The College Fix

James Poulos writes for Forbes about his long, circuitous journey through higher education, and his youthful quest to break into the social strata of the American elite.

Our higher-ed system is now the most garish illustration of how competition is corrupted by the dual love of money and equality. Meritocracy is impossible in theory or practice without social structures that set and enforce sportsmanlike rules of the game. Meritocracy requires not only competition but rational competition. And what our cultural critics of higher education are discovering is that academia — the most important place Americans go to get socialized the same way — has now become an absurd game, a framework for irrational competition.

Smart kids without the right cultural concierge service get aced out of elite admissions. Eager beavers work hard for JDs that turn out to be awful investments. High-achieving nerds who spend a lifetime at the top of their classes discover that even if you earn that PhD, even if you earn it from an elite school, you might still end up fighting for professional scraps — a non-tenure-track gig teaching third-tier students at a fourth-tier college in a cultural Siberia like Alabama or Arkansas…

I went into college as a very smart and very focused kid from a middle-class family with a low net worth. I completed college in three years, thanks to what was then a very generous AP-credit regime at Duke. College was my first exposure to really rich people, including really rich potential mates. But nobody was there to warn me about what kind of girls I might wind up dating unless I found a wife at my elite university. Nobody was even there to help me figure out how things worked in the elite society I had suddenly, if largely technically, gained access to…

The upshot of my strange and technically unsuccessful journey through elite education is that knowledge isn’t the ticket out of a limited social sphere that I once thought it was. But wisdom — or, to put it less pretentiously, learned life lessons — probably is…

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