MosesWrites

Fit Fallacies

Obviate rank, competition, anxiety—seek the best fit—apply to the college of your dreams, the most suitable for you and free from vulgar external pressures.

Best fit, we say these words as if to sprinkle holy water upon the anxious and unmoored, offering the salvation of something they otherwise could never find.

Uttered so often, but also so uncritically, as I prepare for a session on this very topic at a Delhi Public Schools Society—US College Board event in just a few days’ time, I’m compelled to reflection.

I champion self-actualization but I worry as with so many things, well-intentioned verbiage masks unspoken contradictions and offers false promises that may do more harm than good.

A few key fallacies:

(1) best fit found, fantastic futures await! Fantasy, rather: students ought to see higher education as a dynamic process of continued growth, that will continue to shape them. Openness to adventure, difference, challenge—these make for fit.

From personal experience, over nearly five years at Reed College and in twenty-five years since, as to whether it best fit me, I’ve quite a number of answers and likely will never know for sure. Minus the weather: I really ought to have gone to a place with less rain.

(2) Unconstrained choice, as if any and all schools across the world opened their doors to you, not to mention the preordained notion that college or university itself should be the best fit. Prima facie, the child has already felt a squeeze.

Students ought to have an honest, practical, relational notion of their place in the world. I would have loved to have considered Yale for graduate school, but they didn’t admit me. My now good friend, who did get admitted that year, ended up at Princeton with me. So it goes.

Students ought to learn how to think institutionally, to unmask that fantastically clever euphemism, institutional priorities, to unpack the complex and not always ethically clear worlds of higher education. Maybe Eileen Gu (谷爱凌) didn’t have to worry too much about Stanford, but the majority of us mortals upon the earth need to realize we don’t all have the same ease of access as others, same as compared to the grandson of one of the long-time Fellows of the elect President and Fellows of Harvard College, or daughter of the multi-billionaire hedge fund alumnus courted for a major donation (both of whom I advised, long ago).

We need to see what we really do have, the talents beyond conventional metrics, which will, I fear, always prove more soul-crushing than not.

(3) Unconstrained autonomy or, who, pray tell, will pay the bill? Issue the visa? Ensure subsequent employment? Mitigate risk and guarantee security?

Maybe the best fit brigade already knows this, but how to ensure students don’t feel yet more pressure in their quests? What if they’ve no sense at all of what might fit them, or not? Perhaps they’ve got a strategy to transfer midway through, or any number of other more utilitarian aims. An imposition of values as universal belies all the sloppier reasoning.

(4) Narcissism masked as advice, as in I know you ought to know, contingent pressure upon a student’s actual choice—because children know well, so many of those who preach will then prevail, nudge, even cajole them towards what that narcissist actually believes best. Of course you should apply to Harvard, just in case—even if you don’t go—because, the quiet part out loud—think of how we can promote and advertise that until the end of time. You would be crazy to turn it down! Who cares if you’re not the happiest! It’s Harvard, for goodness’ sake. Make it fit.

Those institutional priorities already surround children in their secondary schools, and amongst those charged with their care. I’m not naïve to why, yet I dislike self-interest masked as virtue, personal ambition covered up as altruistic wisdom. I think the children deserve a bit more honesty.

How miraculous that a high school could have so many students destined to fit at a top 30 university in one country! Or top ten, even, or profiled into liberal arts colleges or STEM programs. When did the fitting get fitted so well, I wonder. When did the divine truths reveal themselves to a leadership so confident in their own unwavering insights?

Maybe you don’t know. Hell, I still don’t know, but I want to equip you with the capacity to navigate whatever challenges you encounter, to ask for help, to know when you need to make another choice, to give your self space to grow and to change your mind.

I’ve so many students who have come helplessly in despair to confess; they’ve no idea or priorities. Or they’ve become so self-assured as to worry me, as if any seventeen- or eighteen-year-old could be that certain of anything. I can’t dream, they lament, no dream school for me, I’m a dreamless hopelessly lost confused without any unique talents typical lonely teenager.

Yes, yes you are. That’s truly amazing and wonderful, too, so let’s have some fun exploring a bit, ice cream flavors, higher education, all in between.

As an intellectual hero of mine puts it, “We're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time / It's miserable and magical” (22).

I still don’t really know, either, I confess. I’ve the confidence not to know, yet still to do.

I could right now put ten college and university names in a hat, let you pick one and, if you’ve really an open mind, you’ll unfold into a great fit. Not bump-free or utopic, but fine fitting experience enough, tailor as you go.

I’ve the same hope for you, in your own way, however it may: an aspiration, as another of my intellectual heroes, Isaiah Berlin, puts it, “to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark” (14).

 

(Well worth reading! Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, Henry Hardy (ed.), London: Hogarth Press; New York, 1979: Viking; 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013)

​Shanghai, 18 April 2026