What We Talk About When We Talk About Sending Our Kids to the Ivies

By Aaron S. Lecklider. For those of us who teach, work, and study in universities–especially those who, unlike me, find themselves within Ivy League institutions—no topic has aroused more passion recently than William Deresiewicz’s New Republic article, “Don’t Send Your Kids To the Ivy League.” If one can look past the article’s click-bait headline, one discovers that the substance of the piece deals with a number of weighty issues in American life: the dramatic increase in income inequality; the slow and painful decline of the humanities; the lack of creativity in lucrative professions (and the lack of lucre in creative ones); the troublingly narrow metrics for measuring a meritocracy. More...