Dear brother,

Yesterday, we talked about the (for some) counterintuitive fact that an elite education isn't just for those with elite pocketbooks. (Fun fact: for 90% of students, Harvard is cheaper than state school.) Today, we're grappling with something a bit more meaty.

Deresiewicz's swipe at the financial cost of an Ivy education is delivered offhand, but his critiques of Ivy League admissions policy are full-throated. We, he alleges, were admitted not because we demonstrated true passions and talents or showed any real promise as peers and fellow-students-to-be, but merely because we were "manufactured" to be "fit to compete in the college admissions game."

Well, to borrow a phrase, "it almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard" attract truly talented students. What, an admissions committee with basically free choice of the nation's graduating seniors, some of the business's most talented officers, more than a few decades experience, and a year-round mission to see through the ploys of Ivy-at-all-costs parents to the true character of applicants...is just going to fail at their single job? Paint me skeptical.

To the contrary, I'm sure Mr. Deresiewicz would be ecstatic to hear that writing an essay about your all-expenses-paid service trip to Guatemala is a really easy way to get your application canned; if instead you wrote about "waiting tables so that you can see [that] you really aren’t as smart as everyone has been telling you," you'd have a much better shot at convincing the committee that you're

Dear brother,

Congratulations on making it through three years of that purgatory called high school! Soon you'll be getting up close and personal with that great Millenial coming-of-age ritual: the one where you and a few dozen people you've never met conspire to decide what sort of weather and dining hall food you'll be enjoying (or cursing) for four years of your life.

You're going to get a lot of advice on how to navigate the next year or so. Unfortunately, not all of it will be good. One day, I'll try to organize my own thoughts on the matter, but today, I feel compelled to rebut a refrain I've heard echoed far too often recently.

The fundamental complaint is that "elite" education (for some definition) leaves students with empty credentials at the expense of true learning, and that graduating high school students have better options for learning to become citizens of the twenty-first century. I contend that this is mostly stereotype and sensationalism -- at least, my own experience at the elitest of elite schools has been overwhelmingly positive.

I fear you are already familiar with the charges that William Deresiewicz, writing for the New Republic, recently leveled (seemingly indiscriminately) against the whole of the elite-education-industrial-complex:

• that the preparations required for an "elite college" are, on the whole, soul-destroying;
• that the admissions process is completely, hopelessly rigged;
• that the student body is firstly, invariably "entitled little shits", and secondly, enslaved to some abstract myth of excellence;
• that the same students are four

At work, for the past week or so, I've been wrestling with a complicated-ish thing, born of a conversation over lunch about something completely different, and taking me deep into some statistics and algebra that I don't really understand (yet). It's awesome.

But (more than once), I've been explaining the thing to someone, and had them offer helpful advice: "Isn't this problem basically [this simpler thing]?" My response has consistently been along the lines of "No, of course not! Can't you see that it's obviously more complicated than that?" I even had a version of this exchange with myself recently, where I thought for a moment that it was actually trivial after all, and then (with some relief) reminded myself that it was, in fact, hard. Whew, what a relief.

...except that, if the point was actually to solve problems in the world, that's entirely the wrong attitude to take. This problem either:

• actually isn't complex, in which case rooting for it to be harder is pretty useless
• actually is complex, in which case rooting for it to be even harder is pretty useless

This isn't academia, where pretending that the problem you've got a solution to is actually Really Quite Hard is a good thing, since you can then wow people by solving it. I'd like to think that I'm in the business of actually solving problems -- and to do that, I can't take sides on whether it's hard or easy. Either way, the only thing to be done is to do it. If it's easy, do it fast and get something harder.

Now, it's true that discretion is the better part of valor,

Today's quote comes from a talk about programming languages:

"If you're ever writing code to loop over the indices of an array, just assume there's a bug in it somewhere."

(In particular, we were discussing pitfalls of imperative languages, but that's not at all important to what I'm trying to talk about, so ignore this sentence if you didn't understand it.)

Okay, so it's not quite true; I've reached the point in my programming career where, upon needing to write array-indexing code, I am still forced to stop, ask myself what I want to do, and then tell the computer to do it -- but at least I usually get it right that first time. Even so, there are certainly other areas of my life where I could benefit by applying similar logic:

• If you're ever planning to be on time to a class/meeting/event, just assume that you're going to be ten minutes late.
• If you're ever planning your time around the deadline for an assignment, just assume that you're going to be working up to literally the last minute.
• If you're ever coming up with a password, encryption key, or other important string of characters to remember, just assume you're going to forget it tomorrow.
• If you're ever reading a book before bed, just assume you're going to read at least an hour later than you expected.
• If you're ever planning to take a small nap and get back to work, just assume it's not going to happen.

The common factor here seems to be "There are some things you're really chronically bad at planning; you should stop assuming that you're going to be

Today, I had someone pull me aside and ask me if I was alright; several people had noticed that I was really worked up about something the other day, to the point of getting angry at one of my coworkers.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was talking about, and when I did, I laughed a little. "Oh, Lucian and I go way back; we've been roommates for two years now. We're in the habit of giving each other a hard time; there's nothing wrong."

Afterward, I realized what I should have said -- something like: "Oh. I understand what it might have looked like, but actually everything's okay. We've been roommates for two years now, and I was just giving him a hard time."

The crucial difference: If someone comes to you concerned that there might be a problem, first let them know unambiguously whether there is, in fact, an issue, and then explain. If you put the explanation before the verdict, they'll spend the entire time parsing through what you're saying, trying to determine whether it makes the problem better or worse, before you give them the bottom line at the end. They'll be distracted enough to miss most of what you actually say, and then they'll be forced to change mental gears at the end from whatever conclusions they had dug into to the conclusion you then sprung on them.

The principle, I think, generalizes. If you're trying to tell someone something important (either in conversation, or, as I've found

Much has already been said about the choice to hide important course evaluation data from students (Crimson article), and I won't try to rehash in full what others have said so eloquently. Instead, I'll try to bring to the surface some of the most salient points, and add a few of my own.

First, it's been said (and satirized by Satire V) that Dean Harris did a fine job of (trying to) bury the lede on the whole matter. After all, the change to the Q was announced in sentence 16 of 21 in an email titled "Pre-Term Planning for Fall 2014":

Now, unless the the Dean was attempting to imply that we should be planning for Fall 2014 by scoping out courses now, before difficulty ratings go away forever, one has to question the reason behind revealing a crucial change in student resources (which, as the Crimson reports, has been decided since last September) in the middle of an email about a weeks-away optional survey to a group of students who have already left campus for the summer.

Or perhaps, one need not. I'm not sure that anyone except University spokespeople would be willing to argue that Dean Harris just happened to send

The Harvard Crimson: Q Guide Will No Longer Display Difficulty Score, Harris Says

A straight news piece, the Crimson article is noteworthy for including several quotes from professors defending the change:

Richard F. Thomas (Prof. Classics)

"[Difficulty ratings] could create an impulse in the instructor to make the course easier in order to attract students."

Mark C. Elliott (Prof. Chinese History)

"[Difficulty rating] is not really the most important thing about a class."

"One hopes that after everything that our students have done up to the time they get admitted to Harvard ... they recognize the value in a challenging curriculum and in taking courses that may not be an easy A, but will add in some way to their intellectual enrichment or development."

Ore Babarinsa '15 (comment on the Crimson article)

For once, sense is spoken in the comments section of the Crimson; my friend and classmate Ore speaks to a student perspective on the necessity of difficulty ratings:

I'm sorry, but the stated rationale given is completely disconnected from any understanding of how, or why many students desperately need that difficulty rating for courses on the Q quide. I've been in the hospital because of having too much academic work on my plate at Harvard, and I think the administrators need to understand that students need to be able to adequately balance the difficulty of