Poisoin Ivy: Review of Excellent Sheep
The students at the élite schools were mostly patrician, also white and male, and, owing to these and other factors, not terribly anxious about their post-graduation circumstances. Deresiewicz is right that today’s college students are more risk-averse. That’s partly because there’s much more risk to be averse to. A Yalie of the Nick Carraway generation could afford to “stand outside the world for a few years,” as Deresiewicz puts it. It cost nothing: a Wall Street job awaited.
Today, the markets wait for nobody, and leaving college with nothing except your course credits makes you exactly one of nearly two million Americans, most of them job-seeking, who received a bachelor’s diploma this year. (About a million more took higher degrees.) Credentialism—the pursuit of markers of success for distinction in the eyes of strangers—is what happens when you wipe away the grime of old-boy exclusivity.