Why do Ivy League students self-sabotage?

The whole experience felt so pre-social media era. Blog posts link to other blog posts which they regards as valuable and drive a discussion without ads and distraction.

It feels very early 2000th like and I enjoyed it. I still miss technorati. :)

Michael Sandel in his recent book[^1] called "The Tyranny of Merit" analyses the problem at length. It's a worthy read on a variety of topics around "merit" in our society, etc. Michael Sandel is a teacher of political philosophy at Harvard and one of the most well known philosophers of our time.

Another book called "The Danish Way of Parenting"[^2] explains how to raise kids that are: (a) self-starters in the sense that they don't rely on others for goal-setting and (b) coping in a healthy and constructive way with failure.

How can someone raise a child that will have to compete against the global young intellectual elite? Private tutors are common in London, amongst those who can afford them. They fly tutors for 160 BGP/hour alongside the family to Santorini for a week or two[^3]. Imagine having to compete with these ppl for a spot to an Ivy League college. Quoting from the respective Economist[^3] article:

> Tutoring has risen in line with a cultural shift: university education is now the norm for a larger share of school-leavers than ever before. Close to half of all 25- to 34-year-olds in the 37 wealthy countries that make up the OECD now have a degree. Other countries are fast catching up: by 2030 China and India will account for half of the 300m graduates in this age group worldwide.

> Widening access has changed the nature of the competition. Despite the large rise in the number of universities, the same institutions tend to fill the top places in the international rankings. This means that education is now a global battle: far more people in a wider range of countries are competing for slots in the same few, elite institutions. Twenty years ago, America’s Ivy League universities would admit a quarter or more of all applicants. In 2020 Harvard’s acceptance rate hit a new low of 5%.

[^1]: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374289980/thetyrannyofmer...

[^2]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Danish-Way-Parenting-Happiest-Confi...

[^3]: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/10/09/first-class-flight...

Maybe that's what's at the root of it, but it's rarely what these kids tell themselves, I don't think. Much more of a discovery about how delayed consequences are when you just ignore them, and how good it feels to focus on the random highs you can get over the satisfaction of a job well done that doesn't pay off for a long time.

Before you've ever skipped class, the presumption is the world ends were that to happen. Then you get so drunk you sleep through the alarm and... wait, nothing? Nobody cared?! You can just go get drunk, miss class, and your parents don't come out of the walls to beat you???

There are a lot of kids, I think, who've been driven through their academic lives via purely "stick" incentives. When they find out there isn't a stick looming over their head immediately, and there are a lot of distracting "carrots" within short reach, it's hard to come back from.

There already exists tons of pre existing institutions that will give a great education to those students with many gifts. The twisted thing is if your parents send you to cram school and you DON’T get into Harvard, even if you have cognitive gifts, you’re going to still be drinking heavily at Berkeley from burnout. So the institution that does receive you doesn’t get the whole You.

It’s up to the high schools to take the first step to limit the stress, which has been a consensus opinion for at least a decade. And yet, I really doubt that’s going to happen in the high schools I’m personally familiar with. Nonetheless some brands, like Montessori, have achieved this (less stress, same education) for younger students, so my hopes are high.