I'm going to disagree with many of the points in her article. She had a couple good points, but the smug tone that was obvious immediately and that ran through the whole piece set off alarm bells.
The themes in the piece reflect erroneous ideas in our society about the purpose of a college education. We've had very recent discussions questioning policies that encourage everyone to go to college. Rightly or wrongly (I think wrongly), our society sees a BA as a ticket to higher earnings. This belief encourages people to go to college for wrong reasons, and love of learning, curiosity, and a willingness to do something important and interesting (I don't put marketing or investment banking in that category) are being pushed down the list of reasons to get a degree. So we end up with indebted people who work at Starbucks.
The Ivy League fixation is just a sub-category of that same mistaken belief system: a credential from there is seen as a ticket to even higher earnings (plus access to a network of friends who are related to wealthy and powerful people and a ticket to "prestigious" positions, whatever that means)!
You must go to Harvard is simply
You must go to college for members of the upper middle class who suffer from artificial-stress syndrome. And I say this as someone who has degrees from a Seven Sisters' college and one of the old European universities. So, no sour grapes here.
Worse, the author makes incorrect assumptions --- and they're the same bad ideas that are doing so much damage at the faculty level in academia right now. First and foremost, look at this one:
The colleges are looking for one very specific quality at this point in the cycle: not �creativity� or �imagination� ... what they are looking for are the most deeply smart students in the country.
So, in other words, given that colleges don't require IQ tests, "the most deeply smart" is defined as "the highest achievers." These schools are selecting people who fit a mold: very high grades, worked like crazy in school, mostly do what they're told by authority figures --- for this group, fitting into a social structure is a high priority. In many ways, it's part of what allows them to be such high achievers in school and at work: these qualities endear them to superiors. Unfortunately, quirky creative people don't do well in this competition (as Flanagan notes in a subsequent paragraph).
Yet we need quirky creative people. They're the ones who challenge dogma and come up with the new discoveries and inventions that drive technological and social progress. People who prioritize fitting into a social group aren't generally going to do that. Putting high value on fitting in precludes it.
We need both types of people. The quirky creative types make the discoveries, and the high-achiever-types perfect them and implement them in ways that the quirky ones usually can't. When we exclude quirkiness too much and define "smart" too much as "high achiever," we're doing our society a disservice.
