A real epidemic...and a very real public (mental) health crisis

[Nietzschelover]

This article I just came across from the Washington Post helped me put a finger on a queasy, feeling I am going to be sick phenomenon I sometimes experience reading certain things on SDN. To be clear, this is very much a national phenomenon, that, because of the focus of the forum, SDN often reflects rather than causes.

Education, whether at the undergrad level or at the med school level, has become so much about climbing perceived ladders and so consumed by a combo of an elitism and pre-professional/professional mentality that one can wonder where and whether real education truly happens. We're (many or all of us) about the notches on the belt. The CV building, trophy accumulation ethos reigns supreme.

Now back to Stanford vs Harvard, full ride to Wash U vs Yale, serviceable (except for me) low tiers vs top 10 glory.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...g-into-harvard-heres-the-story-i-want-to-see/

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[bananafish94]

My dad went to not one, but two Ivy league schools. I grew up thinking that this was the norm, and that I would naturally follow in his footsteps. I applied to a bunch of fancy schools and got rejected from each of them with extreme prejudice. I got so many rejections that I actually thought I wasn't going to get into college at one point. But I got into my state school, toured it, and instantly fell in love. It's by far the best decision I've ever made, and I have never once even thought about my life being better in any way for going to a more prestigious school.

 

[TehTeddy]

Education, whether at the undergrad level or at the med school level, has become so much about climbing perceived ladders and so consumed by a combo of an elitism and pre-professional/professional mentality that one can wonder where and whether real education truly happens. We're (many or all of us) about the notches on the belt. The CV building, trophy accumulation ethos reigns supreme.

Very true. Have you ever read the book Excellent Sheep? It's written by a Yale professor who used to be part of the adcom, and pretty much addresses this exact phenomenon.

Edit: Some links in case you're interested. Pretty much talks about what's in the book:

https://newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

http://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...the-miseducation-of-our-college-elite/377524/

 

[Lucca]

Related essay written by author of Excellent Sheep in Harper's. Addresses some of the insidious trends in education

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/

 

[Mansamusa]

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[ZedsDed]

I think @mimelim might find this discussion interesting.

 

[njtrimed]

As someone who's a bit older and out of touch with what it means to get into the Ivy League these days, I generally ignore these posts. When I was in high school two decades ago, most of my AP classmates went to top tier schools, and they were "just" top achievers with great stats who were also normal people. There were a few who were prodigies (perfect SAT scores and that kind of thing), but most of them were just kids who were smart and balanced a lot of things better than the rest of us. Now that I'm tutoring high school and college kids, I have a different perspective. I just started working with a high school junior, and was taken aback when we started working through some of his problem sets. I was expecting standard AP Chem- this required a different level of analysis. When I probed a bit, I found out this was his third year of chemistry and that he's basically a "failure" who will "never be a good engineer." Granted, he's in a very exclusive school, but he's acing physics and mathematics that I have never encountered. Before he enters college, he will have finished calculus through differential equations as well as linear algebra, and he thinks he's not very bright.

I cannot speak to what is happening these days, but if this kid is struggling to get into "middle-tier" undergraduate schools, there is a serious disconnect somewhere.

 

[Lucca]

As someone who's a bit older and out of touch with what it means to get into the Ivy League these days, I generally ignore these posts. When I was in high school two decades ago, most of my AP classmates went to top tier schools, and they were "just" top achievers with great stats who were also normal people. There were a few who were prodigies (perfect SAT scores and that kind of thing), but most of them were just kids who were smart and balanced a lot of things better than the rest of us. Now that I'm tutoring high school and college kids, I have a different perspective. I just started working with a high school junior, and was taken aback when we started working through some of his problem sets. I was expecting standard AP Chem- this required a different level of analysis. When I probed a bit, I found out this was his third year of chemistry and that he's basically a "failure" who will "never be a good engineer." Granted, he's in a very exclusive school, but he's acing physics and mathematics that I have never encountered. Before he enters college, he will have finished calculus through differential equations as well as linear algebra, and he thinks he's not very bright.

I cannot speak to what is happening these days, but if this kid is struggling to get into "middle-tier" undergraduate schools, there is a serious disconnect somewhere.

Kids from exclusive schools with good connections (the academies, famous NE prep schools, "special" early college high schools like LASA/TAMS in TX) tend to do very well in terms of getting into strong undergraduate institutions. The competitive public high schools (read: located in affluent suburbs) also do well, albeit less-so.

What do you mean by middle-tier? If you mean very good public schools, then those are still very accessible (imho). If you mean Rice/Vandy/top public schools like Berkeley and Michigan then that is a lot harder and you will probably have to be at or near the top of your class at a school like my high school to have a shot (everyone who got into Rice from my school excluding myself was in the top 10 students). If you want a non-crapshoot shot at HYPSM then you need to be well connected and go to a well-reputed school and do very well or be "hooked" (top athlete, Intel-Siemens, etc... URM is not enough. I am URM, zeroth-generation immigrant and disabled - "diversity" bait - and had 99th %ile test scores and a strong GPA + EC package and was rejected from HYS).

I have a friend here who had a 2400 SAT in high school and graduated valedictorian. He was rejected everywhere but here and some non HYPSM "top schools" that were just too expensive. I have another friend from middle school who went to high school at Milton academy, scored a 2400, and got into Harvard and several other apex-predator schools. They are both doing very well for themselves. I don't really buy into undergrad prestige anymore past a certain point. If you go to a good enough school and work hard you will get a great education, obviously there are differences between institutions.

P.S. My education is one of the most important things to me and I would not go into the types of debt my friends at Penn/Berkeley/Rice/Duke/Vanderbilt/Cornell/Princeton/etc. are going into for their degree looking back from where I am now. HYS tend to be more generous with the $$$, thankfully.

 

[Mansamusa]

P.S. My education is one of the most important things to me and I would not go into the types of debt my friends at Penn/Berkeley/Rice/Duke/Vanderbilt/Cornell/Princeton/etc. are going into for their degree looking back from where I am now. HYS tend to be more generous with the $$$, thankfully.

There are a lot more top schools that give a large amount of aid besides HYS, including some that you listed (Princeton is known for being the most generous). My top school saved me $20K over my state school.

I wouldn't go to a top 10 med school unless you paid me (which they probably would because they have aid -_-), but the benefits of going to a top undergrad are tremendous. People aren't merely jumping through hoops for prestige- there are palpable difference between jobs opportunities- even for things like law, 85-90% of all law school applicants from my school get into T-14s.

That being said, I still agree and disagree with the sheep guy. So much of education (and med schools are the biggest culprits) is jumping through hoops. The sheep author is part of the people setting up the hoops, so his view is biased. I did find that probably over half of students were really invested in learning and I learned more talking with classmates in the dining hall than I ever did in class.

So he is wrong that a majority of students don't enjoy learning for learning's sake, but he is right that there is always the pressure to keep jumping through hoops to get to the next step. No one wants the pressure of these stupid checklists, but, you know, if I focused just on learning and not what med schools want, I wouldn't be starting med school next year.

Now residencies are getting competitive and research is more or less obligatory for certain specialties. You can take a stand and decide that you won't jump through the hoops and publish bs research for the sake of matching.....but then you won't match.

As for the inability to fail, maybe its not being unable to fail and a result of coddling, but the feared consequences of failing? I have no problem with failure....and I almost didn't get into med school because of it. I had a friend from rural Mississippi. He wanted to do academic econ research. He got Bs and now he can't get into the programs that will get him to the career he wants and he is stuck with debt. It used to be that a degree was worthwhile for the knowledge alone....now you need the degree, the grades, the experiences, the clubs, the diversity, etc. We didn't make that system and I would gladly get rid of it.

I am dreading the hoops of med school and I would love to be able to go and learn my craft to the best of my ability and then move on to become the kind of doctor I choose.instead, I will have a $500K loan influencing my decisions and pressuring me to not fail and to go through the song and dance motions, so I don't run the risk of not matching and being stuck with a huge loan and no job.

And actually, now that med schools are opening like crazy, med school prestige is going to start to become more and more important

 

[SpottyGlassware]

As for the inability to fail, maybe its not being unable to fail and a result of coddling, but the feared consequences of failing? I have no problem with failure....and I almost didn't get into med school because of it.

This. I refused to jump through hoops (to some degree) in high school and got burned for it in the college admissions process. That experience is in the back of my mind now that I'm trying to become a good applicant for med school. The result is that I'm overly cautious at a time of life when I should be meeting people, making mistakes, and finding myself. I'm now having a mid-college crisis because I've realized that in striving for this imaginary ideal, I've lost touch with who I really am and why I'm doing this in the first place-- to make discoveries and connect with the patients who might benefit from those discoveries.

 

[Nietzschelover]

Thanks for all the links. Good stuff. I found the one below as one of the current SDN feature articles on the home page. Very much speaking to the same thing. My fear, as Foucault predicted decades ago, is that the concept of "identity" (as in having an identity with a strong sense of "who you are") no longer really exists. The extinction risk for identity is reflected by how raising the question of identity almost no longer even makes sense (like what in the heck is this fool even talking about?). Intense self-reflection, that isn't just tied to a goal or a decision, is difficult to think about in terms of what that even means. Who one is almost always is trumped (pun sort of intended) by what one does, but worse, the doing seems to be mostly detached from a real person in charge of doing the doing. Has our culture, spurred by technology and dissolution of identity, "advanced" to a point where one can be anything more than a technician? I see some of the finest physicians the world can offer in Boston, some of them going on 10 years, and none of them have a clue about me as a person or as a patient inside of my history. It's not their fault, and my overt, physical medical care has been excellent. They are simply as swept up in the cyclone of how life now gets lived as the rest of us (and even more so by virtue of how precious and limited their time is). I fear that the pressure and desire to achieve, and the inevitable pitfall of comparing oneself to the achievements of others, leads to an inverse relationship between greater achievement and increased understanding and development of self. Does the achievement treadmill less of an identity, or, has the idea of identity become indistinguishable from what one can produce? I hope I'm wrong.

http://www.studentdoctor.net/2016/04/dangerous-devolution-physicians-technicians/

 

[bararaboi]

*Bookmarking this thread*

 

[Scumbag_Steve]

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[Lucca]

How do you know that many people at schools like that? That's insane. My high school had two kids go to Yale for sports and the next most "prestigious" schools attended are Villanova, BU, and UConn

I went to a very competitive (affluent) public high school that sends lots of kids to top schools and have a lot of friends that went to the very good private Catholic schools in Houston through my church when I lived there/went to church. To paint you a picture of my high school, the only way to get into the top 10 was to not only take every single AP class offered but pay thousands and thousands of dollars to take AP classes over the summer at Rice U (I think they are discontinuing counting credit for those classes at my school now because even those fascists realized how toxic that was). I only took AP classes I actually cared about and not all of the random ones and was only involved in stuff I actually wanted to do. As a result, I got good grades but was nowhere near the top of our class lol. Worked out though, I feel like I would have been miserable living like my friends at the top (who all turned out just fine, either way).

It's the difference money can make for a high school student in this country.

 

[Mansamusa]

How do you know that many people at schools like that? That's insane. My high school had two kids go to Yale for sports and the next most "prestigious" schools attended are Villanova, BU, and UConn

I went to a top 10 school. Do you know how many students I've met from Stuy high school in NY? There was a social club of students from Exeter because these high schools maintain a tight networking system all throughout their lives. Rich high school are cray and they send lots of people to top schools.

 

[Scumbag_Steve]

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[Lucca]

Both good ponts. It is amazing what the powerhouse high schools can do. It's another world.

Yup. Yet another reason why college admissions is essentially a sham.