42 pages • 1 hour read
William DeresiewiczExcellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4, Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Society”
Part 4, Chapter 11 Summary: “Welcome to the Club”
The final section of the book delves into the role of society in the current system of elite education. The system’s effect on America is to reinforce and continue the class system by.
…exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is as isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead—and even more smug about its right to its position—as the WASP aristocracy itself (205).
Deresiewicz provides statistics to show that income inequality has worsened in the US over the last 30 years, which is further reflected in the student bodies of elite institutions. In fact, the elite schools want it this way for a variety of reasons and are not amenable to change.
Deresiewicz also examines what it means to say Americans live in a meritocracy. On the surface, it implies a level playing field in which everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. He argues, however, that elite campuses are rigidly segregated by socioeconomic status: Diversity exists in terms of ethnicity and gender but not class. This breeds a certain sense of superiority among the upper-class elite. They believe in the popular notion of the country as a meritocracy and believe they work harder than others; therefore, they must be better because they’ve earned it. Deresiewicz writes that students from this class no longer feel a sense of responsibility as in the past, but instead have a sense of entitlement. They are praised for being the best at every step through the system without ever realizing the system is rigged in their favor.
Finally, Deresiewicz notes that students are taught differently depending on the class to which they belong. This has been shown by research at primary and secondary levels, and it continues into higher education. Students at elite universities get second chances and extensions of deadlines, are the recipients of greater grade inflation, and are rarely punished or expelled. “Once you’ve been admitted to the club,” Deresiewicz writes, “the feeling seems to be, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club” (219).
Part 4, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Self-Overcoming of the Hereditary Meritocracy”
In the final chapter, Deresiewicz enumerates his recommendations for changing the system being as that is the underlying cause of the problem. The backgrounds of recent presidents, presidential nominees, Supreme Court justices, and CEOs show what stranglehold elite universities—particularly Ivy League institutions—now have over the nation’s top corporate and political leaders. By contrast, only three of the 14 presidential nominees from 1948 to 1984 went to elite universities, and two (Barry Goldwater and Harry Truman) had no college degree at all. And yet, Deresiewicz argues, true leadership over recent decades has been lacking and the meritocracy has failed the public.
Deresiewicz compares the present era to the 1920s—the heyday of the WASP aristocracy. Both are ages of excess following a large international shift (World War I, which ended in 1918, and the fall of communism in 1989), which culminated in an economic crisis (the Crash of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2008). He argues the changes ushered in during the 1930s by Harvard’s president, James Conant, represented the waning aristocracy setting the stage for a new, expanded group of leaders, which would become the meritocracy. Today, however, the meritocracy—which has likewise lost its legitimacy—is not making way for its successors.
Deresiewicz ends with his prescription for what needs to change to improve the system. The obvious ideas include doing away with legacy and athletic preferences in admissions, as well as making affirmative action based on class rather than on race. However, the root problem is economic inequality. People are no longer working for the common good, as evidenced by slashes to government funding of public universities over the last 30 years. Inequality sets in early for students in the K-12 grades, and could be sharply reduced by national funding of education rather than local funding through property taxes.
Policies need to change so they are less favorable to the “one percent,” whose excesses are often heard about in the media. Beyond this small group, however, the problem is the much larger upper-middle class, who buy into the zero-sum system. As they fight for their children to “win” in the education race, it inevitably produces losers. The system needs to be “win-win,” writes Deresiewicz, and working once more for the common good. As Deresiewicz puts it, “We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy” (242).
Part 4, Chapters 11-12 Analysis
This final section of the book takes a hard look at the impact all this has on American society. Two of the book’s themes—societal inequality and citizenship in a democracy—are explored here. Deresiewicz argues the gap between the rich and the poor is widening and hardening as a result of the system governing elite education. The rich dominating elite universities increasingly live in a bubble, patting themselves on the back for their supposed superiority—that is, for excelling in a system rigged in their favor. Evidence to support this idea emerged five years after the book’s publication, when a scandal erupted in 2019 involving celebrities and other rich parents who bribed officials at elite schools to ensure their children were guaranteed acceptance.
The poor, on the other hand, have ever fewer opportunities and are being left out. What’s more, they’re ironically often held to a higher standard. Deresiewicz presents research to show that students from different social classes are taught differently starting in elementary school and that grade inflation is more of a problem in elite schools than in others. As his title for Chapter 11 indicates, elite students belong to a club that has their back—seemingly no matter what. Deresiewicz writes that rich kids, according to “a former student—she was talking about the kids at her fancy private high school, every one of whom, even the biggest druggies and fuckups, are now doing fine—are ‘too rich to fail’” (207). This echoes language used after the 2008 economic crisis, in which certain banks were deemed “too big to fail” (because of the ripple effect such a failure would have on the economy). Both imply a system rigged in favor of the wealthy. The fact that average people are catching on to this may have been reflected in the results of the 2016 presidential election, when candidates of both parties deemed to be “elite” had trouble gaining traction with voters.
