Last year, in February 2021, I graduated from college! Yaahooo!
It is certainly a big milestone in life to get done with college. Since pursuing post-secondary education is associated with greater economic success, social mobility, connections, power, and a good deal of personal grooming, it is no surprise that getting a college degree can be a life-changing event.
For me, personally, it has been life-changing in the strongest of terms! I developed many hard skills during my college years. I learned programming, reading, writing, French—the language I currently work in, Arabic, and how to engage with cosmic ideas floating in the world.
Having gained and learned so much in a couple of years, it certainly looks like a good deal. Doesn’t it? Yet, I question whether it was all worth it. Was going to a top university worth my and my family’s effort, time, and stress? This question has been bothering me ever since I graduated. Was it the right decision to go to the best university that I possibly could? I graduated from McGill University. For the year 2023, it is ranked as the best one in Canada. When I decided to go there in 2016, it ranked number one. Since then, it has dropped points along the way, and now that I have graduated, the reputation has circled back. (Perhaps my batch had something to do with it. 👀)
You might think, well, good for you. The reputation of your school is doing some work for you. What’s there to complain about?
There is a lot to complain about! The university experience, I have concluded, is variegated. It is not consistent. But some common elements remain based on what kind of university you choose to attend. If you do go to a university that is competing to be the best at research, like my university or any other university that is of the same rank and purpose, it will most likely present a similar experience to its students.
On the other hand, if the university you go to focuses on, let’s say, spiritual development, then you’re certain to have lots of enlightenment to learn about, and perhaps you leave the college being enlightened yourself in some way or another.
From this video,
You see god in every student. You see god in faculty.
The Culture of Branding and Ranking Education Perpetuates Classism
Photo by Tim Alex on Unsplash
What I have to complain about madly is the obstinacy in our heads or prospective students and culture, that somehow going to the best possible university shall do the trick for life and shall help each person to the greatest merit. For a simple reason, this cannot be true. The needs of each individual are not the same. Pushing our kids to go after the greatest college has many negative outcomes that we can avoid and pitfalls that we don’t want to end up where many countries have already fallen into.
In the United Kingdom, nearly half of all Members of Parliament attended a private school. And in the 2019 general election, of the MPs elected, 20% of them went to either Cambridge or Oxford; that is, 1 in 5 current MPs is an Oxbridge graduate. If any ordinary middle-class British citizen wants political success, it would make sense for him or her to collect as many of the status symbols as possible. In the United States, studies show Ivy League graduates are disproportionally overrepresented in corporate America.
I don’t have any contention with meritocracy but with elitism. Suppose we believe in the ideal of universal education and opportunity. In that case, we don’t want our culture and society to merit class-based achievements such as the university’s ranking, fancy company names on the resume, or family name. Elitism says your social status is more valuable than your qualities. The elitist culture encourages name and branding over merit. Rather, we want a meritocratic society based on action-based achievements like what people have learned, what ideas they have developed, what hard skills they have gained, and/or what problems they can solve to make the world a better place.
If the merit of university education is personal development and improvement in employment prospects, then going to a top university does not guarantee that.
If students know what things they need to learn and what specific skills they need to develop while at university, then rather than ranking, they should find a university that can provide an environment where they can not only learn the things they want to learn but also achieve more than what they originally intended.
Elitism basically says your social status is more valuable than your qualities. The elitist culture encourages name and branding over merit.
I keep thinking about the intense stress I went through while at university. As someone who had never been an organized person, it was a nightmare to have non-stop assignments, essays, quizzes, midterms, and the kamikaze final exams.
I could have learnt the same things I did—programming, philosophy, reading, writing and languages—more sustainably. (I still carry the nightmare of university stress and often sit in disbelief at work about how less stressful it is). But this requires pre-knowledge. Unfortunately, I did not have an explorative education as a child, so right after high school, I could not have said I needed to study “programming, philosophy, reading, writing, and languages” in that order. Only painfully did I figure those things out.
The Pursuit of Intellectual Adventure
Even if you are looking for a pure academic challenge, as many people going to top universities do, including me, I think the challenge could be a little more harmonic and soft on the skin and heart. One of the things I observed during my time at McGill was the easing of ego when the school valedictorian and the Rhodes scholars had to struggle for their academics. It is certainly not palatable for a valedictorian to fail their math classes, nor for a Rhodes scholar to find himself/herself in a rocky pool of doubt about their academic skill.
Some would say these challenges are why you should attend those ranked universities. That’s how you man up and push yourself!
While pushing yourself is certainly great—though I don’t know about manning up—there is also the opportunity cost we must consider. And this is why it hurts me the most. Had I not been so stressed, perhaps I could have not only learnt all the things I wanted to learn but also built more meaningful relationships, travelled further, developed greater expertise in my subjects of interest (philosophy, programming, and languages), and taken more initiative to start something.
However, I admit that, academically, I had the adventure of my life! I studied every subject I was curious about, developed great rigour in reading and writing, and found myself lucky to be around so many smart students, where it seemed everyone was special in some way. If someone is not, I assumed, it is mainly because I don’t know enough about them. Could this experience have been found at a lesser-ranked university? I do not know.
Had I not been so stressed, perhaps I could have not only learnt all the things I wanted to learn but also built more meaningful relationships, travelled further, developed greater expertise in my subjects of interest, and taken more initiative to start something.
If you are someone who’s going to apply to a university very soon, here I will spit out all the benefits of going to the best possible university versus all the benefits, according to my humble guess, of not pursuing the very best but what I call a targeted normal university.
Top 5 Reasons to Attend the Best University You Can
In no particular order:
1. Smart Students and Influential Professors
There are a few maxims I believe sans reason. One of them is that you are what your crowd is. Hanging around smarter folks, I believe, does make you smarter, albeit I don’t have any basis for it.
Professors are ranked on their ability to produce influential academic content, i.e., papers, journals, reviews, books, etc. The higher a university is ranked, the higher ranked the professors that teach there should be. They will have a couple of highly cited papers and books. That means you will get the opportunity to connect with some very bright people. They don’t have any special knowledge to share with you. Anyone can learn what they know just by reading.
What they have, though, is a unique approach. They know how to solve a specific problem, while others don’t. What you should learn from them is the approach and how they arrived at it, not the raw theories (this you can do on your own).
2. More Course Choices
If there is a single thing that I suggest you look into when selecting a program or faculty of study, it is to look at how much breadth and variety they can provide you regarding course selection.
Luckily, to make college more affordable, I pursued a Bachelor’s in Arts at McGill. I had no idea how flexible this program was. This program allowed me to study anything and everything! I am hugely indebted to the people who developed such an awesome program. As the modern world necessitates a complexity of interests and studies, more universities should follow suit and open their curriculum selection to students.
In my opinion, singular studies, like being a doctor, serve narrow functions. An “enlightened” doctor, on the other hand, would serve more than one purpose. Had he pursued history along with medical studies, he would have been informed not only about the human body but also about his country, culture, society & politics.
3. Better Knowledge Infrastructure
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that the internet has opened all knowledge to our fingertips. While at university, I learned how far away from the truth that claim is. The most powerful and insightful knowledge is actually not accessible to people!
In developing countries, though people have the Internet, they have no idea how to find the knowledge that they need to learn new skills through the Internet. What tech entrepreneurs will not tell you is that to benefit from the internet and get access to knowledge requires a great deal of training. The more sophisticated education one gets, the more knowledge one can access through the internet.
The point I want to make here is that while at a top-ranking university, you will have access to an exclusive set of knowledge because only the best universities have millions of dollars to make them available to you. Top universities can access many libraries, experts, online catalogues, and expensive academic journals and publications.
4. Reputation to Brag About for Life
Personally, I can see the benefits of having the university name. Everybody in Quebec knows my university is the best in the province, if not in the country. In some ways, I noticed during job interviews that no one had any doubts about my abilities. But I don’t feel right about living off of my university reputation though. I think it is more elegant to have a reputation of your own rather than that of someone else.
5. Stellar Alumni
They are everywhere where it is competitive to enter. All Fortune 500 companies will have alumni from your brand university, almost without a doubt. Through LinkedIn, I have made several connections just by stroking the sentiments of the shared university experience.
Top 4 Reasons Why a Regular University Could Outperform the Ranked Ones
Here, I want to make the hypothesis that the regular university you choose to attend shall be close to your parents’ home. The reason for this is that if you have the option to go to two universities, both equal in every measure except the distance from your family home, you’re better off choosing the university that is close to your home.
To a lesser extent, you can get all the benefits of attending the best universities by attending a local university.
1. Accomplish the Same Things You Would Do at Any Top University
If you can spit out in x, y, and z terms the educational outcome you are looking for, then any regular university—not being particularly ranked and immensely competitive—in a developed country (and some developing countries) could do the trick. For this to work, ideally, you should have immense clarity on what you want to get from the university experience. (I am currently writing an article about this in great detail to help prospective students plan out everything about their university and not go into an abyss of gloom like I had to when attending university for the first time).
2. Save Money for Travel and Entrepreneurship
The money you save by not living on your own is arguably the biggest luxury you will ever have in your life. You can do anything with it! If you use it wisely, you will become richer in experience by travelling and learning about other cultures. You can use the “try, fail, and repeat” method to start companies and solve problems that your community or the world is facing. I so wish I had this! Unfortunately, my family was 10,300 km away.
3. Benefit from The Existing Social Network
By being close to home, you already have a lot of relief to do more. While I do empathize that existing networks can be a leech and time-draining—for example, the obligation to attend random family events—the comfort of an existing network can if you’re smart, help you make a more refined network of people at your local university. I was never mentally well while at university (I doubt how many do). On the one hand, I had to deal with intense academics while, at the same time, I was broke socially and economically. I didn’t have enough time and energy to make more friends. In fact, most of my free time was spent recovering from the damage I was enduring.
4. Education Is Not Competition
This last point is possibly the most important. And that is that education should not be a competition. If our ideal is that everyone in the world deserves a quality education that they desire to attain, then we have to encourage all universities to be better and not just the top ones, so that way within the country, everyone can receive an excellent education. The institution you choose and the accomplishments you make in life will help directly in making this possible. Can I reverse this in my case, where my accomplishments could be attributed to my elite educational background (both high school and college)? Not really. Could I do it otherwise? Idk. Retrospectively, nothing can be fixed, certainly not history, so I am better off embracing it.
Nonetheless, remember, the call is yours. Not all programs are available at all universities. I am very well aware that for special programs or needs, your best option might be to move to another city. But the point of this article is not to consider the specific cases people have, but to direct an approach to choosing our educational institutions that do not lead to elitism and classism and instead considers more pragmatic conditions such as closeness to family, saving money, benefitting from existing social networks, and, by doing that, basically, getting the most out of our bucks at the end of the day.
Top 3 Reasons Not to Attend the Best Possible University
Now that you know what you can expect to get from the very best universities and your local university, I want to mention some important reasons why you should not attend a top university (just for the sake of it being at the top of the list) in your country.
- Stressful environment. If you get energy from stress or want to improve your stress tolerance, then go for it. Go to a ranked university. But if you have trouble handling stress, like me, then you should take seriously the consequences your choice of university can have on your mental health.
- Too competitive. Some universities, I will not name them, have a hostile culture of the survival of the fittest. Watch out! Even if you are very smart and competitive, the greater question is, do you really need that?
- Not great among a group of greats. While at university, I constantly reminded myself that most students here are ninetieth percentile and up students. Academics is something everyone is good at. Most folks have something that they have mastered, something that makes them “special.” While this experience is not necessarily bad, you must be even greater to be significant in a group of greats; I think it is additional work and pressure. You’re better off going the more straightforward route where you ace the game.
Developing the Builder Mentality for Long Term Success
In real life, what gets things moving is people’s motivation to make things happen. That is how businesses prop themselves up and how great ideas have developed over time. If people just settled for how things were and did not seize others’ frustrations as their opportunities, we would not have had many of the conveniences that we do. Think of U-Haul. They basically made it pointless to own a van. Why bother owning a van when you can just rent one for a day or two when you need it? That has become a billion-dollar business because someone actually made it happen.
Since graduating from college, this is what I have learned. What I do in life and all of my accomplishments, if any, will stem from the initiatives I take and the execution that I am capable of ensuring. My educational experience would have little to do with it. If I don’t develop the builder mentality in me, the best degree program in the world will not move things much.
Here is what distinguishes the builders from the rest of us:
Builders Are Set for Life
Not based on their fancy university name or titles or connections but rather on their drive to take the initiative and make it happen.
They believe with all their heart in the lifelong value of building things from scratch, and they continue to do so religiously.
These people, with any university degree, will make it in life. (I hope I am in this category of people, and I hope you are too).
Infinite Growth Mindset
Being infinitely growing by constantly developing hard and people skills. Growing hard skills is the easiest thing in the world. Take courses, copy & practice, repeat, repeat, repeat, that’s it!
Building people skills is also incredibly easy. Force yourself to communicate more often with as many varieties of people as possible. That’s it! All the awkwardness you encounter will eventually make you more refined at the end of the process.
Giving as Opposed to Taking
Nobody likes someone who just likes to take and benefit from the relationship but offers nothing in return. To make oneself of extreme value is important so that it is not you that makes you attractive but that you are just so useful to everybody when they need something.
Conclusion
To answer the question, I started with, ‘Was it the right decision to go to the best university that I possibly could?’ In my case, the answer is a clear yes! That is because, as it turns out, I happen to be a thinking person. Most of my motivations are intellectual in nature. In the world of ideas, academic study and knowledge, the reputation of your university is a rubber stamp to the assessment that you are a good student capable of intense learning.
I think I need this reputation. But how many people are interested in just thinking on their couch all day? I don’t think it’s everyone’s cup of tea. Most people are not interested in academia or being intellectuals, and that is why, if we want to speak for the average case, it makes sense not to push for the best university.
I am grateful for my “elite” education in high school and college. But at the same time, I desperately believe that everyone deserves to get the same quality education that I received. The universities we have in the world are just not enough to educate all the people that are there, which is why, in this essay, I have suggested a more nuanced approach when it comes to the university we choose to pursue. If you are deciding on a university to go to, aside from ranking, programs, and your personal interests, also think of how your decision affects the world. What kind of culture do your decisions push for in your country? Do you want to posit an elitist culture, as it has become the norm in many countries? Or do you want to posit a sustainable culture where your core belief in education-for-all motivates you to pursue your education in a way that helps you and your country and others the most? At the age of 19, I wish I had had someone help me ask these questions. I had no other direction than to make the most of my 92% grade.
