How the Ivy League Broke America
It’s a very Ivy League factor to attempt to take credit score for breaking America. I share David Brooks’s criticisms of a system that ranks and kinds based mostly on take a look at outcomes. However standardized testing had taken maintain in america lengthy earlier than James Conant’s presidency at Harvard. The hazard of blaming the Ivy League for as we speak’s overreliance on blunt ranking-and-sorting devices is that we could also be tempted to attend for the Ivy League to repair it. As an alternative, let’s agree that we additionally want leaders who flourished in area people schools, regional universities, apprenticeships. The expertise is on the market—I noticed it day by day as a high-school trainer. However our present system sends the message that if you don’t rating properly on standardized multiple-choice checks delivered in English, you aren’t succesful.
Erin Crisp
Knoxville, Tenn.
A lot of the elite colleges David Brooks criticizes already consider “the entire particular person.” Cognitive metrics are solely a small a part of getting in. These establishments have invested closely in evaluating candidates’ noncognitive abilities, and arguably, the result’s worse.
Households in search of to safe a spot at a prime faculty should strategically place their baby as a well-rounded applicant. They select extracurricular actions and write admissions essays that exhibit empathy, curiosity, the power to beat hardship—all issues that Brooks needs these establishments would consider. This method has additional advantaged households with the monetary means to afford academic consultants, non-public teaching, and enrichment actions. We do want an alternative choice to the meritocratic system. Sadly, Brooks’s resolution has already been swallowed by the meritocratic machine.
Pete Marshall
St. Louis Park, Minn.
Why is the central drive controlling our economic system and society as we speak Ivy League admissions places of work and never, say, the calls for of worldwide capitalism, the transition to a services-based economic system, or the rising worth of symbolic pondering in these contexts? The world has modified in ways in which reward a sure sort of intelligence. That could be good or unhealthy, however it’s not primarily the fault of a small variety of elite colleges—it’s true in each developed economic system.
Andrew Bartholomew
New York, N.Y.
It’s not utopian to think about an American public-school system and society that acknowledge the talents and contributions of each the mechanic and the debater. They do it in Europe: Set into the bronze plaques on London’s Tower Bridge are the names of a plater, a rivet boy, a prepare dinner. In America, such a prestigious public placement on an iconic construction would honor solely massive company donors.
The individuals who pursue vocational training should be handled as a core constituency in arguments concerning the meritocracy, not as afterthoughts.
Sheela Clary
West Stockbridge, Mass.
David Brooks is true that America is damaged, however he factors his finger on the improper wrongdoer. Universities aren’t improper to judge educational benefit and choose the scholars who will most profit from the training they provide. The societal downside is an financial system that offers virtually the entire advantages of development to the already rich and never the working class. The financial elites are the actual predators savaging the American dream—not the cultural elites.
Stuart J. Kaufman
Bear, Del.
A lot of what David Brooks described resonated with me. I attended neighborhood faculty on a full Pell Grant; each of my dad and mom had been blue-collar employees. I liked faculty and I liked studying, however my dad and mom may by no means afford to pay for extracurricular actions, Superior Placement exams—I by no means even took the SAT. I at all times felt that there was an elite class of studying that I’d by no means entry.
And in some ways, I used to be proper. I used to be rejected from tons of of jobs, solely to seek out out later that the profitable candidate was from an elite faculty. This instilled in me what Brooks calls the sixth “lethal sin” of the meritocracy—“contempt for your complete system.” I now educate as an adjunct, and my college students are typically way more well-off than I ever was. I concern my anger has made me much less inclined to know the very actual stresses they face.
I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and for Kamala Harris in 2024. It was throughout this span of eight years that I attended faculty after which graduate faculty—I’m a dwelling instance of the best way training influences opinions and beliefs. But I empathize with the working-class voters of Texas, my house state, excess of I empathize with the elite voters of New York Metropolis.
Katherine A. Chase
Brooklyn, N.Y.
I’m 92 years outdated. I attended a public highschool in Cincinnati. Once I advised my principal I needed to go to among the best liberal-arts schools, he beneficial Harvard—he advised me that Harvard would take as much as seven college students from my class. Wanting by way of my information, he seen that I used to be Jewish and certified his assertion, saying that Harvard would by no means take greater than three Jews. Harvard accepted seven college students from my class, together with me, and 6 of us had been Jewish. Once I arrived within the fall of 1950, it was apparent that the quota system was gone—Jews made up a good portion of my class. At a gathering with incoming college students, the dean of freshmen proudly advised us that our class had the best common SAT rating of any incoming faculty class within the nation. I steadily noticed James Conant strolling in Harvard Yard, not understanding that he had made it attainable for me to be there.
John J. Frank Jr.
Cincinnati, Ohio
David Brooks replies:
I’m grateful for the considerate responses. I’d like to focus on one space of disagreement and one space for additional exploration. Pete Marshall says that “cognitive metrics are solely a small a part of getting” accepted to an elite faculty. I’d say they’re the foundational half—the typical Harvard freshman has an SAT rating of about 1520. It’s a must to meet these metrics earlier than every other qualities are thought-about. Andrew Bartholomew means that the actual downside is world capitalism within the Info Age. There’s loads of fact to that. I do assume universities churn out “information employees” as a result of mental life has been commodified. College students and employees are caught in the identical system that desires us to reside lives of complete work. However my argument is that our system doesn’t even prove very best capitalists: Giant numbers of recent workers have to go away their corporations as a result of corporations don’t know what to search for in candidates. They choose for the qualities that the meritocracy can quantify—however these aren’t the qualities that matter. Intelligence is overrated, and temperament and want are underrated.
A Observe from the Editor in Chief
Greater than twenty years in the past, The Atlantic determined to cut back the variety of print points revealed every year, dropping from 12 to 10, thus ending the run of what had been beforehand referred to as The Atlantic Month-to-month. The rise of the web made this appear on the time, I’m positive, like an apparent and unavoidable selection. However the historical past of our journal is full of improbabilities, and as we speak, extra folks subscribe to our print journal than at any time since its beginning, in 1857. Which is why we’ve determined to revive The Atlantic to month-to-month print publication, starting with the problem you’re presently studying.
The broader developments within the journal enterprise, and throughout journalism typically, should not promising. However The Atlantic continues to develop, as a result of (I consider) our editorial crew produces the highest-quality journalism, and since readers such as you proceed to seek out what we do helpful, and even illuminating.
Final 12 months was an excellent 12 months for The Atlantic. We crossed the million-subscription threshold; we grew to become worthwhile once more after working within the purple for a number of years; and we received our third consecutive Nationwide Journal Award for Normal Excellence, one thing no different journal has carried out on this century. However primarily what we’ve tried to do is make vital journalism. I hope, by your lights, that we’re succeeding, and that you simply be a part of me to find the return of a month-to-month Atlantic a really blissful factor.
— Jeffrey Goldberg
Behind the Cowl
On this month’s cowl story, “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson explores how Individuals got here to spend a lot time alone, and what that solitude means for our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to actuality. For the duvet, the illustrator Max Guther created a sequence of figures engaged in solitary actions. Arrayed throughout an in any other case clean discipline, Guther’s figures evoke a nation through which folks have come to favor their very own firm to that of others.
— Liz Hart, Artwork Director
This text seems within the February 2025 print version with the headline “The Commons.”