Ramblemuse Touch Points

The first of two starting points for this post is David Evans’s An ‘Unacceptable’ Degree? in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Evans is discussing hiring practices and the rejection of potential candidates who lack a “trophy degree.”

One of the commentators mentions several reasons that a candidate would be rejected that, even if shared, wouldn’t help the candidate prepare for future searches. The most striking of those is, “Technically you have an appropriate graduate credential and your presentation was OK, but the school you attended just isn’t acceptable to our administration.”

There’s an implication in this that academic departments and even businesses might, at times, be turning away more capable candidates in preference to those coming from “the right&lrdquo; institutions. My own reaction to this is, “Great! Let them!” The place to put pressure on leveling the playing field toward maximizing capability and return on investment isn’t in hiring practices but in funding, a point raised by one of those commenting on Evans’s article.

The place to push back against blind elitism is in the review and funding process — ensuring that it doesn’t just become a process of the elite donating to the elite. Given that, such preferential hiring practices can open entrepreneurial doors. Any commodity, including talent, undervalued by some is an opportunity for others. If capable persons are overlooked by some institutions, they become available to those less concerned with trophies and more willing to discern abilities to function in the trenches. Potentially having a lower level of debt, such person may come with somewhat lower salary needs. So, for someone trying to build a new department or new business, rejection by some may improve the ability to create a “knock their pants off” facility. In an educational world in which both new technologies and a need to contain costs will play an increasing role, ROI is going to be something to consider.

The second starting point for this post is another essay by William Deresiewicz, again come across via Don Vandergriff’s blog. This time it’s, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. This time, Dereesiewicz in noting that, while an education at an elite institution may strengthen some capabilities, it can also cripple other capabilites and create perceptual blind spots.

You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. …

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

On the average, tunnel vision education and hiring gives us leaders who are less flexible and less perceptive than they might be, opening the door for others either in the U.S. or the increasingly global economy. To the worst, an elite education may give us leaders seriously out of touch with the world, such as highlighted by Michael Watkins in his Harvard Business Review article, I Want To Live Like Common People: BP and the Great PR Divide.