Earlier this week, Rachel Shin, a current junior at Yale College, published a piece in the Atlantic titled “Elite College Students Are Doing It to Themselves.” She provides an insider’s view into the humorously competitive world of clubs on campus. The examples she supplies betray their own absurdity:
The investing club turned away 236 people last year. The “teach kids to code” club turned away 20. The musical-improv group turned away several dozen, leaving its rejectees to find more loosely organized ways to burst into song. Half of the applicants to the magic club saw their hopes vanish into thin air.
Most pertinently, however, Shin observes that “this culture is not wholly imposed by Yale as an institution. . . . The students are doing this to themselves.” Why? “Fueled by insecurity,” she writes, they “feel the need to over-justify their worthiness. And so they impose endless hierarchies on one another.” Surprising? I think not. This seems to me the natural outcome of equating value with selectivity.
As it happens, I, too, experienced the strange world of internal auditions and applications while a student at Yale (I graduated in 2020). Doubtless, the jungle of “a million micro-meritocracies” multiplied the fear and trembling that naturally accompanied me when I was an 18-year-old, fresh to campus.
I find myself wanting to offer Shin a maternal response, something like, “Don’t worry, it gets better when you leave those ivy halls.” But that would be dishonest. The jungle of “a million micro-meritocracies” doesn’t dissipate after college — it thrives underground, glimpsed in social encounters, job titles, name drops, the cut of one’s lapel. (At least undergraduate clubs tell you their criteria for admission.) How, then, to be disentangled from its vines? I see only one way: The worthwhile must be separated from the world of wile.
Rachel — I wish you luck.