NEW YORK TIMES: Bruni argues that the first place some of us go — not to college generally but to a particular college — has less impact on identity, success and happiness than many suppose. What he calls the “industrialization of the college admission process” in recent decades amounts to a speedup abetted by expensive personal coaches, proliferating online applications and the inevitable U.S. News & World Report rankings. He admits to “bashing” the last of these familiar and easy targets. “I’ll proceed to bash,” he explains, “because I believe passionately that the college experience can’t be reduced in this fashion.”
This is actually [Frank] Bruni’s point: that the best education is less a matter of getting into the best school than of making the best of wherever you go. His most vivid examples and insights emerge from sensitive conversations with parents, applicants, guidance counselors, admissions officers — and especially recent graduates, thriving 20-somethings who now feel lucky to have been rejected by their preferred schools. Some who ended up far afield, geographically or demographically, discovered the educational and personal value of exceeding their comfort zones. Such was the case for Bruni himself, who, after growing up in the suburbs of Connecticut and New York, turned down his dream school, Yale, to accept a scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill…
Kevin Carey urges nearly identical advice not on parents and students but on colleges and universities, which he believes have actively resisted transformation by information technology in order to maximize profit and preserve centuries-old privileges. An education wonk at the New America Foundation, with degrees (Bruni would want you to know) from Binghamton and Ohio State, Carey elegantly blends policy analysis, reportage and (briefly) memoir into a hard-charging indictment of the eggheads and ivory towers many Americans love to hate. While Bruni extols all the other places you could go, Carey believes that the time is nearly at hand when students won’t need to go anywhere to learn everywhere… (more)
