As international education is increasingly favored by affluent Chinese families, its potential harm is often neglected. Among the international curriculum types, the American elite education is the crown in many parents’ eyes. However, nothing is perfect and neither is elite education. In the article “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”, William Deresiewicz denounces elite education by analyzing its disadvantages. As an international counselor working in China for over a decade, I cannot agree with him more. While it is debatable about the harm of American elite education in the US, I find the harms he points out are already real in China by way of the prosperous international education and related industries. By elite schools, I also include the highly selective institutions because Chinese students face similar admission standards and cost of attendance to Ivies and its peers, which Deresiewiczs refers to as elite in the article.
Having been a school-based counselor for 7 years and an independent counselor for 4 years, I have participated in guiding hundreds of families to elite education in the US. I have always been suspicious of the benefits of elite education but find few critical voices around me. When we talk about elite education, there is unanimous praise and admiration. Students, parents, teachers, counselors, school officials, and tutors, are all excited about admissions into elite schools in the US. It seems indisputable that the admission letter of elite schools endorses the excellence of the students and the contribution of all the others.
While it is hard to change the domestic worship for elite education, the criticism of Deresiewicz may raise a moment of rethinking its value. Deresiewicz has Ivy League degrees and teaching experience at Yale, which allows him to give detailed reflections and examples supporting his critical claims. As he mentioned at the beginning of the article, he realizes that “there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35” when he finds he does not know how to talk to a plumber in his house. He thinks something is wrong with this “Ivy retardation” and through a reflective journey of his own educational and teaching experience reveals some disadvantages of elite education.
Deresiewicz points out that one disadvantage of elite education is that it “inculcates a false sense of self-worth”. In his words, “the problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when ‘better at X’ becomes simply ‘better.’” I am not here to argue whether this is a real problem in the US, but, according to my counseling experience, I find it undeniably true for Chinese students on the American track of education. It must be familiar to Chinese parents how they monitor students’ progress according to test scores of GPA, TOEFL, SAT, AP/IB, and/or contests. School teachers and private tutors join the force to raise test performance. Students are ranked according to scores, criticized for low scores, and awarded high scores. As a result, their self-worth can hardly avoid being linked to numerical rankings. Year by year, elite students pamper their self-identity in the abstract numbers they can achieve in tests.
However, this criticism seems to be in direct contrast to a common belief that elite schools embrace diversity and allow students the flexibility to study what they want and the freedom to pursue their passion. Yet here lies the trick of elite education. Just as Deresiewicz points out: “however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.” He further emphasizes elite students “possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others”. According to my work experience in five international schools, students have no time for caring about the value of others. They may not even have time to think about their own value. When teaching essay writing class in an IB school, I was surprised how difficult the whole class struggled to produce some reflective value out of their previous experiences. I have always encouraged students to read and write extensively, but under test pressure, even those who are at first excited about pursuing their passion soon focused on test scores.
In fact, the harm of false self-worth could be worse than most people think. It not only harms elite students but also non-elite ones. Deresiewicz further points out that “elite education… teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense”. When elite students think they are more valuable than non-elite ones, the latter, after many failures to achieve high test scores, are prone to self-deprecation. Students with lower performance usually have low confidence, feel desperate about the future, and some even had signs of serious depression. A 10th-grade boy recently told me that he was continuously criticized by his parents for his low test scores. He felt the future dark, accompanied by agony on his face. Another 12th-grade girl reported she found it hard to appreciate herself due to her low GPA, but in one business competition, she was happy to confirm a bit of confidence by showing talent in marketing strategies among a group of high test score takers. I could sense how much she wish my confirmation of this bit of her excellence, and I generously and sincerely praised her for that.
In addition to criticizing the harm of false self-worth, Deresiewicz also thinks self-worth has political implications, which in my view also hurts Chinese students in a hidden but slightly different way. He points out that American elite education “ushers you (students) into the upper class” and “trains them to get there”. While he thought this was a disadvantage, I know many Chinese parents could welcome this guaranteed possibility to the upper class. However, international students face a different situation here. Remember that their self-worth is falsely built during high school yea. When they begin their study in the US, the challenge of the foreign culture and environment will threaten to crush this vulnerable and false self-worth, because they do not belong to the elite class of the US. International students are not Americans, nor do their families have any roots there. They may want to blend into the elite club, but as some students reported, it is just impossible. “ You feel respected, and they are nice to you, but somehow you know, you just don’t fit in”, a high school classmate, a Ph.D. graduate now settled in Canada, told me last year. This echoes other negative reports from my previous students. I can hardly imagine how international students would fare in elite schools when they constantly receive messages of their superiority yet are conscious of their inferiority in the foreign land. In addition, those less competitive international students only receive a non-elite education in public, regional, and community colleges and universities. All four years they struggle to adapt to the new environment for fear of not being able to graduate. In sum, for Chinese students, the political implication of elite education is dislocating the elite ones at the periphery of the elite class in the US, and the non-elite ones at the heart of the non-elite class.
If we consider one more of Deresiewicz’s criticism of elite education: “the temptation it offers to security”, we have more reasons to worry about the real situation of Chinese students in American elite schools. He explains “This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others.” It is not uncommon for international school students to give up some activity just because they cannot achieve the desired result within a short time. They cannot risk not being able to put it in the application form because their free time is so limited. Indeed, academically excellent students are often more closely monitored so that they won’t waste time on something they would fail. They may be given a chance to try, and would soon be led away due to difficulties or initial failures. When they entered elite schools due to their well-monitored achievements, their personal competency is frail and the security to future success is a sham.
Certainly, American elite education has its advantages in training students for future success, but there are sacrifices we cannot ignore. By applying Deresiewicz’s criticism to the Chinese setting I try to alert both parents and educators that this success not only has unforeseeable costs but might not be as secure as we are willing to believe. It takes Deresiewicz years to figure out he might be miseducated. It may take less time for international students to make it out because of the immediate harm they receive. Yet there is a dim chance for future parents to recognize the harm before putting their kids in an international school. With only a small group of students going to the US each year, a general criticism of American elite education is slow to spread. But the earlier we recognize the potential harm of elite education, the better chance it will cater to the healthy development of our students’ academic and personal careers.
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