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Education · Jan 27, 10:32 AM

Mark Oppenheimer has written a pleasant essay on NRO called Typing Alone: giving college students a healthy obsession. I’ve only read it once, so I won’t try to comment. Here he summarizes his complaint nicely,

If once upon a time the key to a job at the right bank or law firm was an adequate academic record and an exemplary array of connections made in the dining hall and the fraternity, today the key to that job is an adequate academic record and an exemplary number of other activities. The eight letters of recommendation that the Rhodes Scholarship committees ask for guarantee that nobody who has been passionately dedicated to one or two pursuits could possibly win. Promiscuous activity is the rule of the day.

But it’s a fun read.

When I didn’t make the debate team, I cried and cried. If I wasn’t a debater, I didn’t really know who I was. Now I had to confront this hole in my life, a hole into which my entire identity seemed to have fallen. Who was I? If not a debater, who would I be? I asked those questions for about two days, during which I read Gloria Naylor’s novel Linden Hills, simply because after finishing my homework I didn’t know what else to do with my time.

And,

Like all free markets, the free market of education produces terrific abundance, dulling us all to the virtues of scarcity.

I’m a sloppy fan of pithy wit like this.

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