Reasons Not Everyone Needs to Go to Elite College

By Robert Perloff and Lewis P. Lipsitt

Scripps Howard News Service

This is the season when nail-biting high-school seniors along with their high-achieving anxious parents nervously await word from colleges about admissions and rejections. Hence, we should ask whether college is the indispensable ticket to the good life, and also, whether elite colleges are invariably better than the less highly ranked institutions.

Enigmatically, graduating from college, especially elite ones, has come to be a mantra for accomplishment, "top" styles of living, and a harbinger of success for the individual as well as the community and beyond. But the data may be skewed toward a higher-education bias that has now taken on a distinctive panache, a perception that pleads for scrupulous examination and demonstrable validity.

It is not an iron-clad guarantee that college graduates fare better in coveted aspects of life than those who have not attended college. The data do show that college graduation is associated with higher income levels, but there is a whole cluster of attributes that goes with attending college in the first place, some of them relating to the wealth and education of the child's family before he or she even enrolls in college.

We all know of many individuals who are intelligent, accomplished and "well placed" in so many different ways as to defy belief that a college education is the "open sesame" be-all and end-all that it's glibly cracked up to be. How is it, why is it, that so many parents believe they must start early, even in an infant's first year, preparing their offspring for a college education and even a professional education for their children to be worthwhile human beings? Many men and women who have never been to college are in so many senses of the word successful that it is truly a matter of great demeaning assessment that we regard them as odd untutored souls, and they often suffer from our exclusionary practices.

Sometimes such individuals emerge victorious and enormously successful. Immediately springing to mind are such luminaries as Erik Erikson, the prolific and iconic child psychologist, psychoanalyst, and biographer of Martin Luther and Mahatma Ghandi. With no more than a pre-college art-school certificate, he nonetheless became an acclaimed author and full professor at Harvard University, the same university from which the enormously talented folk singer, composer, and environment expert, Pete Seeger, decided not to graduate after some time studying there. We can include Microsoft's Bill Gates, one of the most innovative and wealthiest men in the world, as another drop-out from the "traditional education track."

Let us not also regard Harvard graduation as the elixir of accomplishment. Note that the most visible and highest paid entertainers and sports champions in the world who have grown up in America are not college graduates from anywhere, many of them high-school dropouts. They are highly motivated and self-schooled for the most part, and have expertise in pursuing with passion their special areas of talent and interest.

The middle-class obsession with formal education in America is of relatively recent origins. One or two generations ago, young folks could become doctors and lawyers without attending undergraduate college. They could go to law school or medical school and become outstanding professionals with what we would today regard as minimal formal education. We recognize that in some disciplines where the technical details and technological advances have increased dramatically in complexity, longer periods of advanced education are required to assure safety and responsibility in the handling of, for example, medical crises. Some occupational streams now require that professionals and academicians receive training that can take years to master. We argue only that society must acknowledge that there are many paths to success.

The bottom line is that since life is complex, multi-faceted, and does not follow a straight line or comparable path for all individuals, society must recognize that college is not necessary or useful for all people and, elite institutions of higher learning are not necessarily better in all respects than their lesser-ranked cohorts.

One size doth not fit all!

Robert Perloff is an emeritus professor of business administration and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Lewis Lipsitt is a professor emeritus of psychology, medical science and development at Brown University.