Excellent Sheep summary

We’ve all seen a “tiger parent” at one point or another – mothers and fathers who oversee their child’s life with constant pressure and criticism.  

Surely these parents mean well, but an overbearing parenting style is just as damaging to their children’s well-being as one that is laissez-faire and overindulgent. While these parenting styles might seem like polar opposites, they’re in fact both forms of infantilization, i.e., the process of treating a mentally capable adult as a child.

Most of us would assume that you’d get an elite education from an elite university. However, as former Harvard dean Harry R. Lewis once said: “Harvard no longer knows what a good education is.”

Elite institutions today are more concerned with “efficiency” and revenue rather than with crafting genuine knowledge. While it might be hard to argue against making education “efficient,” at large elite academic institutions, “efficiency” has less to do with education and imparting ideas and more to do with revenue-generating research.

So what exactly is the point of pursuing higher education? Sure, there is the piece of paper, i.e., the degree, that you get at the end, but surely there is something more to it all.

College is supposed to impart students with critical thinking skills as well as help them to develop a habit of skeptical reflection and the aptitude to put the specific knowledge and skills they learn into practice.

The best way to ensure that you find a fulfilling career is through critical reflection and a strong understanding of who you are as an individual. These days graduates are obsessed with finding the right vocation after college, but few think about what it is that they really want out of life.  

In the case of graduates from elite institutions, many choose prestigious career paths such as consulting, or go on a quest for fortune by becoming hedge fund managers. Ultimately, by focusing on fame and fortune, many also go on to feel unfulfilled or find that their work has no real meaning.

Common knowledge holds that graduates with liberal arts majors, such as history or philosophy, are less employable than their peers who study science or business.

However, liberal arts graduates are in fact highly valued in the workforce, and are even recruited more than the majority of other disciplines. For example, a recent survey revealed that 30 percent of companies were recruiting liberal arts graduates specifically. This came second only to engineering and computer science, while beating out finance and accounting, which amounted to only 18 percent.

As our societies become more and more secular, many people are looking to alternative explanations to answer life’s big questions. Scientific discoveries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries paved the way for modern science and has radically changed the way we understand the world around us.

These discoveries were in part made possible by the intense skepticism from the Enlightenment era of seventeenth-century Europe, which caused many traditional belief structures to crumble.

Top colleges such as Harvard and Yale are known for sending graduates out into the world who become business leaders and even presidents. But do these graduates actually become good leaders? To answer this question, let’s look at some statistics and economics:

Simply put, elite colleges lack economic diversity now more than ever. Even with their efforts to increase diversity, the majority of students at elite institutions are still immensely privileged. Consider, for example, that 40 percent of Harvard students come from households in the top six-percent income bracket in the United States! What’s more, these figures are consistent across elite colleges: a 2006 study found that 67 percent of students at elite institutions come from families with incomes in the top quartile.