Today's episode of Potpout is going to be a little bit different.
I'm just going to get straight into it.
I actually want to speak from the heart here about just a lot of reflective thoughts on
everything that I've put up on the previous podcast,
but also just reflecting on the educational system,
and especially at the college level.
Up till now, I've been trying to give you at least some insight into
how to improve your chances of getting into a competitive college,
to optimize your outcomes both in and before and after college,
how to structure the way that you present yourself.
There are also plenty of resources online that are there to help you.
Some of them good, some of them not as great,
but there are resources that are all over the place that are designed to
help you through the process to get you into the colleges that you want to get into.
But I want to step away from that for a second and just say,
look, if you're going about doing this,
applying for college that is,
and then doing so in the best way you can,
there are some ways in which I feel a bit mixed about helping students in that process.
The reason I feel a little bit of mixed feelings about this is that in some ways,
we're continuing to play a game that has been set up as it's been set up and
operating for generations now.
If you've been following everything I've been saying in these podcasts,
you'll realize that the educational system is designed today to be shrouded in lies,
in the sense that a lot of these colleges are relying on
reputation to do a lot of the heavy lifting
of in place of the real education that students receive.
The reality is actually that many of the national and
liberal arts colleges across the United States, they're top notch.
They're very good.
I could go down a list of probably if you go on the ranking,
like top 100, 200 colleges,
they're all very good.
They all provide opportunities for their students to move up on the social ladder,
to open up opportunities in the workplace,
but also for future academic endeavors.
The schools, especially the national ones that are
big enough to house a lot of different disciplines,
they're almost indistinguishable from one another in their academic offerings.
They all have great faculty.
They all have great research programs.
Furthermore, the quality of the students that come out of
these institutions honestly depend less on the college and more on the students themselves.
The college just provide the setting,
but it's the students who make what they make out of that experience.
I've been asked this question before because I've taught at several different colleges.
People have asked me,
do you notice a difference in the students from one school to another?
I always tell them the same thing,
which is they're college students.
An 18-year-old is an 18-year-old regardless of what college you go to.
An 18-year-old is going to do dumb 18-year-old stuff that other 18-year-olds are going to do.
It doesn't matter whether they go to Harvard or Princeton or go to Cal State Fullerton.
It doesn't make a difference because everybody is in that stage of developing and learning about
themselves in a way that they didn't in high school and that they need to grow
into before they get out into the workforce.
I think that when we sit with the reality of what it is that the colleges are actually offering,
then you realize that what matters most is not where you receive your college degree,
but that you did receive your college degree.
I don't know if a lot of the most competitive colleges are going to agree with me or not.
They might try to prove me otherwise,
and I'm open to having that discussion.
But my guess, honestly, is that if we did a blind study,
we randomized the student population and sent them off to all of these colleges
and then see how much they improve in their time at the college,
there would be very little difference in terms of the outcomes for all of these colleges.
That would be my guess.
And that would be my guess with knowing that I've attended a lot of different colleges
and have worked with students who attend all these different colleges,
and they all tell me the same thing,
which is they thought that college was going to be one way given the kind of college they went to,
and then they went there and then they realized college is just college.
There's going to be college students that are going to act like college students wherever they go.
And they're struggling with the same college student-y stuff that everyone struggles with.
So look, what I'm saying is this.
If we actually are to accept the reality of the way that college admissions work
and what these colleges actually provide, then here's what we should be seeing.
For one, there would not be any pride or shame in the college you attend,
except maybe like the pride you feel from your own personal experience at that college
and deep appreciation for the college that you attended, right?
I mean, I feel this way about my alma mater, right?
So I am grateful for the experience that I've had there, right?
But that's different from kind of like a pride in the sense of like,
oh, this is a better school than another, right?
There also wouldn't be any excessive excitement for acceptance into a college
beyond really your personal preferences, right?
Like, I see students posting up their reactions to whether or not they got accepted or not to a college.
And I wish that all of these responses would be the same for every student,
which is that they get super excited because they got into the college that they wanted to get into.
And the reason they wanted to get into that particular college had nothing to do with ranking,
had nothing to do with future prospects.
It had only to do with the fact that they knew themselves well
and they knew that they would be a good fit for that particular college, right?
And that's where the excitement should be.
That's where the real excitement should be, I think, right?
Additionally, there wouldn't be any oohs and ahs over what college you got accepted into.
The work that the reputation does cannot be understated, right?
I remember that, you know, like people in the United States might think,
okay, UCLA, I went to UCLA as an undergrad, I was like, oh, that's a really good school, right?
It's gotten more competitive over the years.
But at the time, it was like, oh, it's a pretty good school.
But I didn't realize how big it was internationally, right?
The name, the brand, right?
How big it was internationally.
And I remember hearing all the oohs and ahs, right?
When I got into grad program and I decided to go to Boston University and people would ask,
like, what other schools do you get into?
And I said, oh, well, I got into Harvard and also to Yale, but I chose not to go there, right?
They looked at me with puzzlement as if, like, why would you do such a thing?
Alternatively, some would also respond with, like, oh, like, you must have been really good.
And I was like, no, actually, the acceptance rate for the graduate program that I applied
to wasn't particularly competitive.
But more importantly, who cares?
Who cares?
There's nothing special about going to these schools.
The school is just a school.
But we wouldn't be treating people who have attended or have associations with these schools
as anything other than what they are deservingly, you know, should be given, all right?
We shouldn't be giving them any additional oohs and ahs, respect or fawning over just
because of the brand name, right?
Because we would all know what the reality is.
And the reality is that a lot of these schools, they're not particularly, I mean,
there's nothing about the school itself that makes them better or worse than any other school.
Additionally, your job prospects would not be dictated by the college you attended.
And this is, I think, a place where, you know, this is just society in general that has kind
of contributed to this.
We make a lot of uninformed assumptions that just because a college was more competitive
or harder to get into, that you must somehow be better, right?
Or that because you attended a particular college,
you received somehow a better education or you're more qualified.
And the reality is that's usually, if not almost always, not the case, right?
Great students, great leaders, great innovators come from all over the place.
You don't need to look further than actually looking at the faculty of even the most competitive colleges.
And you'll see that so many of them have come from all over the United States,
from different colleges all over.
Finally, I think if we were to kind of let go of placing so much weight on the college you're
actually attending, then people would actually treat each other with a lot more basic human respect
and dignity.
There wouldn't be all this rank and comparison.
And a lot of people are doing this unknowingly.
They're not doing this with the awareness.
Oftentimes, this kind of comes out.
Our biases come out through nonverbal tics that we might have, right?
It's all implicit or things like that, right?
So look, college is just a step in a longer journey.
Let's not overemphasize the importance of college, all right?
It's honestly, if college becomes the defining feature of your life, that's pretty pathetic.
I'm reminded of, I don't know, this is aging myself, right?
But I remember watching Married with Children back in the days.
Al Bundy was a middle-aged man who would constantly be reliving his glory days playing football in high school, right?
And it just looks pathetic.
And it looks pathetic for a reason.
If you are the kind of person who puts such heavy weight on college and that becomes a defining feature of who you are,
right, not the experiences you had in college, not the friendships you made in college, but the college itself and the name,
that's pretty pathetic, right?
That shows honestly, I don't know what that's about.
Probably time to step into therapy and figure out what that's about, OK?
Because college is just a short blip in the rest of your life.
It might be an important one.
It might be one that is extremely memorable, but it is still just a small portion of the rest of your life.
Keep this in context.
We hope we would.
Simply put, if we were to live by the reality that a lot of these colleges are not necessarily significantly better than any other,
then we would probably live closer to a true meritocracy.
And you would also find that people value themselves and value others without as much judgment based off of this brand association.
OK, I say all this, I say all this because, you know, if a student were to come across my doors and wanted help in getting into the college they wanted to get into,
I would help them to the best of my ability.
If that's what they really wanted and it was a good fit for them,
I would give everything I can to help them get to the college, get into the college that they want to.
And I'm willing to play that game of, you know, making the application look the best as it possibly can in order to get in.
I will help them.
But at the end of the day, honestly, I really want to see personally want to see a culture shift.
And I know that that shift is not going to happen from the top down.
It's not going to happen by colleges saying, hey, we want to get rid of the ranking systems.
We want U.S. News to stop publishing any sort of ranking.
OK, colleges are not going to want to do that, especially the most competitive ones.
They benefit from having the reputation that they have.
They have they benefit from keeping that reputation.
They do things in order to keep that reputation.
Right. And they pride themselves in this way.
And they want the competition.
Look, the truth is a lot of these colleges can make more room for students.
They could expand if they wanted to.
They choose not to. Being exclusive makes them the brand that they are.
This is what luxury brands do.
They purposely create a scarcity, but that as a result makes it much more valuable.
And that's one thing that a lot of these colleges are not going to want to give up,
which means that it needs to be taken away from them if we really want the culture shift to happen.
And if we want to take it away from them, I have some suggestions for some things that we collectively,
as a society, can do depending on your place,
depending on your place in society and what role you play as of now.
Now, you don't have to do this with me.
I'm going to do this for myself and I want to encourage other people to do these things with me.
But, you know, I want to be clear about this, that I am going all the suggestions that I'm going to put up is really,
again, a reflection of the reality of what college is and how it serves the serves people in reality.
Like that actually, actually help students.
OK, so first off for the students, if you're a student, as I suggested already,
put an emphasis on yourself, on the fit you have with the university or college instead of brand.
OK, use the metrics that are given about the media and GPA and SATs and so on as an informative tool
to help you understand your odds of acceptance.
But I would I would suggest that you take time to make sure you're not placing your identity in the college that you attend.
It's honestly not emotionally healthy at all.
All right. It's not emotionally healthy.
It's something that I imagine that you're you're wanting for yourself for other reasons than,
you know, you know, something about you like deeply personally, like it probably matters more because of either pressure
you're receiving or because you think that it's going to get you someplace that it just or just be pretty, you know,
have you perceived in a way that has nothing to do with the actual education itself.
Right. So don't worry so much about the brand.
Focus on fit. OK, this should impact the kind of colleges you choose to apply to.
OK, it should impact the way that you react to what colleges you get into.
Right. You should be excited for all the colleges you get into.
That's a good fit for you. That has all the things that you're looking for in a college.
OK, this also means that you're not going to focus so much on the rankings and you're going to focus instead on the things that might matter most to you.
Right. So you're going to focus more on things like location, you know, proximity to home.
Maybe you want to be close or far away from home.
Maybe you're you know, you want to be closer to a city where it's vibrant and has all these different opportunities.
Or you want to be somewhere a little bit more peaceful.
Maybe you want to be closer to nature.
Maybe you want to be, you know, have smaller classrooms.
And so liberal arts colleges make more sense, even though they might not have as big of a brand.
Right. Like you should be choosing based off of what actually matters to you.
And you should be perfectly happy and content with wherever it is that you decide to go as long as it was a good fit for you.
OK, to the parents, I encourage you to talk to your children and emphasize that you want what's best for them.
And by that, it's not it's not like a code word for the most competitive college.
All right. I need I want the parents to really keep themselves in check.
And I'm saying this as a parent myself and knowing how hard it sometimes can be.
But I need the parents to start being more honest with themselves, which is, you know,
how much of my pushing my kids to be the best versions of themselves is it about my own anxieties?
And how much of it is about actually caring for my own children and wanting what's best for them?
Because if you want what's best for them, you might not always be looking for the highest ranked university.
You'll probably looking for a good fit where they will succeed the best they can.
OK, if you are an employer, I would like for you to keep in mind that a 22 year old is a 22 year old,
regardless of the college they attended.
Many employers have already learned this.
And so if you're one of them, kudos to you.
But just because you come out of a competitive college does not mean that you are more mature, does not mean you're more responsible,
does not mean you're more reliable or hardworking or more knowledgeable.
OK, it just means that you got a college degree. OK, all college students will have to learn on the job.
And all college students in virtue of their degree have demonstrated the ability to learn.
So seek out other ways to measure their fit for your workplace.
For instance, it could be prior experience.
It could be, you know, something that you see in them in an interview.
It could be some other activity they've done outside of the classroom because the college they attended itself just won't be a good indicator.
It just won't. And you'll figure that out unless you kind of buy into the rankings.
OK, all right. Students, once you have been accepted to or have graduated from one of these more competitive schools in the nation,
learn to lay your privilege down and acknowledge that the school is just a school, that you are not anyone special.
And this is going to be hard because I think the world currently is designed to give you preferential treatment.
They see where you got your degree and they might treat you differently for better or worse, but oftentimes for better.
It will probably open up doors for you.
I know that when I was first looking for summer jobs, teaching SATs and helping students with their college applications,
the school that I went to mattered a lot and it helped open up some doors.
But I would hope that you would learn to kind of keep that in check, right,
in the sense that, you know, you acknowledge for yourself that, you know,
there's nothing particularly special about the college you attended other than that you went to college.
So whether it's economically or relationships or elsewhere, just conversationally,
don't feed into this notion that somehow others should be impressed or treat you differently or see you differently because of the college you attended.
OK, you need to take active measures on your end to dispel that myth, the myth that you're somehow special because of the school you attended.
You have to dispel it for other people by actually making that explicit.
I know it might not be something that you might not find comfortable doing or something that you might not want to do because you benefit from it.
But if you were to try to be more honest about it, I think that would be a good place to kind of start.
And then finally, to the general public, the people who have an advantage,
like the people who have attended these competitive schools, realistically will not want to give up on any advantage.
So there's a reason that, for instance, people with wealth will actively oppose drastic changes to the system that will diminish the ability to use that wealth and power
in order to help themselves or their children get into these most competitive schools.
OK, you know, we could get rid of legacy admissions, but I'm not going to I'm not going to lie to you.
That's going to probably have minimal impact, right?
Because the truth of the matter is that you could experience the disparity in opportunities elsewhere in the extracurricular activities.
Like a lot of people don't know this, but sports often benefits the wealthy more than the poorest in getting into a good college.
And the reason for that is sports are extremely expensive, expensive to get training, expensive to go to competitions, expensive to get equipment,
especially certain sports that require a lot of very expensive equipment.
So it exacerbates the differences in a lot of cases.
So people with these advantages, it is not because they're bad people.
But if you design a system where they benefit from it, they're not going to want to give up that benefit.
It doesn't make sense for them to do so.
They'll want to keep the system in place.
So what can you do if you're not part of the people who, you know, I'm suggesting lay down this sort of privilege and advantage?
The best way to do so is to not be impressed by a school brand, not treat people differently based on the school brand.
Basically, I mean, I don't want you to like actively mock them or dismiss them altogether.
But you maybe should for the people that are, you know, expecting admiration or flaunting their school brand.
But I think generally there's nothing wrong with these schools, right?
It's more like I like to think of the movie Wizard of Oz, when the curtain open up and you see the great wizard is really nothing but an insecure man.
And, you know, what I really want is that sort of undressing of a lot of these quote unquote elite colleges.
I want us to really see them for who they really are.
Right. At the end of the day, if you are in a position to be able to attend one of these more competitive colleges and you benefit from it and you have all these advantages and you have all these doors that open up for you,
I would hope in the sincerest, you know, I'm saying this sincerely, I would hope that you would want to make a change because you're the people that are actually empowered, that can have a bigger impact.
You can make a change in how colleges do their, you know, have their mission process process, right?
Who they decide to select, how much they care about these rankings and the kind of things they do in order to keep those rankings.
Right. I would hope that as an alumni, you would do something that would serve the general public good rather than something that's more self-serving to the particular universities.
I don't think anybody is a bad person necessarily. I think more often than not, people are very good.
I think that people want to do good, but I also understand from my own personal experience that people will do what is best for them given the circumstances they're placed in.
And one of the things that they're placed in is an educational system that benefits certain types of students that benefits certain behaviors from the people who have wealth and power.
And it has been detrimental in reducing opportunities and, you know, reducing the kind of openings that can exist for the people that are not part of this exclusive club.
So I would hope that you would start speaking out as well and that it could be part of a public discourse.
I think there's reasons to be concerned about the educational system, especially at the collegiate level.
But I'll be honest with you, the collegiate level is just a reflection of a deeper disparity that exists across in our society.
This is not a political stance.
This is me as an educator wanting as many students to have the opportunity to learn and to become the best that they're able to be and to be given those opportunities.
Because I know from my own experience that so many students are capable of so much more than they show if they were just placed in the right set of circumstances.
Right. So I would hope that you would join me in this in this call for change.
And I hope I hope that at some point we can really learn to love and embrace the educational system as something that,
you know, regardless of what else is going on in the world, right,
that this would be a space where our future generations can all learn, grow, mature and just, you know, come to a place of leaning on one another and creating a community that builds each other up rather than,
you know, terror tries to tear each other down or tries to create any sort of, you know, rank system cast or, you know, the sort of status for themselves.
That would be the ultimate dream, at least for me.
And I hope that you can join me in it.