Excellent Sheep

Excellent Sheep describes how fundamentally broken elite education is, why it makes students feel depressed and lost, how educational institutions have been alienated from their true purpose, what students really must learn in college and how we can go back to making college a place for self-discovery and critical thinking.

First of all, the problems with our educational system aren’t limited to elite schools like Harvard, Yale (where the author is a professor) and Columbia. The system as a whole is fundamentally broken, and it shows. According to a 2010 study by the American Psychological Association, almost 50% of students report a feeling of hopelessness and over 30% admit being so depressed that they find it hard to function normally throughout the year.

Of course, the already tough strain that’s put on students these days is taken to an extreme at schools like Stanford, where students tend to suffer from something called duck syndrome: On the surface, they seem to be cruising along, but beneath the water they’re struggling.

Hard work isn’t that hard when it’s fun. But when you don’t know what kind of life you want, it’s impossible to find that kind of work.

Because most students and recent graduates don’t even have the time to do the kind of self-searching college is actually meant for, they end up in jobs they don’t really care for. For example, almost half of all Harvard graduates end up in finance or consulting, even though very few of them indicated any interest in these industries when they started out as freshmen.

The reason students feel lost lies, at least in part, with the way the colleges they attend are run. Especially prestigious schools suffer from monetization, because the more money a college has and makes, the more it’s run like a business, not a school. For example, TU Munich has a budget of almost 800 million €, in case of Harvard and co., we’re talking about billions. With money comes pressure to keep and grow that money, so elite colleges try to be efficient by spending most of their budget on research, which in turn generates more funding and revenue. That means economically profitable majors are preferred over liberal arts ones, the professors have to be great researchers, but not necessarily great teachers, and students are treated like customers. In spite of being artificially hard to get in (Harvard admits about 5% of all applicants), once students enroll and pay thousands of dollars, their average GPA soars (to 3.43 in 2007). If on a 0.0-4.0 scale, the average is 3.43, the scale is either wrong, or the numbers inflated. This adds even more pressure to perform, and so most students don’t…