The Elite College Student - Great At Jumping Through Hoops...

...but not developing his or her own point of view.

I found this quite a compelling show to watch/listen to.  Many of the themes I've been railing about over the years regarding undergraduate education come up in this discussion.  And there are some themes, such as the relationship between parenting a la Amy Chua and how the kids go about their college years, which is intensely interesting and I haven't written about it much at all except in regard to my own situation when I was in high school.

Bloggingheads.tv via kwout

I know Loury a little.  He was an Assistant Professor at Northwestern when I was a graduate student there.  I had never seen Deresiewicz talk before.  He sounds like a faculty member, which he once was but no longer is.  He does seem to be getting a lot of mileage from his book Excellent Sheep.  One wonders what is next for him.

I thought Loury's style in doing this interview quite interesting.  He never really contested any of the assertions made by Deresiewicz, though he paused a few times without saying anything, as if he had told himself ahead of time to hold his tongue.  The questions he asked were all what I'd call framing questions.  They were aimed at sharpening the argument, not at derailing it.  From my perspective, the diagnosis of the problem part of the discussion is pretty much spot on.  The more speculative part of the discussion, what might be a cure, was less satisfying and seemed totally infeasible to me in the current environment.

There is a specific discussion of the Economics major at around the 18:00 minute mark.  It is especially revealing about the mercenary tendencies of the students.  I would say the argument applies to the students I've seen at Illinois pretty much intact, with the exception that standardized test scores here are lower in Liberal Arts and Sciences (the college where the Econ department is situated) than they are in Engineering and Business.  To a certain extent, the statistics that Deresiewicz cites about the Econ major probably don't consider whether there is also an undergraduate Business major or not.  I suspect at many of the schools he focuses on don't have an undergraduate Business major and Economics then serves as a proxy for it, which it also does at Illinois to some extent because there are many students who want into the College of Business but can't get in.

The one bit of this that I found distracting is the angle of the camera on Loury.  It is not so terrible in the screen shot above, but when he leans back in his chair his face takes up only about a quarter of his side of the video.  It would be better if the camera were set so he is looking squarely into it.  He probably cares about this not a whit.  But he does seem to care about his viewers.  So he should make this adjustment for them, if not for himself.