NYT’s Frank Bruni: Chill Out on the Ivy League already

We recently reported in our April Events Calendar that New York Times Op-ed columnist Frank Bruni will discuss his new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote To The College Admissions, at the Chappaqua Library on Friday, April 24. In his book, Mr. Bruni offers students and parents a new perspective on the brutal college admissions competition and a path out of the anxiety it provokes.  In anticipation of that event, we asked Mr. Bruni to share some of his thoughts with What To Do in this interview.  

The title of your new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, suggests that the current “paper chase” climate is like an illness shared by parents and students alike. Just how crazy has it become?

Well, people who can afford it pay $50,000 to outside consultants who guide their kids’ choices from the 8^th grade on in a manner that will supposedly impress the gods of admission at the most selective schools, and Stanford’s acceptance rate has been about 5 percent each of the last two years. Those two numbers sort of say it all.

Why are we so obsessed about getting our kids into elite schools?

There are many, many reasons, detailed in the book. So I’ll just mention a main one here: For more than a decade now, the country has been in the grip of an economic pessimism and anxiety about whether there are better days ahead and how big the American pie can grow and how wide the chasm between haves and have-nots has grown. Many parents believe that making sure their kids have any and every possible leg up is more important than ever, and they see exclusive colleges like those in the Ivy League as a leg up.

Should we all just chill out about the Ivy League already?

Yes. We should. The anxiety and pressure about this are disproportionate to the complicated reality of success in life and are hurting many kids and teaching others curious values.

But doesn’t the Ivy League offer the “leg up” everyone is looking for?

There’s a fascinating study, a bit too complicated to describe succinctly here, that was done in 2011 and that shows that the lifetime earnings of people rejected from elite schools aren’t substantially different from the earnings of those accepted, because what’s most relevant is that both sets of people had the ambition, the confidence and the type of background that inclined them to see those schools as possibilities. That temperament—that view of themselves and the world—was more germane to what happened to them down the road than whether they got the exclusive-school diploma. Beyond that, people like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others profiled in the book never even considered going to the most selective schools.  Instead they made the most of their experiences at less selective schools. And that was the key to their futures.

You mean people who don’t go to elite schools can be successful too?

Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College in the Midwest, which many people have never heard of. Lyndon Johnson: Southwest Texas State Teachers College. One could expand that list with other presidents whose academic histories weren’t the kind that make the heart go pitter-patter and the knees go weak. And yet we talk about the Ivy League and the White House all the time. My point in the book—and my point here—is that we edit the truth selectively, finding great significance in a successful person’s time in the Ivies but often ignoring a successful person’s educational pedigree if it doesn’t include fancy schools. We should be careful about that, because it sends children an inaccurate message that fills them with anxiety.

In an interview with NPR’s Diane Rehm you discussed some current political heavy weights who graduated from the University of Delaware.

Chris Christie went there. Joe Biden went there. And Steve Schmidt and David Plouffe, key political tacticians in the 2008 McCain-versus-Obama presidential race, went there. But we never hear: Hey, U-Delaware, political power school! That’s what I mean about our selective edit of reality.

If the alternative to chasing a prestige school is to find the best-fit school. How does a high school student do that?

Through the Internet and through all of the statistics gathered today, a high-school student has more potential information about colleges at his or her fingertips than ever before. It takes initiative to connect with that information, but it’s initiative well spent. And a ‘good fit’ is a school that’s going to make the student bigger than he or she is, by showing him or her aspects of life and sides of the world and kinds of people never encountered before. I’d urge students to consider that.

You’ve discussed the value of experiencing diversity in college as an alternative to obsessing over top tier schools.

The value is straightforward: LIFE is diverse. Almost any career benefits from an ability to see life through different perspectives and to deal nimbly with people of different backgrounds. And our whole society’s future hinges on how well we manage an increasingly diverse population. So there’s value in learning to manage it oneself, in college. There’s incalculable value, for all of us, in that.

What would you say to a student who gets rejected at their top schools?

Life is long. This is just one juncture, an early one. The metrics used by admissions committees aren’t rune stones auguring a person’s future. There are many, many paths to a successful, content future.

Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since June 2011, joined the newspaper in 1995. He has been both a White House correspondent and the chief restaurant critic. He is the author of two New York Times best sellers: a 2009 memoir, Born Round, about the joys and torments of his eating life, and a 2002 chronicle of George W. Bush’s initial presidential campaign, Ambling into History. His new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, was published in March 2015. He grew up in White Plains, N.Y., and Avon, Conn. He is a 1986 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill.

More tips on surviving the College Admissions process in What To Do’s Parenting.