So-Called Elite Schools

Hi everyone, I’m E_P_silon. My life is mainly a humanities student at an Ivy League school, with the side quest of doing a bit of math. This article went through a somewhat winding birth. At first I wanted to write a general explainer about elite universities. It eventually turned into a piece about choosing colleges through the lens of what drives personal growth. What I want to offer is a way of looking at universities, especially the very top schools in overall rankings, from an angle beyond the utilitarian project of completing life’s instrumental goals. I chose this angle for two reasons. First, the utilitarian lens, whether it is about choosing a major, entering academia, finding a job in the broader sense, or even the comfort of daily life, has already been explained in great detail in On Choosing Colleges. If that is the perspective you want, you can go read that article directly. Second, when this project was first founded, my good friend Dongyuan Li said something that moved me a lot: “If life were a game, every different character would definitely have a different way to play. I hope we can uncover more of those different ways to play, so that everyone feels they have a possibility of succeeding.” Treating life as a fair game is not necessarily accurate if we are talking about worldly success, but I do believe it is basically credible when we talk about the aspect of personal growth. So I want to use the perspective of an ordinary person at an elite school to talk about the common playbook inside elite schools, and what elite schools mean for students who do not belong to that playbook. Maybe this will help you understand what an elite school actually gives you over a lower-ranked university, or help you feel more at peace choosing a school that fits you but is not as famous.

What Is an Elite School

I believe quite a few students still have a certain fixation on elite schools. Chinese kids especially do, and of course I am no exception. But we may not actually know what elite schools mean for a life. It is like how many Chinese kids think that once they get into Tsinghua, life is set, only to arrive and discover that life has just begun. To answer the question, I think two pieces of essential information matter: what elite schools represent in social recognition, and what kinds of students elite schools select for. The first half of this article will revolve around these two points, so let me first offer two simple conclusions: what elite schools give you is an identity and a sense of identity as a social elite, and what elite schools select for is a student with a strong intellectual base, at least one real skill (by this I mean a skill better than 99.9%, or probably more, of your peers), and a sense of social responsibility. We can see that the second standard often serves the ideal form of the first. Someone extraordinarily capable, quick-minded, and committed to making society better and helping others is often the ideal image of a social elite in our imagination. A quick detour: if you want to apply to an elite school, this image is also the target of your entire admission file. But as UWC students, we should have little difficulty noticing that any ideal-oriented selection process will inevitably deviate from its original goal because of its utilitarian by-products. In other words, the selected group will perform as if they fit the idealistic selection criteria because the result of selection carries utilitarian advantages. A more generalized explanation is that once every selection process is metricized, its execution will only produce results that fit the metrics; see Goodhart’s law and Campbell’s law. In the context of elite-school admissions, this means students will display traits on their profiles that fit an elite school’s ideals in order to obtain the identity of a social elite, even if their motivation is only to better off themselves. I do not intend to make a value judgment about this deviation, but understanding it is exactly the key entry point to understanding the formulaic playbook of students at elite schools.

The Elite-School Formula

True idealists are always few and far between. University, as an early stage of socialization, also very quickly exposes students to all kinds of real-world pressure, so a group of people who originally had ideals will gradually put those ideals away while planning their futures. As a result, the most common formula at elite schools starts from social recognition and then cashes it out. On the internet we often hear the word “circle,” or “friend group,” and we have a vague understanding of it. Put this word into a socialized context and it becomes resource sharing. Imagine that while preparing for a physics exam, you find an extremely useful study guide. Is your first reaction to open-source it to the whole class, or to share it first with your close friends? More extremely, if you had a 7 that you could give to anyone in the class, would you rather give it to your friend or to a classmate you barely know? Likewise, if your buddy in college is the child of a boutique investment-bank owner, and their father or mother is hiring interns, would they rather spend time and effort screening resumes, selecting a qualified candidate, and putting that person through three rounds of interviews, or give you, their kid’s close friend, a chance? The answer is often the latter.

At this point, you might think the purpose of an elite school is that you get to meet a few more guys whose families own investment banks. But that would be completely wrong. The liberal arts education many elite schools provide gives you the ability to speak fluently about art, music, famous books, and similar topics, which helps you build connections among elites. The atmosphere of being surrounded by elites on campus lets you become familiar in advance with the social and communication environment at work. The pre-admission selection ensures that you have outstanding learning ability and quick reactions, so you can adapt quickly to work where the technical aspect is weaker. The elite-school identity is a multi-layered guarantee in elite industries, a pass that lets the existing elite class take you seriously. Of course, it is not the only pass, and it is not a pass to every industry. In technology, where hard technical requirements exist, individual technical skill and ability matter far more than this airy identity. But in industries that mainly run on networks and social interaction, such as finance, law, and business, professional skill is not the central consideration. What matters most is how you communicate with others inside a shared set of elite values and win their trust. On top of that, they only need a candidate who is smart enough. So we can arrive at an important conclusion: the important benefit elite schools bring is an elite identity. Therefore, maximizing the social competitive advantage brought by an elite school means following this elite identity to climb the social ladder and become a social elite in the traditional sense. With the help of an elite school, this path often works.

Under this logic, we get a formulaic playbook for elite-school students, especially non-STEM majors: after entering school, start networking actively as early as possible, attend social events, understand the social style of the elite class, and eventually enter traditional elite industries such as finance, sales or PM roles at major tech companies, or even the path toward top law schools through legal internships. From the usual angle of college choice to employment, an elite school’s alumni network is concentrated in the social elite class, so opportunities in that class are more open to elite-school students. By now we have understood the growth trajectory of many peers at elite schools. But the center of this article is not only growth trajectory; it is the meaning of college for individual growth. So below I will analyze whom this playbook belongs to, and whom it does not fit.

A Lens for Understanding Personal Growth

Before discussing personal growth, I want to share a way of thinking about the choices we make in life: the center of choice is not gaining, but giving up. There is no such thing as a choice that gives you everything. The economic concept of opportunity cost describes this very well. At every moment, we are giving up all the other opportunities our current time and energy could have pursued, opportunities different from the activity we are currently doing, such as reading this article. From this angle, in a seemingly perfect system, what we are actually experiencing is a life state with extremely low opportunity cost. For example, if right now you can simultaneously get an IB 40+, finish the TOEFL, become the leader of a large competitive zhixing, write a research paper, and maintain a mental state that is somewhat collapsing but not clinically ill, what that really shows is that your current life has not yet produced an event whose opportunity cost is high enough that you must give up other things to preserve a perfect result. Let us look at a counterexample. In my first semester of college, by a strange accident, I chose the hardest math class open specifically to first-year students. In the first class I understood only 30% of what was happening, and the professor recommended that I leave the course. At the time I had no replacement class available, so I could only grit my teeth and compete for a semester with the best math students in my year. The result was predictable: even after spending enormous time and energy every week, I only barely kept up and had no way to earn an excellent grade. But it was exactly this class that shook me deeply, led me to double major in mathematics, and gave me very close friends in the class. The growth I got from that course was purchased with an ugly grade on my transcript and a great deal of hardship, and all of this is by far not perfect.

Even if this sounds somewhat unrealistic, the shattering of surface-level perfection is only a matter of time for anyone, because all successful people want to keep succeeding, keep challenging higher limits, and pay costs in that process. Take my roommate as an example. He was a member of a national IMO team. After arriving at college, he switched into CS with almost no background and achieved shocking results: in the first semester, he ranked first in a large class of 168 students, almost all sophomores and juniors; he finished junior-year requirements as a first-year student; and he began taking graduate-level courses as a sophomore. At the same time, in math, he speed-ran the abstract algebra and topology sequences, plus Fourier analysis and real analysis. His GPA? 4.06. Sounds pretty good, right? After starting college, he gained 40 kilograms, his daily rhythm basically disappeared, and his physical health declined sharply. His family also has a history of diabetes. If he continues in this state, it is only a matter of time before his body or mental state collapses, and at that moment all surface-level perfection will cease to exist. Even if he does not seem to have given up anything directly related to this perfection in the way I did, his choices made him passively give up health. When making choices, deciding because we long for good outcomes is often easy, but it is also unrealistic. Every good outcome requires giving up something corresponding to it, and before the thing we gave up starts stabbing sharply into our life, we often find it hard to notice. So thinking about your own growth process is also thinking about what costs you are more able to pay: what I am good at learning from, and what I find difficult to give up. I think understanding these two points is essential for thinking about one’s own growth playbook.

Peers at Elite Schools

Now let us return to elite schools. We might briefly forget the formulaic playbook discussed earlier and return to the premise of student selection, then further focus on the group we have limited out: students who want to become social elites. Our question is this: apart from the common qualities listed earlier, what is their biggest shared personality trait? The answer I have observed in life is ambition. Of course, this conclusion does not apply to peers who can already enter the elite class through family resources. What they display is more like a living sample of the elite values. For everyone else, squeezing into the elite from a non-elite environment requires putting down, or even washing away, one’s existing values, and quickly fitting into the identity of an elite. I should emphasize that I also do not want to insert any value judgment here. The process of socialization itself requires us to reshape and supplement the values we originally built in non-social environments, and the most important part of that is adding utilitarian elements. We could even argue that this process of reshaping values is necessarily going to happen; the only difference is what environment completes it. Since this group of students enters elite schools in order to rise on the social ladder, the goals they set for their lives are highly coupled with the general social definition of excellence. They do not need to make too many value judgments about what they are pursuing, because most of the value judgments they need are embodied in social recognition and economic reward. Within this externalized value system, some of the idealized values we emphasize at UWC become hard to sustain, and in their place appears an extremely utilitarian system, because the mainstream values of this society are themselves extremely utilitarian. Remember the resource sharing we talked about earlier? You may think it is something that naturally happens between friends. But when you need to obtain social resources, the direction reverses: you need to make friends for the sake of resources. Well that doesn’t sound too bad, we can all see it happening in many parts of our life. What about trying to befriend 150 people to find one that saves your sorry ass during recruiting? That’s surely something different. In the workplace, this process has a pleasant-sounding name: networking, building your relationship network. Actually, this is also normal. In social life, many good startups, successful businesses, and great inventions are drafted and completed by groups of friends together. Maybe your parents’ generation, especially if they grew up during reform and opening, also succeeded because close friends became partners. But in this ladder-climbing process, everything is reversed again. It is not that trusted people bring cooperation, which then brings success; it is that you build relationships with people who can help you achieve utilitarian goals, win their favor, and take a share. Trust and identification rarely participate in this process. Why? Because the other party, the upper-position person you network with, knows very well that the purpose and motivation of this social interaction is not sincerely obtaining some social relationship you want, but a transaction. They hold something you want, and in this social setting they are evaluating the chips you possess. The chips themselves come in many forms: the emotional value you can provide, your appearance if you are of the gender corresponding to their sexual orientation, even potential sexual value, potential business returns, and the pleasure of a person in a higher position examining someone below them. This social game is unequal by nature, so you need a sufficiently large desire, a desire for success in the general social sense, to swallow these uncomfortable things. It is worth mentioning that as your years of work increase, the chips you can exchange will also increase. They may include professional skills, all the friends you have, business opportunities you can provide, and so on. But as a college student, these are not things you can currently offer to the people you network with, so you also cannot expect respect based on them. Especially as a student studying in another country, if you want to socialize with locals, you need to understand the local social culture, cater to the other person’s preferences and topics, and display speech and behavior that fit elite values. None of this happens overnight. It requires a large amount of observation and the erasure of the ways of life you used to hold.¹ Therefore, we find that many things proceed in the opposite direction from what we expected. It feels as if things should not happen this way, but they do. In philosophy, this process is called alienation. And in chasing this utilitarian system, what we choose is to maximize the alienation of our social style, interpersonal relationships, and self by social value. This process will not be easy or pleasant, so people who choose this formulaic playbook need enough ambition. Only people who want this success enough can quickly swallow this pain, give up the parts of their old selves that do not meet social expectations, and eagerly reshape themselves into elites. Of course, there is also space for two-way selection on this path. I have friends who, during recruiting, only pay attention to opportunities provided by people they actually enjoy talking to. But that means they must give up many opportunities that look very good. Not only that, many of them can do this because they were already relatively socialized in the first place, so they actually do not give up that much. Again, life is a multiple-choice question about giving things up, and some personalities make it easier for people to give up certain things. For most people at these elite schools, what they give up is the space to act according to their own values and wishes most of the time, letting mainstream social values take their place.²

Not only that, they are often more likely to succeed on this track. For tracks without hard technical barriers, the most important competition is starting time. If a student who could enter McKinsey or Evercore by recruiting as a first-year student starts recruiting as a sophomore, they will probably only go to a lower-tier bank. If they start as a junior or senior, the final outcome may be very far from the major banks. Let us consider candidate A and candidate B on this premise. Candidate A needs to insert their own value judgment into what they do, i.e. only doing things they can identify with. Candidate B can basically outsource these value judgments completely to society. Therefore, A’s value judgments become resistance during recruiting. In some parts of the process, A will feel discomfort, confusion, and dislike. B can put these emotions aside, and may even actively endorse what A rejects. If A and B begin recruiting at the same time, A’s efficiency will definitely be lower than B’s. In a market where competition is already saturated, B’s achievements will very probably exceed A’s. So we can also observe that a suitable track contains a kind of two-way selection: the people most suited to enter a position will also play the best during the personality-selection process of that track. Therefore, suitable things often make people feel comfortable, or at least not resistant.

Different Ambitions

So if you are admitted to an elite school today, but you are not someone who can put down many of your commitments and fully socialize yourself, is there still a place for you here? Don’t worry. Although our earlier analysis of selection mechanisms suggests that this kind of person is the majority at elite schools, people different from them absolutely exist. Logically, this is also easy to explain: if every selection process produced students that elite schools did not really want, then the selection would be a failure, and elite schools would not allow that failure to continue. Let us return to a small detail in the wording earlier. I only said what kinds of people elite-school selection mechanisms select for; I did not assert what kinds of people elite schools want. In my view, the answer to the latter is very different from the former, and it can also explain to a large extent why the appearance of this elite-school formula still fits the educational goals of elite schools themselves. I think the true educational goal of elite schools is extremely simple: they want to cultivate people who can change the world. Reaching the top of various fields, achieving huge economic success, pushing forward the progress and development of an academic field, changing the politics and livelihood of certain regions, all of these are manifestations of such large-scale change. Therefore, ambition for social success is of course welcome. People who want to change the world often have to first enter the world, and after being tempered by it, see more clearly the relationship between themselves and the world. All liberal arts education and value input are not merely for a certain kind of social recognition, nor are they meant to make students rush to change the world right now. They are meant to plant a seed in their hearts: that the world does not belong only to them and the elites around them, and that one day the elites cultivated here might share the world with others in their own way. Although when someone occupies such a high position, the influence brought by enormous power makes it difficult for them to act through an anti-elite logic and pursue fairness and justice that conflict with their own interests (which is why a lot of people are arguing that the despair in the elite higher education is that it is against itself: future elites receive an anti-elite education, yet still have no choice but to swallow this elite identity), but you really never know. All the struggles mentioned above are also what elite schools hope to see. Precisely because these struggles mean that one has not completely put down the self and accepted social alienation wholesale, they also mean that the ideal of changing the world has not been extinguished. It is still struggling somewhere, waiting for the moment when it can break through the soil.

Elite schools do not welcome only one kind of ambition. They welcome all ambitions, because any such change is not reserved for mediocre people; one has to dream big before acting big. Here, ambition is not only about social success. It is the sum of all desire: a strong hunger for some kind of knowledge, the effort to hold onto one’s ideals, the constant challenge of one’s physical limits in sports, enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and invention as ways to push society forward, and behind all of these, a powerful confidence in oneself that matches that desire. In fact, this is the strongest feeling the Ivy League has given me. In daily life, the people around you seem no different from normal college students. But if you walk into their lives, you will find that most of them have at least one extremely distinctive ability, a trait that lets them stand tall even in a place crowded with talent. Admittedly, in terms of personality and values, a more socialized university may not be as colorful as UWC. But most people here hide something that can serve as inspiration for you. It is similar to the deep awe you feel when hiking together through magnificent natural scenery; sometimes standing by talents are already an improvement of self. When you see what the people around you can do, talk with them about interesting and deep topics, and gain a kind of double aspect respect brought by both sides’ talent, you are also being changed in subtle ways. This intellectual shock is, in my view, very important for studying highly theoretical disciplines such as philosophy and mathematics, and broad social sciences such as sociology and anthropology. These disciplines rely not only on a large amount of academic background and tradition, which lets students naturally feel the appeal of the ideas, but also on students being constantly passionate about intellectual activities. In an environment with many intellectual companies, daily life itself becomes part of this learning. Not only that, when you see many different people moving forward in many different directions in life, these observations also become a unique perspective and source of inspiration for understanding human beings, providing motivation for the entire learning process.

More generally, what is the meaning of elite schools? Among elite-school students, one line is often circulated to fight imposter syndrome: the admission office does not make mistakes. When you are selected into this place, please be sincerely proud of your own talent, and also proud of the talents of others. Let this experience of pouring out life force connect you with other people. In my view, this is a rare kind of happiness. Therefore, choosing an elite school will never be a wrong choice. The other value it can provide is exactly what the formulaic playbook ignores: a way to invest in your own growth over the long term, and a broad horizon you can see while you are still young. When the angle from which you understand the world and the angle from which you understand yourself both change, you naturally gain more confidence to give up things that are not important to you at all, and turn instead toward pursuing your own happiness.

A Final Note

Thank you for being willing to read this article to the end. Here, I still want to emphasize that the audience of this article is not students in STEM whose goal is employment after graduation or a PhD. If those are your needs, please go read On Choosing Colleges. I hope this article can offer you some realities you may face in the future, some lenses for interpreting them, and some idealistic hope. While writing this piece, I also deeply felt that in this more reality-oriented comparative analysis, I do not perform as well as my two friends. So I hope to write more airy but, in my view, fundamental things for most people. Want a sample? Please look forward to “Traitors of the System.”