Here’s a silly argument I made the other day. It has since fallen ill with virality, the best/worst fate that can befall a social media post.
Before I get to the FAQs (frequently asked questions), FVOs (frequently voiced objections), and FRCBTWRVATTAUSSMDs (frequently repeated critiques, both those with real validity and those that are ultimately shallow social media dunks), let me give you the original argument:
Now, rather than belabor the specifics (can you specify the colleges? did you account for international students? are you aware of all the transatlantic differences? and hey dummy, isn’t this just a roundabout way of saying “Ivy League”?) I want to zoom out.
Education does many things. It animates old ideas. It stimulates new ones. It widens the apertures of the mind. It allows one to feel smart while watching Jeopardy!
And, skipping way down the list, it enables snap judgments based on your degree.
I do not think snap judgments are particularly noble, and I do not advise anyone to live life by snap judgments alone. But they happen. And, given the limitations of the human attention span, they probably always will. I plead not for an end to snap judgments, but merely for a recalibration of them, to reflect the unwieldy scope of the U.S. higher education system.
My home country is a charming and ungovernable sprawl of 340 million people, as big as five or ten of our “peer nations” combined. But our finest colleges are not proportionally bigger. Some are quite puny, just 2000 students or fewer, and any dramatic growth would change (and hence spoil) their wonderful character.
As a result, our system is hard to wrap your mind around. It’s like someone is reading you a grocery list, and you’re trying to commit it to memory, but the items just keep piling up, until you rue your choice not to start with pen and paper, because to memorize this whole list would take a real savant, or better yet, a top-level graduate from one of the many colleges whose names you have just heard and already forgotten.
The same isn’t true in Canada (population: similar to California) or Australia (population: similar to Texas) or even the U.K. (population: similar to California + Texas). In such countries, learning the top colleges by reputation doesn’t take much brain space. Here, it’s practically a college education unto itself.
So the point of the cartoon is not that we should draw the line precisely here (sorry, Penn; congrats, Northeastern!) and then treat that line as something deep and real.
The point is that the U.S. higher education is, like so much in my homeland, a glorious mess. The point is that we must eradicate the endemic disease I call “US News and World Report brain,” with its symptomatic effort to give power rankings to colleges as if they were football teams. (In reality, they are football teams with schools attached!)
If you want to draw crude lines, be my guest. But remember how crude they are. And yes, it’s silly to lump together 15 colleges as “indistinguishably super fancy.” It’s just that trying to separate them is even sillier.
A great conglombination, Ben!
love the combination, but curious, what colleges are in here?
The fact that Yalvard is half the size of Oxbridge is genuinely new to me, and that’s a really interesting point that they’re taking the top 0.1% instead of the top 1%.
I’d never realised there was such a difference. Thanks!
Thanks, Christian!
Though, to put a planet-sized asterisk on the “top 0.1%” point, it’s actually impossible to answer the question “top 0.1% of what.” U.S. admission isn’t focused exclusively on academic merit; universities also consider extracurricular achievements, personal qualities, and the desire for a “well-rounded” incoming class (with a mix of different interests, majors, geographical origins, etc.), not to mention the special status given to certain athletes and to the children of alumni.
Which sort of heightens the point — it’s hard enough to distinguish the 99.9th percentile from the 99.8th percentile on a somewhat-well-defined quality like “academic merit,” but it’s conceptually impossible to do so on a totally ill-defined quality like “Harvard worthiness.”
Loved it! Thank you!
Interesting! I like this! But don’t forget Santa Clara University, Stanford, and San Jose State University! Great job as always Ben! 🙂 Jeanne
Ben, I always enjoy your analyses. And drawings.
To me, if you got your degree from an Ivy League college, or a few others like Chicago or MIT, then I’m impressed.
But then as you go down the list, I have no idea how say U Michigan compares with U Pennsylvania. So I don’t know how impressed I’m supposed to be.
My undergraduate degree is from a school even further down the list. But nevertheless, it served me well in my working career, so as is said in the candy bar commercial, “No regerts.”
Seriously, play melon sandbox! You won’t regret the fun and creativity it unlocks.
A humorous yet poignant look at the ranking obsession, fun games, and chaos that characterize American higher education.
ok what
Even farther down the list is the school from where I earned my bachelor’s degree. Still, I’m glad I did it because, as the commercial for Geometry Dash Lite a candy bar puts it.