The typical college student focuses on one of many set career paths instead of understanding that our human existence is a beautiful gift we can give to the world. As we’ve become disconnected from this understanding, university graduates have focused ever more on exterior metrics of success. Removing the internal motivation that results in byproducts like happiness, integrity, satisfaction and joy. Grades and “projected average salaries” drive people into fields removed from their humanity and in line with emotional ambiguity. This system has been propagated by all universities, but especially in admissions process for the elite colleges that drive the rest of higher education. From a recent article by AlterNet’s Peter Schmidt,
Elite colleges and professional schools bear a share of the blame for the economic crisis that now plagues them, because it is they who educated and bestowed academic credentials upon many of those who got us into this mess.
It should come as no surprise to them that many on Wall Street and in Washington have proven ethically bankrupt and without regard for people of lesser means, because their admissions policies have done much to ensure such a result.
In determining which applicants they will admit and put on the fast track, most elite higher-education institutions systematically favor people from privileged backgrounds who display selfish, cutthroat behavior. The results are campus environments where disregard for society is socially accepted, where bad people are encouraged to become worse.
Consider, for starters, how most such institutions rely on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, even though they know perfectly well that the nation’s massive test-preparation industry has severely compromised the reliability of such instruments, turning them into tools for measuring, as much as anything, wealth and willingness to seek unfair advantage.
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