Alain de Boton: On Asking People What They Do

This lovely essay explores the most common question that modernity prompts strangers to ask each other:  What do you do?  The author is the philosopher Alain de Botton, who explains that this question is freighted with moral judgment.  In a meritocracy, what you do for a living is not just your job; it's who you …

Irena Smith — The Golden Ticket

This post is a reflection on some of the insights I culled from Irena Smith's new book, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. The book is a memoir a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, who got a PhD in comp lit, taught college, became an admissions reader at Stanford and then …

Johann Neem — Revenge of the Poorly Educated

This post is an essay by one of my favorite historians, Johann Neem.  It's a review of a new book, After the Ivory Tower Falls, written by Will Branch.  In this review, Neem examines the way that the divide between those who attended college and those who didn't has defined and defiled American politics in …

Career Ladders and the Early School Teacher: A Story of Inequality and Opportunity

This post is a piece I wrote for the 1989 book, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Don Warren.  Here’s a link to a PDF of the original.  A slightly different version appeared as a chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning.  I agreed to write the chapter a …

Nathan Greenfield and Val Bur– The Influence of Institutional Prestige in Faculty Hiring

This post is a piece by Nathan Greenfield, reporting on a major study about the influence of institutional prestige on faculty hiring in the US. His article was first published in University World News.  Here's a link to the original. He focuses on a new research analysis recently published in Nature. The study, conducted by a …

Nathan Greenfield — How Institutional Prestige Shapes Faculty Hiring

This post is an article by Nathan Greenfield about how institutional prestige shapes faculty hiring. It was published recently in University World News.  Here's a link to the original. He's reporting on a remarkable study by Daniel Larremore and Hunter Wapman, which involved "300,000 faculty members in 10,612 departments in 368 PhD-granting American universities."  What …

Jorgenson and Abram — The Dark Side of Rigor

This post is a lovely essay by Olaf Jorgenson and Percy Abram about the harmful consequences that follow from the kind of academic rigor imposed on students today in the name of raising standards.  The emphasis is more on hard work than on effective learning.  The motto is "no pain, no gain."  As a result, …

Schools Are at the Root of the Youth Mental Health Crisis

This post is an op-ed written by Deborah Malizia and me that was published on December 2 in the Mercury News.  Here's a link to the original.  It's about how the pressure for rigor and high academic achievement in American schools has been damaging the mental health of students.  Another example of schooling's role in …

Johann Neem — The Model Minority Might Be Too Good at the Game

This post is a smart and timely essay by Johann Neem, which was recently published in The Hedgehog Review.  Here's a link to the original.  As we wait for the Supreme Court to issue its ruling on the Harvard admissions case, it's a good time to think about how elite universities manage the makeup of …

Luck and Pluck — Alternative Stories of Life in the Meritocracy

This post is a piece I published three years ago in Aeon.  Here’s the link to the original.  I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy.  It was nearly impossible to get students to consider …