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Opinion | The Real, Hidden Truth About College Admissions - The New York Times

Our political leaders may or may not be worthy of emulation, but there’s no doubt that they’re successes in the strictest sense, having summited the professional peaks that they intended to scale. Which colleges set them on their ascents?

Kevin McCarthy, the highest-ranking Republican in the House, graduated from the Bakersfield campus of California State University. Hakeem Jeffries, the top Democrat, got his bachelor’s degree from Binghamton University, a branch of the State University of New York.

Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, went to Harvard, one of the hyper-selective schools at the center of an intensifying anger about the admissions practices of elite institutions. But Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, went to the University of Louisville, which accepts roughly three of every four applicants.

The acceptance rate is roughly the same at President Joe Biden’s undergraduate alma mater, the University of Delaware. At Vice President Kamala Harris’s, Howard University, it’s about 35 percent — a competitive situation, but not crazily so.

The people at the pinnacles of private enterprise have similarly diverse educational pedigrees. Among the chief executives running the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500, only two were undergraduates at American schools with current acceptance rates under 20 percent (Harvard and Boston College). One was educated in Britain, one in India and the remaining six hold bachelor’s degrees from these institutions: the University of Arkansas, Texas A&M, Auburn University, the University of Nebraska, the University of Colorado and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I go through all of that in the service of the obvious, which — sadly — needs constant stating and restating: Highly selective colleges are hardly a prerequisite for, and have no monopoly on, lofty careers.

That gets somewhat lost in the discussion — especially impassioned in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action and in the midst of a fresh challenge to legacy admissions — about who gets into the most storied colleges and how. The intensity of emotion enveloping that conversation partly reflects and corrosively perpetuates the belief that the shimmer and exclusivity of the undergraduate institutions that students attend exert some magical, make-or-break influence on their futures. That belief is bunk.

Undeniably, the Harvards and Stanfords of the world have — and confer — significant advantages. Their resources are extravagant and their alumni networks extraordinary.

The same goes for the institution where I teach, Duke, which now accepts roughly 6 percent of its undergraduate applicants. During my two years on Duke’s faculty, I have watched many of my students leverage its reputation and its reach into plum jobs immediately upon graduation.

But I’ve no idea where those students will be 10 or 20 years down the road. I’d bet good money that a sizable percentage of them will realize that they followed somebody else’s script rather than writing their own and change careers. I also know that in many cases, their professional beginnings had a whole lot to do with privileged life circumstances and significant talents that Duke didn’t create but rather validated.

And I am beyond certain that their professional futures — and, more important, their fulfillment and contentment — will be determined less by where than by how they spent their college years. And perhaps the greatest tragedy of all the drama around college admissions is the degree to which it obscures that transcendent truth.

Nothing that I’ve observed at Duke or that I’ve discovered in many years of reporting on higher education has impressed me more than how differently students approach college, with widely divergent benefits. There are students who greedily and gratefully sop up what their professors can teach them. I’ve watched them bloom. Others do the bare minimum, cementing habits that will haunt them going forward. I foresee their stagnation.

There are students who spot the most exciting programs and niftiest perks and sprint toward them. They’re honing the best kind of opportunism. Others never pause long enough or look intently enough to notice the bounty before them. They’re honing the worst kind of wastefulness.

Where, in all the chatter about the Ivy League and all the debate about meritocracy, is the necessary attention to that? I’ve been asking that question and beating that drum for almost a decade, and I’ve seen too little erosion of the myth that no crossroads in a young life has as much consequence as the one that leads to an exclusive private college in one direction and a much less selective public institution in the other.

So, ever hopeful, I collect and scatter contradictions to that thinking, corrections of that assumption.

Jack Smith, the special counsel whose work just led to another indictment of Donald Trump? His route to Harvard Law and to a heroic role in the preservation of American democracy ran through the State University of New York at Oneonta.


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I used to trump like there was no tomorrow.

I don’t mean in card games. I mean in sentences. I loved “trump” as a verb — so compact, so efficient. Merriam-Webster defines it, in its transitive form, as “override,” and that’s three soft syllables to its crisp, emphatic one.

My hunger didn’t override my worries about my weight. It trumped them. Oh, how I trumped and trumped, relishing the sound of it, reveling in the look of it.

Until, well, Trump.

Donald Trump was certainly around for many of the years when I trumped — he was emblazoning his name on buildings, doing that “Apprentice” show that I never watched, peacocking, pontificating. But not to a point where he could ruin a perfectly good verb.

Then came the presidential bid, the White House, the great American nightmare from which we’ve yet to emerge. A writer can no longer trump without reminding readers of Trump — or without having an editor ask if there’s a double entendre at play, some partly veiled reference to our 45th president.

“We can substitute ‘overcomes,’ ‘overshadows,’ ‘replaces’ and probably a host of others,” Laurel Rupp of San Jose, Calif., wrote to me, recommending the retirement of “trumps.” She complained that trumping “appears in way too many random sentences.”

Maybe she just feels that she can’t escape lowercase trump because uppercase Trump is indeed ineluctable. Regardless, a syllable warrants only so much exposure. Until the big T retires or is ejected from public life (hurry the day!), the little t should probably be given a little rest.

Players of bridge and other games with trump cards, you get a pass. And I’m not saying that the rest of us must go eternally trumpless. The madman of Mar-a-Lago has taken too much from us already.

But for now: Let’s inaugurate a trump slump, until and in hope of a thumped Trump.

Words Worth Sidelining debuted almost a year ago and appears periodically, and I know that many of you didn’t catch early installments of it: You’ve written to me subsequently to nominate words and phrases already covered. So here’s a quick guide to anything you missed. Just click on the given subject matter to get to the newsletter in which you’ll see it discussed, always in the newsletter’s second section. I previously wrote about “it is what it is,” “amazing,” “at the end of the day,” “long story short,” “unpack,” nonsensical dog metaphors, a glossary of expressions overused by political journalists and another such glossary. I think that covers it! More to come.


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In The Washington Post, Emily Heil cataloged the quirks of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous (or infamous?) martinis, each of which had a whopping four ounces of gin: “More than one of them, and you might find yourself Oppen-hammered.” (Thanks to Monica Gordon of Slingerlands, N.Y., for nominating this.)

Also in The Post, George Will needled the error-prone Ron DeSantis: “For writing about DeSantis, one needs a computer on which a single keystroke produces the phrase ‘DeSantis later explained.’” (Tom Powell, Vestavia Hills, Ala.)

In his Substack newsletter, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar mocked Ron DeSantis’s attempts to shirk any responsibility for a Florida lesson plan that laundered the horror of slavery: “DeSantis was trying to wrap himself in the Cloak of Invisibility but instead slipped on the Hoodie of Absurdity.” (Mary Gebhart of Howe, Ind., and Mike Bush of Los Osos, Calif., among others)

In The Boston Globe, Christopher L. Gasper questioned whether Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots, competed aggressively enough for the star wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins, who will play for the Tennessee Titans instead. “Belichick is clinging to the past the way that Hopkins does passes. He’s a buzz-cut coach in a man-bun world.” (John Bruce, Cape Elizabeth, Me.)

In The Atlantic, Mark Leibovich mulled the traditionalism of one of America’s most enduringly popular sports: “Baseball’s obsession with preserving its keepsakes through the generations is part of its charm, as though the sport is constantly adding new sepia-toned episodes to its perpetual Ken Burns documentary.” (Andy Fine, Waban, Mass.)

In The Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch described Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a “defective product from the Kennedy family charisma factory.” (David Eberly, Swarthmore, Penn.)

In The Times, Bret Stephens contrasted the two Republicans who represent Texas in the Senate, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz: “Whatever else you might say about Cornyn, he is to the junior senator from Texas what pumpkin pie is to a jack-o’-lantern.” (Jay Kraker, Houston, and Linda Brand, Fort Worth, Texas, among others).

Also in The Times, a reader, Benjamin Traveler, offered a wry comment on Margaret Roach’s strategies for replacing a lawn: “Loved the article, though its lengthy championing of pawpaws did lean ever so slightly toward pawpaganda.” (Liz Selden, Birmingham, Ala.)

Lewis Hyde likened carrying a net when he goes in search of butterflies, even though he’ll release the ones briefly imprisoned in it, to reading with a pencil in hand: “The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own. You may think you can read with the same quality of attention while lying in bed at night without a pencil, but you can’t. The mind notices your posture and models itself accordingly. ‘This dog is ready to sleep; there can’t be any rabbits here.’” (Deborah Galvin Rychert, Burien, Wash.)

Kyle Buchanan noted that “Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig, and “Oppenheimer,” by Christopher Nolan, had rather different palettes: “If anything pink has ever appeared on the set of one of Nolan’s films, it was only because Harry Styles hadn’t changed out of his concert wear before shooting ‘Dunkirk.’” (Cliff Seixas, Elmwood Park, N.J.)

And James Poniewozik eulogized Pee-wee Herman: “To call ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ ahead of its time would unduly flatter ours.” (Ste Kubenka, Austin, Texas). I also adored James’s description of the Pee-wee character as “a bow-tied pogo stick of a man-boy” and of his television trappings: “The overstuffed set, with its midcentury candy palette and zigzag angles, looked like a B-52s album you could live inside.”

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.


The SundaysGie Knaeps/Getty Images

Last week I presented some of your thoughts about why summer — despite the sweat, the bugs, the burns — is special, but I saved one strand of observations for today: Several of you mentioned music, observing that we talk of a song of the summer, typically something joyous in its sound or lyrically tethered to sun, sea or heat, but not of the winter, spring or fall.

Bob Vickery of Philadelphia cited classics in this category, including “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess,” The Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and Frank Sinatra’s “Summer Wind.”

Bob Entwistle of Madison, Wis., wrote: “Other than Christmas songs, how many good songs about winter are there? I’m thinking of Merle Haggard’s ‘If We Make It Through December’ and Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter.’ They don’t really celebrate the season, do they?”

But many summer songs do. Just check out the Beach Boys. Or the song “Magic,” by the Cars. Pamela Andrada of Santa Monica, Calif., recalled its opening lines: “Summer, it turns me upside down/Summer, summer, summer, it’s like a merry-go-round.”

Sally Haynes of Sanibel, Fla., noted that many summery songs have a sunny agenda, “enabling each one of us to create a youth of soaking up the sun, riding waves and falling in love, forever transforming the reality of our summers of church camp, reading lists and marching band practice. Grandma never gets run over by a reindeer in the summer, because she’s cruising in her little deuce coupe, eternally young with her sun-drenched blond locks blowing in the breeze behind her.”

A favorite of mine that I seldom see mentioned in summer-song roundups is The Sundays’ “Summertime,” released in 1997 and of no relation to the “Porgy” classic. Take a listen. Both musically and lyrically, its chorus is buoyancy itself:

And it’s you and me in the summertime
We’ll be hand-in-hand down in the park
With a squeeze and a sigh and that twinkle in your eye
And all the sunshine banishes the dark

Interestingly, many songs with titles that seem to position them as summery fare have lyrics and meanings much more complicated than that. Don Henley’s superb “The Boys of Summer” and Sheryl Crow’s “Soak Up the Sun” come to mind.

Because I’m not a big country music fan, I wasn’t aware of Brad Paisley’s delightfully naughty, mischievous conversion of summertime nuisance into summertime opportunity in the song “Ticks,” which Robert Smith of Big Canoe, Ga., brought to my attention. I’ll leave you with this stretch of its lyrics:

I’d like to see you out in the moonlight
I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks
I’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
And I’d like to check you for ticks.

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