's good for the kids. Don't challenge them intellectually, don't encourage them to engage the material, don't even try to insist on academic rigor. That may be the most damning thing about these schools, so full of smart teachers teaching the smart children of smart parents: that they finally don't care about learning at all. "Don't put any ideas into his head": a request that is honored all too well. Everybody wants their child to get an education, but nobody wants them to get an education education. A series that was published in a Palo Alto paper—Palo Alto, of all places—portrays an environment at the local high schools that is "hostile to learning." The kids in "Doing School" rarely hear that education might be valuable for its own sake. "I went to Hopkins, a Yale feeder school, and hated it," a former student wrote me. "The place turned learning into a simple endurance test, blithely awarding the best 'athletes.' " The whole of childhood and adolescence, across a large swath of society, is now constructed with a single goal in mind. All the values that once informed the way we raise our children—the cultivation of curiosity, the inculcation of character, the instillment of a sense of membership in one's community, the development of the capacity for democratic citizenship, let alone any emphasis on the pleasure and freedom of play, the part of childhood where you actually get to be a child—all these are gone. As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, "affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children." Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we're living to it. What can such a circumstance produce, if not the full demonology of psychological suffering? One of my students compared the situation to women's gymnastics. Think of the mood that prevails on the competition floor every four years at the Olympics, tense with a kind of

anorexic perfectionism: no margin for error, no joy in the work, no room to hide from scrutiny, success understood as the absence of failure. Levine writes of teens feeling "pressured, misunderstood, anxious, angry, sad, and empty"—in short, "dreadfully unhappy"—and of responding with eating disorders, cutting, substance abuse, addiction, depression, antisocial behavior, and suicidal thoughts. Eve, the girl who's running a 3.97 in "Doing School"—she is carrying four APs her junior year, plans to do seven her senior year, and copes with the workload, among other ways, by studying in class (that is, for other classes)—has this to say: "I sometimes have two or three days where I only get two hours of sleep per night. . . . I really really fear failure. . . . I am just a machine with no life at this place. . . . I am a robot just going page by page, doing the work." She "surviv[es] on cereal" but is usually "too stressed and tired to feel hungry"—though not so stressed that, like some of her friends, she talks about killing herself. And yet she wouldn't have it any other way: "Some people see health and happiness as more important than grades and college; I don't." Levine speaks of addiction in the usual respect, but the mechanics of addiction operate for high-achieving students in a wider sense, as well. Addicts often say the reason that they need a fix is that it makes them feel, not good, exactly, but "all right." The drug no longer gives them pleasure; it only takes away the pain—the pain, that is, of needing the drug. So it is with the drug of praise upon which these children are trained to depend: the praise that is the sign of parental love, for the achievement that is the condition of that love. Every A is a fix that temporarily quells the anxiety of failure, the terror of falling short. This is all that famous "self-esteem," the quality that parents are so keen to instill, amounts to. It is a balloon that must be kept perpetually inflated by the hot air of approval ("valued," not "valuable"), and it collapses at the first contact with reality. Levine writes of young people who have no ability to handle setbacks, like the girl who contemplates suicide because her SAT scores are a little lower than she expected, or the boy who, cut from the basketball team, is terrified of going home to face his father's disappointment. Hence the reason the admissions process often proves to be so devastating. For the first time in their lives, a lot of kids who are used to nothing but success are forced to deal with

failure. One of my students remarked that the movie Black Swan, about a ballerina who goes through a psychotic break, reminded her of a lot of her peers: so perfectionistic that they no longer live in reality. 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. And here we come to the heart of the matter, as Alice Miller laid it out in her classic psychoanalytic study, The Drama of the Gifted Child. In Miller's account, the self of the "gifted" or accomplished child is formed in response to the parents' need for gratification through achievement (typically rooted in their own "brittle selves," as Levine reminds us, the result of the same kind of upbringing). The child gives his parents what he understands they want, becomes the person that they need him to be. But the demand is insatiable, because its satisfaction is always provisional. The child is "never good enough" ("only as good as your last sales quarter"), and so he tries to be perfect. Once this expectation is internalized, of course, it doesn't matter where the needed affirmation comes from. All achievement becomes a stand-in for parental approval. "He seeks insatiably for admiration," Miller writes, "of which he never gets enough because admiration is not the same thing as love." And so, Miller says, the gifted child—no longer necessarily a child, needless to say—swings incessantly between the poles of grandiosity and depression. Grandiosity is the delusion of supremacy. It's what your parents told you when you did live up to their expectations: You're perfect! You're the best! You can do anything you want! It is self-esteem at its most distended, that rush you get when you ace your SATs or get the job at Goldman. The internal monologue goes something like this: "Screw you all—I win." Grandiosity is what you're in the grips of as you lay your plans for world domination, whatever that might mean for you. Depression is the state that ensues when you suffer a setback, and the delusion collapses. Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the

kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death. It also means self-punishment, which, among other things, is all those thoughts you use to make yourself feel bad—"I'm not good enough," "I'm not smart enough," "I don't work hard enough," "So-and-so is better than me," etc., etc.—and which stems from the feeling that you don't deserve to be happy. "If I didn't take Zoloft," a former student told me, "I would hate myself." Grandiosity involves contempt for others; depression involves contempt for yourself. We had a cruder name for this dynamic, back when I was in my twenties: "hot shit/piece of shit." Either you're up or you're down, totally cool or utterly worthless. "I spent about 50% of my time at Yale feeling smug because I was smarter than everyone," a former student wrote me. "I spent the other 50% feeling shitty because everyone was smarter than me." It is this kind of thinking that lies behind the all-or-nothing mentality that one invariably finds among high achievers. To hear people talk, there is no middle ground between a mansion and the gutter, the Ivy League and total disgrace, Carnegie Hall and being, as Amy Chua would say, a loser. Philip Roth has his hero put it this way in Portnoy's Complaint: What was it with these Jewish parents, what, that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood—saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little shits, little ingrates, on the other! Here we see that famous Jewish guilt, amply attested in other traditions as well: the sense of criminality that comes from failing to give your parents naches, pleasure—or in more familiar terms, to make them proud. I should say that this is very personal for me. Everything I'm talking about is very personal, because I used to be one of these kids, but this above all. For years I rode the roller coaster of grandiosity and depression, struggled to separate myself from the need for my father's

approval. (He was both an immigrant and an Ivy League professor, a double whammy.) Even getting a job at Yale turned out to be, like every achievement, no more than a temporary salve. Within a few months, he was asking me when I was going to get my dissertation published. But he wasn't the real problem anymore, and his death, a decade later, made very little difference. The real problem was, as one of my students has put it, "the Frankenstein's monster of ambition," the insatiable need to be "the best." Time and again I'd thought I'd finally gotten over it, and time and again I would relapse. It was only when I read The Drama of the Gifted Child in the course of researching this book—I was already forty-eight, with half of my adulthood gone—that I was finally able to find relief. Actually, it was only when I read The Drama of the Gifted Child directly after Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. (Thank you, Amy Chua.) Tiger Mother felt like reliving a childhood trauma; The Drama of the Gifted Child felt like going through the therapy to cure it. Both show, from opposite directions but in terms that are equally stark, what it was that I'd grown up with. Something broke in me, or rather, something broke loose. I suddenly felt—not only saw, as I had for many years, but felt— that I was missing my life. I was missing my chance to be happy, missing my chance to be free. I was also missing something else: the joy that comes when you stop feeling threatened by other people's accomplishments and let yourself be open to the beauty that they bring into the world. For that is one of the greatest curses of the high-achieving mentality: the envy that it forces on you—the desperation, not simply to be loved, but to be loved, as Auden says, alone. Milton, in Paradise Lost, has Satan put it like this—Satan, who is not a beastlike creature in the poem, but the brightest of the angels, the first in his class, fallen, precisely, from excess ambition. He has arrived in Eden to destroy the happiness of Adam and Eve, and looking around himself, he thinks: the more I see Pleasures about me, so much more I feel Torment within me, as from the hateful siege Of contraries; all good to me becomes

Bane, and in Heav'n much worse would be my state. That's how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don't belong to you. Or as Satan puts it more succinctly elsewhere in the poem, "myself am Hell." But now I'd finally had enough. I wasn't going to be guilty anymore. I wasn't going to punish myself by looking for reasons to be miserable. I wasn't going to feel bad about feeling good. I had spent enough time in Hell. But it had taken more than thirty years to reach that point. The self that forms in response to parental expectations is, in Miller's terms, a "false self." Because the child's feelings and desires are not validated or acknowledged, she learns to ignore them and eventually loses the capacity to recognize them. Such parents, Miller writes, cannot tolerate a child who is "sad, needy, angry, furious"—a dark foreshadowing of that contemporary impulse to shield your kids, as Orenstein put it, "from pain or failure or sadness." The result is that affable, competent, adult-oriented personality that today's young high achievers are so famous for. Rather than developing an inner self with its own goals and values, they become dependent, for their sense of who they are, on authority figures and the tokens of approval they distribute. Levine's patients, she says, will often speak of themselves the way you'd expect of a six-year-old, in terms of an inventory of superficial characteristics. Instead of "I can run fast, my eyes are brown, and I hate broccoli," it's "I'm in three honors classes" or "my butt is way too big." If kids today have so much trouble locating their passion or finding their purpose, that really shouldn't be a cause for wonder. But students, teachers have told me, never think of themselves as other-directed, just as parents never see themselves as that parent. When I suggested, at an event at Harvard, that college students need to keep an open mind about their decisions, one young woman replied, "We already made our decisions back in middle school, when we decided to be the kind of high achievers who get into Harvard." Leaving aside the question of whether you want to live forever with the decisions you made

in seventh grade—or to put it another way, to let a seventh grader tell you how to live—one has to ask, in that context, just what "we" decided means. Beyond the junior careerism, the directionless ambition, the risk aversion, and the Hobbesian competitiveness, the system cultivates a monumental cynicism. Whatever the motives out of which they were established, the old WASP admissions criteria actually meant something. Athletics were thought to build character—courage and selflessness and team spirit. The arts embodied an ideal of culture. Service was designed to foster a public-minded ethos in our future leaders. Leadership itself was understood to be a form of duty. Now it's all become a kind of rain dance that is handed down from generation to generation, an empty set of rituals known only to propitiate the gods. Kids do them because they know that they're supposed to, not because they, or anybody else, actually believes in them. If students were told that they needed to stand on their heads to get into Harvard, they would do so as eagerly, as diligently, as skillfully, and as thoughtlessly as they do everything else. The process takes activities that used to be ends in themselves and reduces them to means. No wonder they have also lost their souls: athletics means no more now than physical training; music means technical proficiency; service means charity; leadership means climbing to the top. Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify. An article in the New York Times described the emergence of consulting companies devoted to producing essay- ready summers. What strikes one is the superficiality of the activities involved: a month traveling around Italy studying the Renaissance; three weeks in a creative writing program; two weeks as a counselor in a theater program; "a whole day" with a band of renegade artists. A whole day! "I love that and I got to put it on my application." (The artists were not quoted as to their impressions of the encounter, though I'm sure that they were glad to be of help.) The principal purpose of private admissions counselors, as Mitchell L. Stevens explains in Creating a Class, is to show students how to package themselves for consumption

by admissions offices: which ultimately means, to create a self—or at least, the illusion of a self—that is capable of being packaged. If students have come to be cynics about education itself; if they see it, as a Deerfield Academy graduate wrote me, as "not far from game theory, an algorithm to be cracked in order to get to the next level"; if they believe that "people don't go to school to learn," in the words of one of the students in "Doing School"; if cheating has become endemic, and cheating scandals routine; then young people are only showing us what very good students they are, because they have learned the lessons we are teaching them. Why should it surprise us that they get to college having no idea why they're there, or that they run aground when called upon to make decisions for themselves, or that they prove to be such easy marks for recruiters selling answers? We mandate "activities," so we reward joiners. We insist on "leadership," so we reward climbers. We value those who give us what we want, so we reward manipulators. We punish those who will not play the game. We are robbing children of their childhood and teenagers of their adolescence. We have engineered a vast regimentation of youth. I know that there are lots of parents, even in the upper middle class, who don't conform to the Amy Chua model. Quite a few have said to me, essentially, I know better but I do it anyway. Just as there are many college students caught between conformity and courage, so are many parents struggling to do their best within a system that has lost its mind. But we need to do more than throw up our hands. We cannot continue to go with the flow, however powerful the current is. If we want our kids to turn out differently, we have to raise them differently.

Four The Institutions Fortunately, our colleges and universities are fully cognizant of the problems I have been delineating and take concerted action to address them. Curricula are designed to give coherence to the educational experience and to challenge students to develop a strong degree of moral awareness. Professors, deeply involved with the enterprise of undergraduate instruction, are committed to their students' intellectual growth and insist on maintaining the highest standards of academic rigor. Career services keep themselves informed about the broad range of postgraduate options and make a point of steering students away from conventional choices. A policy of noncooperation with U.S. News has taken hold, depriving the magazine of the data requisite to calculate its rankings. Rather than squandering money on luxurious amenities and exorbitant administrative salaries, schools have rededicated themselves to their core missions of teaching and the liberal arts. I'm kidding, of course. None of this is happening, and none of it will happen without a fundamental change in the culture of higher education. Schools do little or nothing to wake students up from the values and habits they bring with them from high school—give little evidence, indeed, of recognizing there's a problem—which is why the undergraduate experience often ends up being nothing but more of the same. Kids are basically handed a course catalogue and told to figure it

out for themselves. Yes, there are advisors, but they mainly serve to help students navigate the arcana of curricular requirements, as well as to usher them toward the counseling center if (I am tempted to say, when) the need occurs. Everything else is taken for granted, including the questions that might naturally be thought to arise in the course of forming an adult self and of undertaking the education that ought to assist one to do it. Universities, writes Harry R. Lewis, the former Harvard dean, "have forgotten their larger educational role for college students": to help them figure out who they are and what their purpose in the world should be. Schools, in fact, "are having a hard time making the case that the education they offer is about anything in particular"—or as he puts it more bluntly, "Harvard no longer knows what a good education is." Curricula consist of long series of unrelated courses; distributional requirements follow the cease-fire lines of interdepartmental skirmishes. "There is no vision," writes Allan Bloom, "nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is." The problem is an old one, for its origins lie in the divided nature of American higher education itself. The American university inherits the missions of two very different institutions: the English college and the German research university. The first pattern prevailed before the Civil War. Curricula centered on the classics, and the purpose of education was understood to be the formation of character. With the emergence of a modern industrial society in the last decades of the nineteenth century, that kind of pedagogy was felt to be increasingly obsolete. Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 as the first American university on the German model: a factory of knowledge that would focus in particular on the natural and social sciences, the disciplines essential to the new economy and the world to which it was giving rise. Other universities followed—the University of Chicago in 1890, Stanford in 1891—while existing institutions retooled themselves along the new lines. Soon the full structure of graduate research and education began to emerge: departments organized by discipline, national professional associations, peer-reviewed journals, publish-or-perish, the ladder of professorial ranks, tenure, dissertations, PhDs. At the same time, and for the same reasons, Harvard was taking the

lead in supplanting the old undergraduate curriculum with a system of electives and, eventually, of majors. College was now seen as preparation for professional life, the initial stage of specialization. But the old ideal of the liberal arts persisted, the notion that college should also speak to "the whole man": the concerns proper to an individual, not as a doctor or lawyer or scientist or manager, but as a human being—questions of purpose and value, as addressed above all, as their name implies, by the humanities. The years between the world wars saw a backlash against specialization, with schools developing a variety of "general education" curricula—most famously, the Great Books programs at Columbia and Chicago. The very fact that we still have majors at all in this country represents a compromise between the ideals of depth and breadth—not majors as opposed to nothing, but majors as opposed to nothing but. When someone studies chemistry, say, in England or France or just about anywhere else in the world, that is the only thing they study. Great Books curricula came to grief in the 1960s and '70s, along with requirements in general. The Western classics were vilified as Eurocentric, mandatory courses as paternalistic. Brown, the "hot" college when I was graduating from high school in 1981, was famous for having done away with structure almost altogether. If the core curriculum has survived at Columbia, my alma mater, that is mainly, at this point, a matter of branding—something to distinguish the college's product from the competition's. What's left at most schools, for structure and breadth, are distribution requirements, a Chinese menu of columns A through C or D or F ("quantitative reasoning," "languages and literatures," "world cultures," and suchlike blandeurs) that offers students no coherence and often leaves them, as Bloom put it, "poking around for courses to take . . . just filling up their college years." The recent trend toward double majors can be seen, in part, as a tacit revolt against the formlessness of an elective system that can't remember why it exists. Specialization is the only part of the curriculum that makes sense to students anymore, so they might as well give themselves as much of it as they can.

But the ultimate problem lies deeper than cultural fashion or bureaucratic confusion. The foundational compromise of modern American higher education—the idea of housing a liberal arts college within a research university—has proved to be untenable. Because a single faculty exists for both, and because professors are trained and rewarded for research, the values of the university have inexorably won out over those of the college. The process took decades to unfold. For many years, at many schools, it was still possible to join the faculty without a PhD and to win tenure without much of a publication record. But professional norms have slowly tightened their grip. The boom in federal funding after Sputnik swung the balance of institutional power decisively toward research. The collapse of the academic job market in the 1970s—the famous PhD glut, which never went away—meant schools could ratchet up their expectations for scholarly productivity. As knowledge is elaborated, research becomes ever more specialized. And because professors can teach what they want—which usually means their little square inch of the field, their thesis, their book— fragmentation and specialization have overtaken the undergraduate curriculum. Nothing adds up because nothing is designed to add up. Professors don't care because they have no incentive to care. They want to do their research; they want to teach their research; and they don't want to have to think about anything else. The courses offered, Lewis says, do not bear any necessary relation to what students want or need to know. Efforts to look at the bigger picture—the periodic curricular reviews that faculty committees are convened to undertake—generally run aground on a mixture of territorialism, indifference, and simple incapacity. "We are just not accustomed to thinking about education in general terms," said Louis Menand, who cochaired a notably unsuccessful one at Harvard recently. "It's not our specialty." Our leading colleges and universities pride themselves on their refusal to offer the kinds of vocational majors that most students opt for at most other schools, subjects like communications, business, education, and nursing, but everything they teach is vocational now, because of the spirit in which they teach it. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in

technocratic terms. Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean at this point is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. No more than in high school are students equipped to address the larger questions of meaning and purpose, about their education and their lives, that come so inevitably in young adulthood. Religious colleges, quite frankly—even obscure, regional schools that no one's ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect. What an indictment that is, of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word, than do those institutions. But all is not lost. Elite schools still dimly recollect their responsibility to provide a general education, to teach the whole person, to be something more than expensive vocational schools. So when kids get to college, they hear a speech or two that urges them to ask the big questions. And when they graduate, they hear another speech or two that urges them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to answer the little questions: specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. At least those classes are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. At Harvard, Ross Douthat writes, academics were the easy part, "because almost no one seemed to be pushing back." There are exceptions, of course, and norms differ among institutions, but professors and students have largely entered into, in the words of one observer, a "mutual nonaggression pact." Students want to do as little as possible. Professors are rewarded for research, especially at elite schools, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. To the extent that teaching matters at all for professional advancement, assessments are based almost entirely on student evaluations, which

notoriously correlate with grades. For adjuncts and other people off the tenure track, an ever-larger share of teaching staffs, evaluations matter very much indeed. The answer, all around, is higher marks for shoddier work. Grade inflation, and complaints about grade inflation, are an old story—as old as grades themselves, according to Lewis. Still, even if GPAs have been rising for more than a century, it makes a difference where they are. In 1960, the average GPA at private universities was about a 2.5. In 1990, it was about a 3.1. In 2007, it was 3.3, and at highly selective private schools, 3.43. Given the rate at which the numbers have been rising, the last figure is probably over 3.5 by now. The closer the curve gets squeezed to the ceiling, the harder it is to make distinctions and the less incentive students have to do their best. In 1940, 15 percent of grades fell within the A range; in 2008, the number was almost 45 percent. But there are always students who don't do the work, or who are taking a class outside their field (for fun, or to fulfill a requirement), or who are not up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). Grades are usually lower for freshmen, as well. At elite schools, at this point, if an upperclassman does the work, it is almost impossible to give them less than a B-plus, and even, increasingly, an A-minus. But never mind the grades; it's even hard to give your students honest feedback. Kids who have been raised under a regimen of positive reinforcement, and whose self-esteem depends on perfection, are not well equipped to handle criticism. Besides, they have better things to do than hit the books. At a big, public party school—let's call it the University of Southern Football—that probably means beer and television. At elite colleges, it means those all-consuming extracurricular activities. Extracurriculars certainly have value: they're fun; they're social, which studying is not (at least, not if you do it right); they enable students to express and develop abilities that classes ignore; and they're good for making contacts and testing out vocational options. They also organize the campus social scene. But given kids' addiction to keeping busy, their fear of ever missing out on anything, they tend to expand to fill the available space. The problem is, the more you do, the less you do well and the less well you do everything. A former student wrote an essay called "The Suckage

Factor" as part of a packet for incoming freshmen. The suckage factor is a measure of how badly you suck at everything because you're trying to do too much. The figure is reached by dividing the number of hours in a day by the amount of time you spend on academics and activities: Looking back on my first year, I can perform this calculation retroactively: as it turns out, I was allotting myself six minutes to read Homer's Odyssey and five minutes to scale Harkness tower for carillon practice, provided I slept two hours a night and ate lunch every second day. . . . Before long, I was pulling regular all-nighters in the library, but, paradoxically, not finishing my homework; I was running madly from meeting to rehearsal, but was never on time; I was thrashing about like a banshee in a whirlpool, and I was barely scraping by. The only way the system can work is for everyone, including professors, to lower their expectations. Elite students do indeed work incredibly hard, when you add it all up, and they're still as bright as ever, but that doesn't mean that the work they produce is necessarily up to the same standard. The reductio ad absurdum of the situation is embodied by the academic career of the actor James Franco, who has made a hobby of collecting graduate programs. At one point, Franco was enrolled at Columbia for writing, NYU for filmmaking, Warren Wilson for poetry, and Brooklyn College for fiction—all while maintaining a busy professional schedule. After graduating from Columbia, he started a master's in art at the Rhode Island School of Design and a PhD in English at Yale (yes, my old department). Franco, who went to Palo Alto High School, is a caricature of today's young high achievers. In college at UCLA, he was once allowed to register for sixty-two credit hours, the usual limit being nineteen. How can anybody be so brilliant, so talented, so energetic? They can't; they aren't: not him, not anyone. Getting into an elite college is harder than ever. But once you're in, the way things work today, all you need to do, to a significant extent, is just show up.

Yet there is also something operating here that runs much deeper than professorial laissez-faire or undergraduate angle-playing. The last thirty years or so has seen a revolution in the way that colleges think about their students. The decades after World War II had been a golden age for higher education. From 1949 to 1979, the number of students more than quadrupled, the number of faculty nearly tripled, and institutions were established at a rate of almost one a week. But as the baby boom aged out of college in the 1980s, schools were forced to scramble for students even while governments began to cut funding. Meanwhile, policy makers had initiated an effort to transform higher education into a consumer market by funneling money to students (through grants and loans) rather than to institutions. The effort worked. Higher education increasingly resembles any other business now. 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. Science is king, but not just any science; basic research is suffering, too. The holy grail is technology transfer: scientific investigation, often sponsored directly by corporations, that is capable of being parlayed into profit. (So greedy have schools become in the pursuit of short-term revenue that even companies they seek to partner with have started to complain.) Continuous expansion is regarded as essential. New buildings, new research centers, new campuses around the world. NYU in Abu Dhabi, Yale in Singapore, Columbia in China, Turkey, Brazil: the point is to build the brand, capture market share, and tap the emerging sources of global wealth. The "metric" everybody pays attention to, in the brave new world of academic management, is good old U.S. News. In the spirit of the SATs, in fact, we might propose the following analogy. U.S. News rank : schools : : SAT score : students. Each is dubious as a measure of academic excellence and meaningless as a standard of self-worth, but

both have consequences serious enough to send their subjects into a state of panic. Colleges, in other words, are now being terrorized by the same sort of numerical regime they have long inflicted on high school students. Yet if kids spend a lot of time (and their parents, a lot of money) trying to juice up their numbers, schools do far worse. "Selectivity" is a factor in the rankings, so colleges aggressively recruit more applicants, even though they know a lot of them have no chance of admission. Reputation is a factor, so schools sometimes lowball rivals in the survey that they all fill out. Average SAT scores are a factor, so institutions have been shifting their financial aid awards from need to merit—and since SAT scores correlate closely with family wealth, that means more money to kids who don't need it and less to those who do. And when all else fails, colleges, like students, simply cheat (by misreporting data), as has recently come out at Emory, Bucknell, Claremont McKenna, and other schools. But the worst effect of the commercialization of higher education is the way that it has changed how institutions see their students. Now they think of them as "customers," people to be pandered to instead of challenged. You can fairly smell it on the campuses, where the students are so unmistakably in charge. Grade inflation, which shot up during the 1960s and early '70s, was largely flat from 1975 to 1990, but it has once again been on the rise since then. Not only do students now feel that they're paying for A's, but graduation rates are yet another consideration for U.S. News, so schools don't dare to flunk kids out. The customer- service mentality is also responsible for the profusion of swanky new dorms, gyms, and student centers—a building boom that, like the other ones that happened in the 1990s and early 2000s, was financed by a mountain of debt, and that has been a major factor in tuition growth. Colleges now sell themselves to kids in terms of what they can give them, not what they plan to expect of them. "With no larger educational ideals to shape the undergraduate experience," Lewis says, "decisions affecting students are calculated to satisfy their immediate demands." Instead of humanities, students are getting amenities. 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. I have certainly known students who feel they got a great education in college. But they always say some version of "the opportunities are there if you want to pursue them." In other words, you have to ask—or really, you have to insist. As Douthat wrote of his alma mater, "Harvard remains one of the best places on earth to educate oneself," but it "will not actively educate you, will not guide or shape or even push back in any significant way." In the words of Mark Edmundson, a professor at UVa, "To get an education, you're probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you'll probably have to push.)" Think about that: you have to fight for what you came for, for what you're paying for. You can get it, but only if you insist on it. Imagine a hospital that operated on such a basis, or a grocery store. It's the kids who hope to get an education, not the ones who want to shirk the job, who find themselves confronting an inimical environment. More common, in my experience, than the intellectually serious student who felt fulfilled by their time in college is the one who left feeling cheated, wondering what it all added up to and what had happened to the sense of adventure with which they had entered four years earlier. I was often approached, during my years at Yale, by just that kind of kid: ardent, curious, independent—looking to college for meaning, not skills; looking

to the world for possibility, not security. What they told me, invariably, was that they felt abandoned by their institution, that the education they were being offered had nothing to say to them and that they had no one to help them figure out how to live a life commensurate with their aspirations. These are the students that colleges should prize most highly, yet they are the ones that they're failing most badly. The fact is that elite schools have strong incentives not to produce too many seekers and thinkers, too many poets, teachers, ministers, public- interest lawyers, nonprofit workers, or even professors—too much selflessness, creativity, intellectuality, or idealism. The most prestigious institutions do provide an abundance of academic, artistic, and moral opportunities, if only because they have the financial means to do so. A former student who started a creative writing program for inner-city children after college wrote me a long, impassioned letter about the ways that Yale provided her the resources to find and follow her path. But at the same time, colleges and universities do nothing to suggest that some ways of using your education are better than others. They do nothing, in other words, to challenge the values of a society that equates virtue, dignity, and happiness with material success. Nor do they do much to help kids find their way to alternative careers. On the contrary: I've been told again and again, at school after school, that career service offices have little or nothing to say to students who are interested in something other than the big four of law, medicine, finance, and consulting. At the recruitment fairs, the last two dominate the field. And some schools go even further. Stanford offers companies special access to its students for a fee of ten thousand dollars—and it is hard to believe that Stanford is the only one. Selling your students to the highest bidder: it doesn't get more cynical than that. But though the process isn't often that direct, that's basically the way the system works. As a friend of mine, a third-generation Yalie, once remarked, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. David Foster Wallace (Amherst '85), has a character put it like this: The college itself turned out to have a lot of moral hypocrisy about it, e.g., congratulating itself on its diversity and the leftist piety of

its politics while in reality going about the business of preparing elite kids to enter elite professions and make a great deal of money, thus increasing the pool of prosperous alumni donors. Of course colleges do nothing to discourage students from pursuing lucrative careers, no matter how personally unfulfilling or socially destructive. Of course they run a system that's designed to funnel students in exactly that direction. When James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, began the move toward meritocracy in the 1930s, he wanted to attract no more than a small minority of "remarkable talents"—the lion's share of spaces being still reserved for future businessmen, that is, donors. Now schools can have it both ways: the meritocrats are the future donors, as long as you select and train them right. Hence the increasing proportion of international students at elite colleges, as the scales of global economic power shift. The particular mix at places like Yale, I've been told, represents a form of geostrategic calculus. Kids from Western Europe are out; those from the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and other rising economies are in, the better to line up the major gifts a generation hence. As for the smattering of future artists and do-gooders, they're there to balance the moral books (as well as furnish a few alumni to brag about), not because of any strong commitment to beauty or justice. For the most selective colleges, the system is working very well indeed. Application numbers continue to swell; endowments are robust; administrative salaries have jumped by leaps and bounds in recent years; tuition hikes bring ritual complaints but no decline in business. Whether it is working for anyone else is a different question. One of the saddest things for me in all of this is listening to kids in high school, or those who've just arrived at college, express their hopes for their undergraduate experience and knowing how likely they are to be disappointed. For despite it all, the romance of college remains: the dream, as Bloom puts it, of having an adventure with yourself. Beneath the cynicism that students feel they are forced to adopt, beneath their pose of placid competence, the longings of youth remain. There is an intense hunger among today's students, my travels in the last few years have shown me, for what college ought to be providing but is not: for a

larger sense of purpose and direction; for an experience at school that speaks to them as human beings, not bundles of aptitudes; for guidance in addressing the important questions of life; for simple permission to think about these things and a vocabulary with which to do so. It is to the ways that they can start to satisfy that hunger that I now turn.