"Today's College Students leaning more? "No...just exhausted"

I was reading "Forbes FYI" (Fall 2002), a story that asks just how good today's Freshman college applicant really is...

Apparently the author is a Brown grad circa 1970--who takes a very jaundiced view of today's competition for prestige in higher ed, and the lockstep supplicants, HS Grads, their parents, and the university marketing machine itself--who takes the bold step of submitting his old app records to the addmissions machine of a couple of top universities (including today's Bron)...and is rejected!


He reminds us tha getting into college isn't difficult. Few institutions are priveleged enough to even discriminate against applicants: only 20 to 30% reject them. Most four year schools do not.

Mike Goldberger, admissions director at Brown "says applicants there take 'incredibly difficult course loads that often include six and sometimes seven major subjects per year.' ***Do they learn more? Goldberger says 'No, they're just more exhausted.' Northwestern's [associate provost of enrollment Rebecca] Dixon was more blunt" 'They're more grade grubbing, they know more than we know, but they think less.*** They are less likely to take risks. They are spending too much time trying to qualify and not enough time learning. But we force them into it.'" [Emphasis ***mine.]

I bumped into this revealing article a day after another revealing encounter, this time with two senior's from the University of Rochester, NY--one of America's many Ivy League suitors--vacationing in Colorado. During the gondola ride, a young woman was chatting up a young man and fellow student, comparing notes on how much they could stand to read for comprehension, and how hard and time consuming it was to do. I thought they were discussing a foreign languagel Instead they were discussing Soren Kierkegaard--someone I've read and studied (partly to keep up with a girlfriend's interests).

Kierkegaard was part of the assigned reading in a seminar course in Religious Theory, a required for Religious Studies majors, which she was. SK is the uber-Protestant whose thought and titles humorously haunt early Woody Allen: "Sickness Unto Death," "Fear and Trembling." (I did not mention that there is evidence that suicide among Danes like SK may well be genetically loaded!)

We chatted about William James--she especially liked him and much of the Pragmatist's though on religion in general. Then I asked if she had dipped into last year's National Book Award winning title on this very subject, "The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America" by Louis Menand? She said "no" to my surprise--she hadn't even heard of it! (It's a lively biography of James, Charles Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey, taking its launching point from a brief-lived commonality, a post-Civil War conversational club in 1872.)

I, too, like (although I also hate) James' thought (it's a copout), and enjoy the Pragmatists' struggles to formulate meaningful standards for Truth and action from the unbelievably tragic loss that was the American Civil War; but although these two were exposed to high-level ideas, I gained no sense that they had chewed them over yet or made them their own.

Perhaps--as we know well here--in the fullness of time. Otherwise, I was struck by how the above article mirrored my brief encounter just before. And I thought I'd share it.

--Orson