Are Yale students "excellent sheep"?

The disadvantage of elite education

This newsletter is not an attack on Yale but rather a broader critique of elite education building on the work of William Deresiewicz. In fact, we hosted Yale alumna and the co-founder of Falcon on Network Capital. We are investors in Falcon and Priyanka is one of the earliest members of our community. Check out her masterclass that discusses how to disrupt the modern fintech stack.

Historically, education offered an amorphous bundle of training in core skills, soft skills and critical thinking, along with an opportunity to network and also to demonstrate our value to employers through a recognized qualification. What we are witnessing now, however, is a “great unbundling” of education, with different companies and communities attempting to capture one part of the bundle.

In today’s newsletter, we will explore what William Deresiewicz meant when he said that Yale students are excellent sheep. He is a former professor at Yale and has an important point of view. This is of course meant for all elite education institutes, not one in particular. Before we move forward, feel free to review some of the other essays we have written on disruption of education.

Deresiewicz has written a long and provocative book on the disadvantages of elite education. Some of the reasons he highlights are -

1. It makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.

2. However much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.

3. An elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.