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

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