15 years ago, I spent a day as a guest writer at St. Paul's. It was fun. The students were extremely smart and remarkably polite. My most vivid memory is of my in-class conversation with a young woman who'd always gone to boarding schools. From her earliest years, she'd spent more than 2/3rds of her life living away from her parents. And I'm the reservation Indian kid who grew up with appx 95% of his living blood relatives and 99% of his dead ancestors' graves on the same 160,000 square acres of land.
The thought that just passed through my mind: "I'm extremely polite to service workers because I was a service worker in my teens and twenties. The St. Paul's politeness is not like that."
I think they're good people. Are they good elites? Not sure. Then again, who has been? Does such a thing even exist, or only good-by-comparison-to-other-much-more-atrocious-elites?
Reading these comments, I start thinking about elites who made it out, pushed themselves to see beyond what their upbringing and genetics infused within them, and I think of Siddhartha and St. Francis of Assisi. It can be done, but you must be radical.
There are many people who live a good life and do good things. Some are elite. More are not. I think we need to put the word away when it comes to these individuals who get a massive leg up in society. Being an elite athlete is one thing. Elite media, elite schools, those social constructs - the term serves only those who create and inhabit the hierarchies. Anachronistic and unhelpful in terms of broader society. Be good. Do the next right thing. Live a good life. Those are the the real elites in the game of life. You'll know them when you meet them. The rest is luxury branding
Yes - many of these kids would know more about Drake than about their own grandfather. The price many of these kids pay for this kind of education - lack of love, lack of connection, lack of purpose other than scrambling up the ladder of individual achievement. Also - meritocracy is a bit of a red herring. These kids are every bit as privileged as the privileged kids who went before them - the codes are different. The problem now is that they think they earned and deserve every bit of their privilege. They give only lip service to the country or people around them who got them there. There is no sense of civic obligation of the old sort (ie divorced from politics). Plenty of activists, sure, but fewer humble servants who will do the quiet work in their community year after year. More materialistic and individualistic now.
You should read the book. It's really fascinating, and will probably leave you less judgmental of the kids. They're actually quite appealing, and not nearly as disconnected as you're suggesting. The problem (as Khan sees it, I think, and certainly I do) isn't that they have bad character. In fact by and large they seem to have quite good character, and are not at all dismissive of the people around them who have supported them. The problem is that they're too blind to the class aspects of their success, and to the ways that meritocracy as a framework or ideology is missing some important elements of how things actually shake out in America.
These schools build what I would call "behavioral capital": Politeness, finesse, grace, self-control, etc. Public education could do more of the same, although they will never match the sophistication of the expensive private school. Overworked middle class nuclear families can't do that either, work eats into social life. So we end up with a society of deteriorating behavioral capital in the wider population, and a widening distance between the elites and the middle class. Maybe we should try to systematically increase all types of capital in a society, in a spirit of true capitalism ;)
That's a really good point. I think one mistake that is often made, which Khan mostly avoids, is wanting to believe that what the elite are learning/getting/absorbing is tainted in some fashion. But I'm more in line with your perspective. What they're getting is quite good. The problem is that not enough of us are getting it. We should be focused on how to create more contexts for everyone where they can nourished and nurtured in a similar way.
As someone who has hired extensively among university graduates, I would say that SAT scores are a better gage than the university, but if you want a bunch of people with high test scores, the easiest place to recruit are the Ivies, Chicago, MIT and Stanford, and maybe Georgetown. Yes, a kid with high scores who studied engineering at University of Illinois is just as good, but I will need to sift through thousands of resumes to get to his, whereas, if I go to University of Chicago, they are ALL going to have high test scores.
I can tell you that I have suffered with slow kids whose parents pulled strings to get them hired, and it was unbearable. For many kinds of work, someone must be able to solve problems, and have at least a working knowledge of calculus, and ideally linear algebra. I have worked with not so bright young people with engineering degrees, and I would rather have an English major from Yale who get a high SAT math score. They learn faster and work harder.
The best part of these "elite" graduates is that no matter what you ask of them, they will get it done. They will work though the night, call classmates to figure things out, and they often will just randomly do extra work to impress you. The graduates from those schools worked hard to get there, and it shows. I personally think it is worth recruiting from those elite schools. I have never suffered an analyst from such schools who is unable to learn, or unwilling to work.
Now, let me tell you what I see all the time from nepotism hires: refusal to complete a tasks, inability to learn, unwillingness to work, incessant complaining, and overall a lack of maturity. If I had a perfect candidate, it would be a veteran graduate of an elite university, followed by Asian immigrants. The former has the poise , confidence and maturity while the latter are the smartest people on earth. What I never will hire are the middle class nothings who went to the local school because "the city is cool." Those perpetual children are unbearable. I would never interview anyone with less than a 700 on the SAT math, unless some big shot is forcing me to hire his idiot child who could not find a job anywhere on her own.
Al-Gharbi has a great passage on this in his Compact essay: "the truth is that elite institutions like Columbia primarily select for highly conscientious and capable conformists. If you are sufficiently talented and prolific, the conformity expectations can be slackened slightly (a win-win that helps other conformists understand themselves and the institution as more “edgy” than they really are); and if you are sufficiently wealthy, deficits in capability or conscientiousness can be overlooked or worked around. But the modal student is not an idiosyncratic genius or a billionaire kid who failed his way to the top."
These elite degrees are so immensely valuable as signaling mechanisms precisely for this reason. If you hire a kid who did well at one of these schools, you pretty much know that they're bright, able to learn, and not just willing but eager to work their asses off for your approval. At every level they're selecting for ideal employees. Not necessarily genius innovators or outside the box thinkers, but that's not what most employers need most of the time anyway, and there probably isn't a great way to reliably select for those kinds of people anyway.
The coda to this, in my case, is that I went to Yale with the assist of legacy admissions, and for many years was a terribly inconsistent but intermittently quite creative employee. You would have hated me as an employee. It's taken me about 20 years of rather painful struggle to get even close to the level of performance that most of my classmates had from the get-go. I'm decent now, and fortunately still pretty creative -- I'm now in the talented and prolific but non-conformist bucket that Al-Gharbi mentions -- but it's been a long road, and I have long been acutely aware of the ways in which I've tended to underperform relative to my cohort.
A degree from an "elite" university in the United States doesn't do much for you in an academic sense, or even a "signaling" one. You're much better off if you study intensely under instructors at Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore and then proceed to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. This was once the almost-always-taken path to respect, if not the complete cultural legitimacy (postwar, for example, McCloy, Wilbur, even Reuben Brower, master of Adams House for some time).
Sure. Or any other university that has the faculty, course list (and let's be realistic here), the imprimatur you want. What I'm saying is that the quality of your education depends on the people you choose to learn from and how willing you are to apply what they try to teach you to your particular circumstances in life.
I know that nowadays small liberal arts colleges are, at best, considered sets for Donna Tartt novels and not the powerhouses they should be regarded as for generating leaders and important artists. This is backwards thought set on its ass and tilted sideways. Those institutions continue to exist because they let kids in, smack them into some semblance of intellectual shape, and release them into a world that needs them more than ever.
What they are great at is as preparatory schools. My own college (Amherst) isn't regarded as significant because someone specifically because particular people went there and immediately made a world-changing mark. The particular significance of colleges like Amherst is that they instill reverence for service, most of all, and of course intellectual curiosity.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I had a good undergraduate education, but friends of mine who went to small liberal arts education often describe a more intensive intellectual experience than what I had.
Also, fwiw, I think the data is pretty clear that elite schooling doesn't matter than much in terms of career outcomes, with the exception of a small number of professions that place an extra high emphasis on pedigree. So that kind of super elite pedigree, if it means anything, is maybe more about a kind of intangible status that you can lord over your neighbors than anything else.
absolutely fascinating exploration of the book; would i be wrong to say its thesis is similar territory to ‘outliers: the story of success by malcolm gladwell… I won’t bore you by drawing out the convergences…
yeah that’s it, but covers similar territory about schooling, wealth, class; et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth; just read the wiki for a quick & dirty overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
so yes, while there may be some thematic overlap in their broader discussions of success and privilege, there are NOT any direct connection or reference between the two works however, parallel tracks I guess
What Khan describes is only a more-rarefied version of my experience at Williams College 50-odd years ago. A redoubt of the upper class was then already opening to students from suburban public schools, and even to a sliver of exceptional Black, Asian, and working-class kids. Ever since I've had an equivocal allegiance to an institution that has built a society more meritocratic but no less stratified in terms of power.
Virtue turned in upon itself may be the story of every empire during its final throes. (Thank you for a remarkable summary of a book that I must read: though it undoubtedly will make my heart hurt.)
Reminds me of Orwell's description of the upper classes in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. At first they remained showy and extravagant with their wealth. As the war progressed, they began to dress differently, act differently, blend in with the locals. And then when the war was over it was back to being flashy again.
Great essay! I didn’t attend a school like this (I was given the opportunity to and denied it out of a sense of juvenile populism) but I had a familial connection to one, (of the many up and down the Connecticut river) and this bunch of contradictions about education, hierarchy and meritocracy is something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years.
It'd be fun to Compare this to Rob Henderson's "Troubled." This skill that Kahn describes--the ability to discern how to navigate different social settings with ease--is one that Henderson never seemed to grasp. I don't say that as an elitist critique of Henderson as a person, but just that it diminishes the relevance of his social critique if he can't really understand the culture he's writing about.
One example comes to mind: Henderson asks some Stanford entrepreneurs what has been key to their business success and their response: luck. Henderson then rhetorically asks if they are going to tell their kids if they should just focus on luck as the key to their advancing in life, and as he reports, they sheepishly admit that, no, they will tell their kids to work hard. Apparently this illustrates Henderson's point about the double standard of luxury beliefs. But I think a much more likely explanation is provided here by Kahn. It's really about the ease of moving in different worlds by signalling modesty when that's called for (and when hard work and connections is table stakes in the company you keep).
There's a long history of integration efforts in schools like this, with as much focus on supporting kids once they are enrolled as there is on recruitment. Those efforts tend to focus on racial integration, and so the support tends to take an identity focus: there might be a POC success counselor to support those POC students. It makes me wonder how Kahn's idea of the culture of elitism is different from, weaves together, and interplays with race in affecting the success of these integration efforts.
What determines someone's success in internalizing this culture that Kahn describes? Is there earlier cultural priming that would allow a kid from an elite background to absorb it better than someone who didn't come from that background?
Interesting connection (and one we should pursue when I get my act together to do the Henderson episode).
Khan does touch on the racial aspect somewhat in his book, and has examples of some students of color who are and are not able to internalize the culture. He doesn't really theorize about why some can and some can't, but I guess I assume it would be a mix of nature and nurture. Surely some people are just innately better at deciphering, and adapting to, the subtle social norms around them, so that they'll get it, given sufficient exposure, even if they came from a wholly different background. Whereas others will really struggle to assimilate the norms if they weren't raised with them, and some will struggle to fit in even if they were raised with them.
I think implicit in his book is the idea that if you want kids from non-elite backgrounds to maximally benefit from exposure to elite culture, then you would want to be wary of separating them off on their own too much once they're in the elite space. So some degree of support for your racial or ethnic or religious group would be fine, but you wouldn't want, say, separate housing, or totally separate social worlds, or else you run the risk of depriving them of precisely what they need to learn in order to most successfully advance within elite hierarchies.
15 years ago, I spent a day as a guest writer at St. Paul's. It was fun. The students were extremely smart and remarkably polite. My most vivid memory is of my in-class conversation with a young woman who'd always gone to boarding schools. From her earliest years, she'd spent more than 2/3rds of her life living away from her parents. And I'm the reservation Indian kid who grew up with appx 95% of his living blood relatives and 99% of his dead ancestors' graves on the same 160,000 square acres of land.
That’s part of what’s confusing about it all. I think most of these people are genuinely appealing, not at all snooty or entitled seeming.
But also maybe quite disconnected from what life is like for various other American demographic and cultural groups.
The thought that just passed through my mind: "I'm extremely polite to service workers because I was a service worker in my teens and twenties. The St. Paul's politeness is not like that."
They knew how to be good hosts!
I think they're good people. Are they good elites? Not sure. Then again, who has been? Does such a thing even exist, or only good-by-comparison-to-other-much-more-atrocious-elites?
Reading these comments, I start thinking about elites who made it out, pushed themselves to see beyond what their upbringing and genetics infused within them, and I think of Siddhartha and St. Francis of Assisi. It can be done, but you must be radical.
I think good elitism has a short shelf life.
There are many people who live a good life and do good things. Some are elite. More are not. I think we need to put the word away when it comes to these individuals who get a massive leg up in society. Being an elite athlete is one thing. Elite media, elite schools, those social constructs - the term serves only those who create and inhabit the hierarchies. Anachronistic and unhelpful in terms of broader society. Be good. Do the next right thing. Live a good life. Those are the the real elites in the game of life. You'll know them when you meet them. The rest is luxury branding
ps huge fan of your work, Mr Alexie.
Yes - many of these kids would know more about Drake than about their own grandfather. The price many of these kids pay for this kind of education - lack of love, lack of connection, lack of purpose other than scrambling up the ladder of individual achievement. Also - meritocracy is a bit of a red herring. These kids are every bit as privileged as the privileged kids who went before them - the codes are different. The problem now is that they think they earned and deserve every bit of their privilege. They give only lip service to the country or people around them who got them there. There is no sense of civic obligation of the old sort (ie divorced from politics). Plenty of activists, sure, but fewer humble servants who will do the quiet work in their community year after year. More materialistic and individualistic now.
You should read the book. It's really fascinating, and will probably leave you less judgmental of the kids. They're actually quite appealing, and not nearly as disconnected as you're suggesting. The problem (as Khan sees it, I think, and certainly I do) isn't that they have bad character. In fact by and large they seem to have quite good character, and are not at all dismissive of the people around them who have supported them. The problem is that they're too blind to the class aspects of their success, and to the ways that meritocracy as a framework or ideology is missing some important elements of how things actually shake out in America.
These schools build what I would call "behavioral capital": Politeness, finesse, grace, self-control, etc. Public education could do more of the same, although they will never match the sophistication of the expensive private school. Overworked middle class nuclear families can't do that either, work eats into social life. So we end up with a society of deteriorating behavioral capital in the wider population, and a widening distance between the elites and the middle class. Maybe we should try to systematically increase all types of capital in a society, in a spirit of true capitalism ;)
That's a really good point. I think one mistake that is often made, which Khan mostly avoids, is wanting to believe that what the elite are learning/getting/absorbing is tainted in some fashion. But I'm more in line with your perspective. What they're getting is quite good. The problem is that not enough of us are getting it. We should be focused on how to create more contexts for everyone where they can nourished and nurtured in a similar way.
Wow. Spectacular writing
As someone who has hired extensively among university graduates, I would say that SAT scores are a better gage than the university, but if you want a bunch of people with high test scores, the easiest place to recruit are the Ivies, Chicago, MIT and Stanford, and maybe Georgetown. Yes, a kid with high scores who studied engineering at University of Illinois is just as good, but I will need to sift through thousands of resumes to get to his, whereas, if I go to University of Chicago, they are ALL going to have high test scores.
I can tell you that I have suffered with slow kids whose parents pulled strings to get them hired, and it was unbearable. For many kinds of work, someone must be able to solve problems, and have at least a working knowledge of calculus, and ideally linear algebra. I have worked with not so bright young people with engineering degrees, and I would rather have an English major from Yale who get a high SAT math score. They learn faster and work harder.
The best part of these "elite" graduates is that no matter what you ask of them, they will get it done. They will work though the night, call classmates to figure things out, and they often will just randomly do extra work to impress you. The graduates from those schools worked hard to get there, and it shows. I personally think it is worth recruiting from those elite schools. I have never suffered an analyst from such schools who is unable to learn, or unwilling to work.
Now, let me tell you what I see all the time from nepotism hires: refusal to complete a tasks, inability to learn, unwillingness to work, incessant complaining, and overall a lack of maturity. If I had a perfect candidate, it would be a veteran graduate of an elite university, followed by Asian immigrants. The former has the poise , confidence and maturity while the latter are the smartest people on earth. What I never will hire are the middle class nothings who went to the local school because "the city is cool." Those perpetual children are unbearable. I would never interview anyone with less than a 700 on the SAT math, unless some big shot is forcing me to hire his idiot child who could not find a job anywhere on her own.
Al-Gharbi has a great passage on this in his Compact essay: "the truth is that elite institutions like Columbia primarily select for highly conscientious and capable conformists. If you are sufficiently talented and prolific, the conformity expectations can be slackened slightly (a win-win that helps other conformists understand themselves and the institution as more “edgy” than they really are); and if you are sufficiently wealthy, deficits in capability or conscientiousness can be overlooked or worked around. But the modal student is not an idiosyncratic genius or a billionaire kid who failed his way to the top."
These elite degrees are so immensely valuable as signaling mechanisms precisely for this reason. If you hire a kid who did well at one of these schools, you pretty much know that they're bright, able to learn, and not just willing but eager to work their asses off for your approval. At every level they're selecting for ideal employees. Not necessarily genius innovators or outside the box thinkers, but that's not what most employers need most of the time anyway, and there probably isn't a great way to reliably select for those kinds of people anyway.
The coda to this, in my case, is that I went to Yale with the assist of legacy admissions, and for many years was a terribly inconsistent but intermittently quite creative employee. You would have hated me as an employee. It's taken me about 20 years of rather painful struggle to get even close to the level of performance that most of my classmates had from the get-go. I'm decent now, and fortunately still pretty creative -- I'm now in the talented and prolific but non-conformist bucket that Al-Gharbi mentions -- but it's been a long road, and I have long been acutely aware of the ways in which I've tended to underperform relative to my cohort.
A degree from an "elite" university in the United States doesn't do much for you in an academic sense, or even a "signaling" one. You're much better off if you study intensely under instructors at Amherst/Williams/Swarthmore and then proceed to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. This was once the almost-always-taken path to respect, if not the complete cultural legitimacy (postwar, for example, McCloy, Wilbur, even Reuben Brower, master of Adams House for some time).
You mean get the advanced degree from the Ivy?
Sure. Or any other university that has the faculty, course list (and let's be realistic here), the imprimatur you want. What I'm saying is that the quality of your education depends on the people you choose to learn from and how willing you are to apply what they try to teach you to your particular circumstances in life.
I know that nowadays small liberal arts colleges are, at best, considered sets for Donna Tartt novels and not the powerhouses they should be regarded as for generating leaders and important artists. This is backwards thought set on its ass and tilted sideways. Those institutions continue to exist because they let kids in, smack them into some semblance of intellectual shape, and release them into a world that needs them more than ever.
What they are great at is as preparatory schools. My own college (Amherst) isn't regarded as significant because someone specifically because particular people went there and immediately made a world-changing mark. The particular significance of colleges like Amherst is that they instill reverence for service, most of all, and of course intellectual curiosity.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I had a good undergraduate education, but friends of mine who went to small liberal arts education often describe a more intensive intellectual experience than what I had.
Also, fwiw, I think the data is pretty clear that elite schooling doesn't matter than much in terms of career outcomes, with the exception of a small number of professions that place an extra high emphasis on pedigree. So that kind of super elite pedigree, if it means anything, is maybe more about a kind of intangible status that you can lord over your neighbors than anything else.
absolutely fascinating exploration of the book; would i be wrong to say its thesis is similar territory to ‘outliers: the story of success by malcolm gladwell… I won’t bore you by drawing out the convergences…
Haven't read outliers. Was that the 10,000 hours one?
yeah that’s it, but covers similar territory about schooling, wealth, class; et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth; just read the wiki for a quick & dirty overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
Fascinating read.
so yes, while there may be some thematic overlap in their broader discussions of success and privilege, there are NOT any direct connection or reference between the two works however, parallel tracks I guess
What Khan describes is only a more-rarefied version of my experience at Williams College 50-odd years ago. A redoubt of the upper class was then already opening to students from suburban public schools, and even to a sliver of exceptional Black, Asian, and working-class kids. Ever since I've had an equivocal allegiance to an institution that has built a society more meritocratic but no less stratified in terms of power.
I share your equivocal feelings toward these places.
Virtue turned in upon itself may be the story of every empire during its final throes. (Thank you for a remarkable summary of a book that I must read: though it undoubtedly will make my heart hurt.)
Masterpiece indeed. St Paul’s is an exemplar of the best things about an independent school, captured so compellingly in this wonderful study.
Reminds me of Orwell's description of the upper classes in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. At first they remained showy and extravagant with their wealth. As the war progressed, they began to dress differently, act differently, blend in with the locals. And then when the war was over it was back to being flashy again.
Great essay! I didn’t attend a school like this (I was given the opportunity to and denied it out of a sense of juvenile populism) but I had a familial connection to one, (of the many up and down the Connecticut river) and this bunch of contradictions about education, hierarchy and meritocracy is something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years.
It'd be fun to Compare this to Rob Henderson's "Troubled." This skill that Kahn describes--the ability to discern how to navigate different social settings with ease--is one that Henderson never seemed to grasp. I don't say that as an elitist critique of Henderson as a person, but just that it diminishes the relevance of his social critique if he can't really understand the culture he's writing about.
One example comes to mind: Henderson asks some Stanford entrepreneurs what has been key to their business success and their response: luck. Henderson then rhetorically asks if they are going to tell their kids if they should just focus on luck as the key to their advancing in life, and as he reports, they sheepishly admit that, no, they will tell their kids to work hard. Apparently this illustrates Henderson's point about the double standard of luxury beliefs. But I think a much more likely explanation is provided here by Kahn. It's really about the ease of moving in different worlds by signalling modesty when that's called for (and when hard work and connections is table stakes in the company you keep).
There's a long history of integration efforts in schools like this, with as much focus on supporting kids once they are enrolled as there is on recruitment. Those efforts tend to focus on racial integration, and so the support tends to take an identity focus: there might be a POC success counselor to support those POC students. It makes me wonder how Kahn's idea of the culture of elitism is different from, weaves together, and interplays with race in affecting the success of these integration efforts.
What determines someone's success in internalizing this culture that Kahn describes? Is there earlier cultural priming that would allow a kid from an elite background to absorb it better than someone who didn't come from that background?
Interesting connection (and one we should pursue when I get my act together to do the Henderson episode).
Khan does touch on the racial aspect somewhat in his book, and has examples of some students of color who are and are not able to internalize the culture. He doesn't really theorize about why some can and some can't, but I guess I assume it would be a mix of nature and nurture. Surely some people are just innately better at deciphering, and adapting to, the subtle social norms around them, so that they'll get it, given sufficient exposure, even if they came from a wholly different background. Whereas others will really struggle to assimilate the norms if they weren't raised with them, and some will struggle to fit in even if they were raised with them.
I think implicit in his book is the idea that if you want kids from non-elite backgrounds to maximally benefit from exposure to elite culture, then you would want to be wary of separating them off on their own too much once they're in the elite space. So some degree of support for your racial or ethnic or religious group would be fine, but you wouldn't want, say, separate housing, or totally separate social worlds, or else you run the risk of depriving them of precisely what they need to learn in order to most successfully advance within elite hierarchies.
I went to the most elite boarding school in New Zealand as a youth in the late 80s.
We were new money, now I see this was going on around me. I was oblivious to it then.
The article learned me good on what was going down!
Convincing the world they exist
I meant to say "enjoyed for some time."