Literary Review #5

Citation: Bruni, Frank. Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. New York: Grand Central, 2015. Print.

Summary: The few chapters scattered throughout the book that I have read discuss the negativities about class and school ranks, that is that the merit of students cannot be simplified to a single test score and a school cannot be deduced to a single number and a single rank. Ranks as much as society would like to think cannot accurately represent all aspects of students’ or school’s abilities. The book discusses how Ivies might not be the best choice for students as these schools place a greater significance on finding their students money grossing careers rather than providing them with the power of profound knowledge.

Author: Frank Bruni is a UNC, Chapel Hill graduate as well as a Columbia alum after receiving his masters in journalism. He is currently an op-ed journalist for the New York Times and has been for five years now. Bruni is a two-time best seller and has written many pieces on higher education.

Key Terms:

            College Rankings/ Student Rankings— a tool that society deems so valuable however the system in itself is strongly influenced by money. That is those schools that are very well funded like the Ivies of tend to hold a top rank because of it. One must really look at the details of what exactly is being ranked because most of the time the true importance of a school is overlooked. This pattern holds true for student rankings as well. A single test core can deem one student more worthy of attending the elite than another when in retrospect should one’s sense of intelligence and value to a school be determined by one number? It’s time for the answer to be no.

           

Quotes:

“The assumption is that the No. 5 school must somehow be better than the No.25 school, which in tunr must be an infinitely safer bet and more enviable boast than anything below 50. And that belief is unshakable, surviving countless attempts to shake it” (Bruni, 81).

“Administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, it shows a striking change in the stated priorities of students of the last half century. For example, in the mid 1960s, only 42 percent of freshman said that being able to “make more money” was a “very important” goal in their decisions to go to college. That number rose to just over 73 percent in the survey results published in March 2014” (Bruni, 164).

Hiram Chodosh, the president of Claremont McKenna College explains why a numbers based and rank based approach is used and normalized in the American society “You measure what you can easily count, and then often fail to measure what really counts” (Bruni, 84).

           

Value: This academic source is valuable to my research paper as it displays statistics of the unfortunate growth of students going to school just to make money rather than further their education in something they are passionate in. This urge to make money drives competition and creates this infatuation with ranks, class and student alike. However, this is not what is going to help society. Those achieving in terms of selfishness and those unable to attend prestigious schools due to their lack of money is everything society should be making their best efforts to avoid.