Here’s a silly argument I made the other day. It has since fallen ill with virality, the best/worst fate that can befall a social media post.
Before I get to the FAQs (frequently asked questions), FVOs (frequently voiced objections), and FRCBTWRVATTAUSSMDs (frequently repeated critiques, both those with real validity and those that are ultimately shallow social media dunks), let me give you the original argument:
Now, rather than belabor the specifics (can you specify the colleges? did you account for international students? are you aware of all the transatlantic differences? and hey dummy, isn’t this just a roundabout way of saying “Ivy League”?) I want to zoom out.
Education does many things. It animates old ideas. It stimulates new ones. It widens the apertures of the mind. It allows one to feel smart while watching Jeopardy!
And, skipping way down the list, it enables snap judgments based on your degree.
I do not think snap judgments are particularly noble, and I do not advise anyone to live life by snap judgments alone. But they happen. And, given the limitations of the human attention span, they probably always will. I plead not for an end to snap judgments, but merely for a recalibration of them, to reflect the unwieldy scope of the U.S. higher education system.
My home country is a charming and ungovernable sprawl of 340 million people, as big as five or ten of our “peer nations” combined. But our finest colleges are not proportionally bigger. Some are quite puny, just 2000 students or fewer, and any dramatic growth would change (and hence spoil) their wonderful character.
As a result, our system is hard to wrap your mind around. It’s like someone is reading you a grocery list, and you’re trying to commit it to memory, but the items just keep piling up, until you rue your choice not to start with pen and paper, because to memorize this whole list would take a real savant, or better yet, a top-level graduate from one of the many colleges whose names you have just heard and already forgotten.
The same isn’t true in Canada (population: similar to California) or Australia (population: similar to Texas) or even the U.K. (population: similar to California + Texas). In such countries, learning the top colleges by reputation doesn’t take much brain space. Here, it’s practically a college education unto itself.
So the point of the cartoon is not that we should draw the line precisely here (sorry, Penn; congrats, Northeastern!) and then treat that line as something deep and real.
The point is that the U.S. higher education is, like so much in my homeland, a glorious mess. The point is that we must eradicate the endemic disease I call “US News and World Report brain,” with its symptomatic effort to give power rankings to colleges as if they were football teams. (In reality, they are football teams with schools attached!)
If you want to draw crude lines, be my guest. But remember how crude they are. And yes, it’s silly to lump together 15 colleges as “indistinguishably super fancy.” It’s just that trying to separate them is even sillier.
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