Et Tu, Bruni?

I got tired of college football rankings when I was 15, about when Michigan lost its fourth consecutive bowl game, and so I instead became obsessed with college academic rankings.  I got a hold of one of the encyclopedic college guides, all paper of course, and pored over it religiously, learning each state’s top  colleges, the top state universities in the Midwest, and all of the snotty colleges in the northeast.  This was somewhat off brand for me, as I was an indifferent student, but for a while I cared very much about where I might ultimately go to college.  It’s not too surprising really, given that I grew up in Ann Arbor, America’s snottiest college town then and now.

But then my family shuffled off to North Carolina and, as a result, I went for two years to Exeter, a boarding school in New Hampshire where I quickly found out that I was not Harvard material.  That was the bad news.  The good news, however, was that, by my senior year, I had ceased to care much about where I went to college.  I ended up at Duke, obviously an elite school, though more now than then, mostly because I was exhausted and because I correctly anticipated that they’d overlook my grades given that both my parents worked there.  I now prefer the lassitude of my 18-year-old self to the earnest striving of his 15-year old doppelganger.

Well, that’s how I want to think about my teenage self, but my wife the hotshot psychiatrist thinks I’m full of shit.  I very much did care where I went to college, she says, as evidenced by the fact that, well, I went to Duke. “No, no, no,” I say.  “I didn’t care!  Really, I didn’t!  I ended up there by accident!”  That’s more bullshit, she says, and, moving into full psychiatrist mode, she says that my self-styled slacker of an 18-year old was really trying, subconsciously, to address the wound of Harvard’s rejection. “You failed,” she says, “and so you had to tell yourself that you didn’t want to win in the first place.”  “But,” I plead, “I didn’t want Harvard to love me!”  “Did, too!”  “Did not!”  “Did, too!”  She sometimes even suggests that I am unironically proud, even at this late date, that I went to Duke, but then she’s just mean sometimes.

All of the above is to say that I was predisposed to like Frank Bruni’s “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania.”  Bruni was a long-time columnist for the New York Times and someone that I admire, a man who has written about the challenges of growing up as a gay man in my homophobic cohort and about his struggles with obesity and failing vision.  He’s now also a journalism professor, not at North Carolina, his alma mater, but at Duke!  His book, published in 2015, is a jeremiad against people caring too much about where they go to college, which he views as one of the scourges of American society. The book has been a huge success, selling very well and being handed out like lollipops to neurotic students (and parents) at wealthy high schools.  My 18-year old self, the one who claimed to pick Duke solely out of exhaustion and indifference, would heartily approve of what Bruni’s trying to do.  All of which makes it a pity that Bruni’s book stinks.

Before I bury Bruni, however, let me first sing his praises.  The book is useful in that Bruni talked to many people who had good experiences at non-elite colleges and who went on to be a success.  Clemson, University of Arkansas, Marquette, and many other conventionally non-elite schools all get favorable accounts from Bruni as places where students can find their place and their voice without that Ivy League pressure.  Nice work, Bruni!  The book also employs a definition of success that is admirably catholic.  You might think that Bruni, as a former Times journalist and current Duke professor, might define success narrowly, with a particular focus on arts, education, and journalism. But no, Bruni has a much broader view of success, interviewing all kinds of businesspeople and politicians – including University of Delaware alum Chris Christie! - who a more narrow-minded author might not consider successes.  These people must be at or near the top of their field to earn Bruni’s attention, but he sees the potential for success in many occupations. More good work, Bruni!

Sadly, the good work stops there.  Bruni tries to show that where you go to school doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t predict what you’ll do later…..but that’s not true!  Alumni of Stanford and Harvard really do make more money and have fancier professions, on average, than do alumni of the Clemsons and Marquettes of the world.  (See the Department of Education’s College Scorecard if you doubt me.)  There is of course the subtle question of whether the high earnings of Harvard grads reflect good instruction or good admissions, but in either case the fact is that being the kind of student that Harvard accepts does lead to higher earnings…..on average.

Bruni tries to disprove this fact by recounting example after example of people that went to non-elite schools and that met his definition of post-graduate success.  But this is fallacious cherry-picking.  Sure, there are some “successful” people from any school….it’s just that there are more of them from Harvard and Stanford.  It’s a fundamental statistical error, like using the NBA career of 5’3” Muggsy Bogues to prove that height doesn’t matter in basketball.  Further, if he were going to stick with this line of reasoning, it would also be useful to talk about people who went to Harvard and that are not “successful.”  There are lots of these people, and it would have been a service to know about them.  People need to know about those Stanford grads that live in their parents’ basement!

But it’s not these narrow statistical issues that bother me most about Bruni’s book.  Rather, it’s that his definition of success, while broader than you might expect, is still far too narrow.  Will you find high school teachers, car mechanics, bookkeepers, or groundskeepers among Bruni’s successes?  Will you find even the most skillful lab technicians, nannies, or chefs - or literally anyone who didn’t go to college - in his list of exemplars?  No and no, and that’s a problem.  “Colleges don’t matter!” says Bruni, but having an elite career matters a hell of a lot in Bruni’s world.   It’s as if Bruni said, “Don’t be silly, youngster, it’s not where you went to college, it’s whether you work for the New York Times instead of one of those pathetic local papers!”  Bruni’s not a snob about colleges, but he’s still a snob.

I’m probably too hard on Bruni, however.  Desire for social status is a fundamental trait of humans (and other apes, too), right up there with appetite and randiness.  If we somehow extirpated the roles of college and career in how we define ourselves, then that displaced snobbishness would just get shunted into other aspects of our identity – whether we had royal ancestors, for example – and that might have even less attractive implications. Plus, as that hotshot psychiatrist points out, I am not myself immune to career status-grubbing myself. “No!” I say in panic, but she replies “Yes” with a calm authority. So perhaps the next time I’m in Durham, attending a basketball game and visiting my niece, perhaps I’ll drop by Bruni’s office with a beer in hand. I’d enjoy his company and, who knows, maybe I’d look past his UNC pedigree, and perhaps he’ll not mention that I spent my career struggling to elicit love from elite schools like Duke.  “Et me, Bruni?”