From Exeter, to Trinity, to Vanderbilt, I’ve been immersed in a very unique culture. It’s a culture that I’ve decided to call PrestigeWorld. PrestigeWorld, like all cultures, is messy and complex. It has it’s popular icons (Harvard, McKinsey, and Goldman Sachs) as well as it’s common lingo, customs, and myths. Like most people immersed in a culture, it seems difficult to imagine a world where our customs aren’t objectively true. Here is a popular belief among those in PrestigeWorld: the lower the acceptance rate, the better the institution, and the better the institution, the better your chances for success and a happy life. This is more than just a popular belief, this is PrestigeWorld’s canon ‒ it’s our Code of Hammurabi and its truth reigns supreme. A book I’ve read in the past couple weeks talks about PrestigeWorld in great depth, it’s called Excellent Sheep and tackles PrestigeWorld head on, but from the perspective of the student. The scope of Excellent Sheep is vast: it deals with the brokenness of the rat race of elite education and internships, the depression and anxiety felt by many students at elite schools, and provides suggestions and advice for students to have a more fulfilling and inspirational education.
But there was one aspect of Excellent Sheep that stuck with me, and that was his take on the emotional psyche of students in PrestigeWorld. One of the most accurate analyses of this book is his diagnosis of the mental and emotional state of many students in elite education. Gifted kids often find themselves in a state of being where they swing incessantly between the poles of grandiosity and depression. Because PrestigeWorld is an environment ripe for comparison, students at elite colleges tend to feel an extreme sense of superiority compared with their peers that are doing worse than them, while simultaneously feeling an immense anxiety and insecurity when they compare themselves to those peers that are doing better than them. The issue is that many students, myself included, make arbitrary metrics for human value. These could be anything: GPA, SAT scores, ACT scores, US News Report Rankings etc. For me it was acceptance rates.
I would value people based on the selectivity of the institution they attended or the firm they worked at. The issues would arise when I began to judge myself by the very criteria I used to judge others. Because there is one serious complication that arises when using unfair and binary standards to judge people that are nuanced: I will never completely pass my own standard. That’s where Excellent Sheep’s diagnosis of swinging between the poles of grandiosity and depression fit so accurately in life. I was judging others for the acceptance rate of their credentials while simultaneously being a student of Trinity College, an institution that, at least in comparison to the Ivies and Ivy-lites, has a very high acceptance rate. I didn’t fully pass my own standard for human value; part of me was above the bar, and part of me below. Part of me was valuable, and part of me was not. People are multifaceted and will almost never completely pass the arbitrary metric you can place on human self-worth, and so people will simultaneously be valuable and not valuable, which then gives way for the cognitive dissonance of grandiosity and disillusionment at the same time.
The cure for the diagnosis in Excellent Sheep is quite simple: stop valuing humans on arbitrary metrics of value. A lot easier said than done. I myself am trying my best to not judge others based on their credentials, scores, and acceptance rates. It takes a very conscious effort to undo the myths, nay ‒ the propaganda, of PrestigeWorld. There’s nothing else we can do except to keep saying it: your acceptance rate, credentials, internships, scores, network, and connections do not determine your intrinsic value. Maybe if we say enough times we’ll start to believe it ‒ and then we’ll be on our way to an excellent life and to separate ourselves from the excellent flock.