MosesWrites
"Don’t You Need Me Like I Need You Now"
(with apologies to ROSÉ)
I recently had a conversation with a student that went something like this:
Chris, I want to go to a school full of brilliant, beautiful people, who think I am brilliant and beautiful, and because it’s full of brilliant and beautiful people, it’s not too competitive or stressful, and every evening I can relax in solitude or save the world or join a bacchanalian orgy though wake up the next morning without a hangover, and then get a job at a company full of brilliant, beautiful people, or maybe start my own, and get rich, and marry one of those brilliant and beautiful people and pop out a few kids who we can raise as legacy applicants to our alma mater.
Of course, since I’m a professional who has been in and around higher education for over twenty-five years, a few institutions immediately came to mind (though I’ll leave it to you to guess which ones, not wanting to spark unnecessary controversy).
Then I got to thinking, wow, this kid could really get a job writing for an admissions marketing team!
Perhaps not quite, but I really did get to thinking about the gap between the utopian imaginary and practical reality that often shapes students’ (and parents’) sense of what they’re hoping for in (especially highly selective) admissions. Not for nothing did Jerome Karabel entitle his book on Harvard, Yale, and Princeton “The Chosen.”
Even the University of Chicago doesn’t lead with “where fun goes to die” as they might use to have, if they do focus on academic and intellectual rigor as a distinctive characteristic.
Particularly from my vantage point in Shanghai, so much of the future gets tied up in an undergraduate acceptance letter that it becomes a divine pronouncement on self-worth and predestined success.
All the insanity, competition, out-sized striving—even the fraud and duplicity in some cases—everything that makes the first eighteen or so years of life hell on earth will ultimately resolve itself in the tranquil bliss of college life and eternal happiness. And that’s not to mention the requisite parental pre-planning and pre-natal inducements: elite, private preschool applications are no joke!
However, and back to Chicago, as Marshall Sahlins once remarked with great profundity, “[a] people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy” (Waiting for Foucault, Still, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002 [1999], p. 17).
Ironically, Sahlins, a brilliant and humorous anthropologist and keen observer of human foibles, filed this comment under “Utilitarianism.” That’s to say: folks who consider education a commodity or brand, simply a means to an end, have missed the boat in the first place (to my mind) yet somehow they receive continual and inexhaustible praise for, and confirmation of, their singular achievements. To this day I’m unsure why say Yale hasn’t partnered with Hermès to produce the world’s most expensive university swag, though recently lululemon (perhaps just slightly more affordable and less ostentatious a brand) has been making inroads at suitably fancy schools. Nike just doesn’t quite cut it anymore.
The more closely I read promotional materials from higher education, or listen to presentations, I’m struck by just how blissful things will be, and ought to be, given that I could fly first class once a month between Shanghai and Europe for the same price as an American college or university. Plus, I prefer Champagne in a glass to keg stands and solo cups.
Students have, unsurprisingly, picked up on this copy. Now, I realize schools should provide fun and pleasurable experiences, and environments that offer safety and contentment, as these pair well with serious intellectual work. Plus, few would have much success with slogans like “most kids here are kind of smart,” or, “we promise it will suck less than high school.”
Still, I empathize, because when I promote my own school, I always let families know that the children will eat ice cream for breakfast every day, and they’ll never have a GPA under 2.5… oh wait, that’s a school down the road, which shall also remain nameless.
In fact, I try studiously to say that we foster joy, yet also that learning is tough, especially so when you’re a teenager navigating the travails of adolescence. We’re here to provide support and guidance and, knowing you’ll inevitably get knocked down at some point, to help pick you up, dust you off, and give you the courage to keep going. Such is, I hope, a kinder, gentler approximation of real life.
But that’s a hard sell, and an especially hard sell when all eyes focus on the prize of college and university outcomes. Even the best intentioned and well-meaning parents, who want their children to explore and discover themselves, and who don’t care all that much about rankings—even those parents, of course, and rightfully, have expectations for their children’s future. Education must have some return on investment, even if you’re independently wealthy, whether the pure satisfaction of erudition, of lux and veritas, or the more mundane retrenchment of social privilege.
Ironically, too, as Sahlins rightly suggests, amidst these pursuits of happiness, so many endure unmitigated misery, with anxiety, technology addictions, OCD, and depression a plague upon so many young people. But how many children can grow up to enter a top ten institution without any purposeful grooming, without any cajoling toward Things That Will Stand Out?
Even the most up-from-their-bootstraps candidates who have overcome tremendous adversity entirely of their own initiative will have needed some tinge of practical ambition. Likewise, as the sociologist Shamus Khan smartly argues, artifacts like legacy admissions allow the upwardly mobile to mingle amongst the already elite, helping to propel and solidify the sorts of meritocratic achievement that they deserve. It’s great to be brilliant, but it’s even better to be brilliant and to be buddies with a few billionaires (“Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You Think They Do,” New York Times, 7 July 2023).
In the final analysis, I hope students can be open and truthful about their desires, just as higher educational institutions can reflect openly about their position and power within society. It might not just entail the values and vanity of brilliant and beautiful people, but I think a certain transparency in these matters can then create space for a much deeper, meaningful exploration of why we strive to achieve at the highest levels, what it means if we can or can’t, the promises and perils of progress, the nature and codification of knowledge and, ideally, simply—no pursuits needed—how to be a person capable of uninhibited, infinitely self-satisfying play.
28 June 2025
Christopher Moses © 2025 | All Rights Reserved