THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS | OPINION
Sunday Points

Q&A: Looking beyond the Ivy League with Frank Bruni
Published: 01 May 2015 05:09 PM
Updated: 01 May 2015 05:26 PM

Tens of thousands of students will apply this year to the country's top schools, but only a small percentage of them will receive a coveted acceptance letter.

Rather than viewing college acceptance as the first step in a journey of learning and growth, many young people — and their well-meaning parents — see acceptance into the right school as the single most important factor in how they will fare in life.

Many very successful people have nonetheless charted courses to success that did not require Ivy League degrees.

Maybe we can all afford to relax a little about where our kids will go to school.

Q: According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are more than 3,000 four-year universities in this country. How did we become so fixated on the eight private Ivy League schools and maybe a handful of others with similar reputations?
We're more status-conscious in this country than we've been. That seems to be getting worse and is reflected in the approach to higher education. Some of it has to do with the economy. For a decade now, Americans have more often than not said they think the country is on the wrong track. They're not confident that prosperity will be the same for their kids as it was for them. In that mood, they're looking for any possible leg up that they can get their kids.

Q: People talk a lot about the connections that young people can make in these elite schools. How much do those actually count?
It intrigues me that people think that networks are the province only of elite universities. I meet people all the time who were able to make valuable contacts and establish valuable connections at schools that are outside the top 25 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. ... Networks matter, and you can connect with great ones at some of the most respected and venerated schools in this country. But you can establish networks in many other ways and in many other types of schools.

Q: We would hope that all this stiff competition is just an incentive for students to work hard, but so often students and families end up feeling like their whole lives ride on whether they get into the school that they want.
If this desire to get into the most selective schools, the schools with the acceptance rates under 10 percent or 15 percent, if all that was doing was making students buckle down to some hard work and serious learning, then that would be OK to an extent. What it often does is have students trying to live their high school years according to a very exacting script — the script that they think will impress the admissions committee. Sometimes real learning falls by the wayside; some kids aren't being given the room and the freedom to discover what their real passions are. ... We're not just motivating them to buckle down. We're motivating them to think in very superficial ways that are antithetical to real learning.

Q: To people who are saying, "This is not my family's reality," it's true: Not every college-bound student gets caught up in this. Lots of students are happy to get into a decent school and then find some way to pay for it. We're talking about a problem of privilege. But I think this problem trickles down in a lot of ways to other aspects of higher education. I think people do evaluate the schools they're going to — whether the supposed pinnacle or below — all according to acceptance rate and exclusivity. I'm really troubled by the way the U.S. News and World Report rankings have people believing that exclusivity equals quality. ... That's not a mindset that's conducive to using college as the learning experience it should be.

I went to Texas Christian University, and it is a big deal in this part of this country — and you talk about SMU in a similar way, that sometimes choosing a school that is respected in your geographic region has some cachet. Absolutely. It showed up particularly when I was interviewing and profiling the educational backgrounds of politicians. ... If you're going to make a career that's tied to a certain geography, you're often every bit as served or better served by a school in that area than by one with a more elite reputation and lower acceptance rate elsewhere.

Q: You also talk about state schools that can offer a great deal. You specifically highlight Arizona State University, which doesn't necessarily pop into people's heads as an elite school but has a pretty stellar success rating among its graduates.
It does. Many of its graduates do fantastically. It has an honors college within the university called the Barrett Honors College that has amazing course offerings and a student body whose profile in terms of SAT scores, grade point averages in high school, is every bit on par with the student body in any Ivy League university. I chose ASU for a very particular reason: It has a reputation nationally as the ultimate party school. But that's only a part of ASU. When you're looking at a state university at that scale, if you're a motivated student, that place will have byways and resources that give you everything you could possibly need. You might have to look a little harder than you would at a school that serves it up on a silver platter. But it became clear that if you went to a school that had everything you needed but made you work a little harder to find it, that may be its own advantage because it honed your ingenuity, your determination.

This Q&A is condensed from a recent episode of "Think," with host Krys Boyd. You can listen to the full episode at kera.org/think. Krys Boyd can be contacted at think@kera.org.