A boy tries to demonstrate his pluck in the face of adversity by writing that he’s undiscouraged by the fact that his genitalia are small. But in his sensible and sensitive book, “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be,” Frank Bruni, a columnist for The New York Times, wants to help young people understand the urgent truth of his title. I think it has a good central idea, but it drags on and on and his perspective is elite. Where you go isn't who you'll be. But in his sensible and sensitive book, “Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be,” Frank Bruni, a columnist for The New York Times, wants to help young people understand the urgent truth of his title. (Jessica Hill, AP) This is a true story. And even most private colleges, because they depend on tuition revenue to serve their students, are less worried about how few applicants they can admit than about how many of those admitted will enroll.
But one of its strengths is that Mr. Bruni includes among those who are damaged by the college chase the putative “winners” as well as the “losers.” He doesn’t deny the networking value of attending a prestigious college — especially for those with the dubious dream of working on Wall Street — but he knows that this value is overstated, that the exhilaration of winning the prize is often a prelude to exhaustion, and that on every elite college campus the mental-health services are overstretched. I read this book with frequent nods of recognition. He writes lyrically about his experience in North Carolina, which, to his prep school friends, was tantamount to exile, but where he found passionate teachers. Yet the reality is that most colleges admit about 70 percent of their applicants. Yet even such colleges do everything they can to pump up the numbers still more. Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be Quotes Showing 1-8 of 8 “My fear is that these kids are always going to be evaluating their self-worth in terms of whether they hit the next rung society has placed in front of them at exactly the time that society has placed it. This is a true story. So why the frenzy? Americans need to hear that--and this indispensable manifesto says it with eloquence and respect for the real promise of higher education. They encourage applications through social media, extend application deadlines and buy lists from companies that administer standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, then urge the high scorers to apply, though very few have a chance of getting in. The lure of getting into the colleges that everybody wants to go to is understandable. Find sample tests, essay help, and translations of Shakespeare.
Most Ivy League colleges accept around 2,000 students each from an applicant pool that in some cases is approaching 40,000. So if all of this leaves most parents feeling like the system is rigged, what Bruni does best in this book is provide a reality check of surveys, statistics and stories that proves the axiom: "It's not which college you go to, it's what you do when you get there." But they're a vocal minority, whose concerns are the push behind a $4 billion-a-year test-prep industry, a tripling of the ranks of private consultants in the past five years and an avalanche of applications to what seem like the only 10 colleges in America. What comes streaming through, though, is Bruni's great compassion for the students caught up in all this craziness. “Where we go to college will have infinitely less bearing on our fulfillment in life than so much else: the wisdom with which we choose our romantic partners; our interactions with the communities that we inhabit; our generosity toward the families we inherit and the families that we make.” That’s something we all know in retrospect but that’s hard to know in prospect for anyone caught in what Mr. Bruni calls the “college admissions mania.” “Mania” is the right word. A few minutes into the conversation, the parent says, "Let me go get my son, I want him to hear this." Did you know, for example, that more than half of the winners of MacArthur Foundation "genius grants" hail from schools whose names don't show up on any "10 Best" lists?