excellent sheep

Bill Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep is a powerful indictment of elite education in America, in particular the entitlement, credentialism, and lack of dissent impulse amongst elite students.

Deresiewicz compares students at HYPS+ to "excellent sheep” - ambitious students who are trapped in an endless of cycle of hoop-jumping, from prep school to Ivy League to Goldman Sachs, often "with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction.”  

According to Deresiewicz, here are the biggest problems with elite education:

1) When students do get where they want to be, they often have no idea why they are there and are afraid to deviate from the status quo (finance, consulting, tech). 

2) Students are cloistered and lack diversity - there's a huge financial cost to building a resumé that elite schools want, and affluent families game the system with SAT tutors, donations, college essay advisors, etc.; kids lose out before the race has even started. However, this also means elite graduates struggle with connecting with people who are different than them.

I didn’t agree with everything in this book, especially Deresiewicz’s critique of MOOCs - I think MOOCs are a powerful tool for democratizing education. That said, I think this book would be a valuable read for any high school or college student.The irony of this book and books like Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be is that reading them will get you into top schools, because colleges want students with this degree of awareness. In fact, there’s a fantastic section towards the end of book about what a liberal arts education is and why it’s valuable (wink wink, if you’re applying to any Ivy/Williams/Amherst/Midd). Any student who reads this book will emerge with clearer goals. Excellent Sheep definitely encouraged me to become more critical and to redefine what I want to get out of college.