Napoleon was conservative about primary education, but revolutionary in secondary education

Monday, November 4th, 2024

Napoleon ofby Andrew RobertsNapoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back in the hands of the clergy, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), but revolutionary in secondary education, which began at age eleven:

In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.

All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.

Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees. Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose.

[…]

By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later.

Your A student is average

Wednesday, October 30th, 2024

Your A student is average, David Blobaum explains:

The most common refrain from parents is that their child “is a good student but a bad test-taker.” This comment reveals a fundamental disconnect between what parents understand about grades from school and standardized test scores.

[…]

In most cases, an alternate explanation is true: Despite having a sky-high GPA in honors classes, the student is actually just an average student.

According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute Freshman Survey, 86 percent of the surveyed students at BA-granting universities had A-averages in high school. Thus, A-averages are not rare at all. They are, in fact, average.

[…]

The median SAT score is 1020. The median ACT score is 18.

[…]

“SAT and ACT tests are better predictors of Harvard grades than high school grades.”

“Test scores are the single largest predictor of a student’s academic performance at Yale, and this is true over all four years, and it’s true even when we control for every other available variable that we can.”– Mark Dunn, assistant director of admissions at Yale, on the Yale Admissions Podcast

“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” – Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, quoted by the New York Times (2024)

“SAT scores have significant predictive value for academic achievement over and above other measures such as high school GPA.” – Dartmouth Admissions Research

Dartmouth puts numbers behind its statement: “High school GPA by itself explains 9 percent of the variation” in the first-year GPA of Dartmouth students. An SAT score by itself explains “about 22 percent of the variation.” Thus, at least for Dartmouth students, SAT/ACT scores are about 2.4 times more predictive of academic success than high school grades.

High school students’ grades keep getting better, but standardized tests tell a different story

Wednesday, October 16th, 2024

High school students’ grades keep getting better, but standardized tests tell a different story:

Last month, the ACT released research indicating that student GPA in the post-COVID-19 era has declined in its power to predict student success in college. In contrast, standardized test scores stayed relatively stable in their ability to predict whether students will receive passing grades in their first year of college.

According to researchers, the average high school GPA, measured on a 4.0 scale, has risen slightly since 2017, increasing from 3.44 to 3.59. While ACT scores stayed fairly stable from the mid-90s to 2019, they faltered during and after the pandemic, declining from 20.7 on a 36-point scale in 2019 to 19.5 in 2023. The decline was particularly steep between 2021 and 2022, falling from 20.3 to 19.8. While these drops seem small, they portend a significant problem.

[…]

Another research paper, published earlier this year paints a similar picture. The study, from the Equitable Grading Project, looked at more than 30,000 grades from the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. When compared to students’ performance on corresponding standardized tests, researchers found that almost 60 percent of grades “did not match the standardized test scores designed to measure students’ content knowledge of those courses.” Two-thirds of these mismatched grades were inflated, an outcome that affected low-income, black, and Hispanic students most.

These results indicate that grade inflation is rampant, and colleges should turn back toward standardized testing in admissions if they want to reliably predict which student will be able to handle the rigors of college.

She had never been required to read an entire book

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Columbia University’s required great-books course, Literature Humanities, since 1998, and he loves the job, but it has changed:

Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back

Thursday, September 26th, 2024

Infantry Combat by John F. AntalKulak’s recent review of Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon: An Interactive Exercise in Small-Unit Tactics and Leadership, by John F. Antal, intrigued me enough to pick up a (digital) copy:

Infantry Combat: The Rifle Platoon is a simultaneous Military Tactics and Leadership crash course and semi-political argument about the wrong lessons that were learned from Operation Desert Storm (it was first published in 1995) in the format of a “Choose your own Adventure” novel.

And my god does it work. Its argument is incredibly well presented, its intangible concepts and ethos are really strongly conveyed, it teaches an impressive amount of theory and application despite NOT being a textbook of theory or doctrine…

And it just has no conceivable right to work as well as it works.

[…]

A choose your own adventure is just a series of binary choices, maybe a few 3 pronged choices to mix it up. That clearly can’t teach anything.

But Antal’s writing and veteran understanding of the concepts can, and he exploits the format perfectly to REALLY creates painful choices and moments of indecision. Your pre-knowledge of even very broad pop-military concepts, or study of history, is GREATLY rewarded. Your observing the map ever so much longer is rewarded. And your attention to detail is rewarded. Your intuitive understanding of leadership or your having read about the subject, or your complete lack of any such instincts, plays a shockingly impactful role for leading what are static words and binary decisions.

I’m certain there are skilled military officers and professionals who could go in this and get the best ending right, first try… But I doubt it’d be a majority of even actual infantry officers.

Likewise an attentive amatuer or student of history could probably do it…

But I died shot by friendly fire my first read/playthrough, so not me.

[…]

Life isn’t a videogame. There isn’t instant feedback when you’ve screwed yourself and everyone around you. The fatal decision can be 10 decisions back and every subsequent decision is just determining exact conditions and flavor text of how that failure will happen…

And absolutely all of it makes sense, is tied into the core principles Antal is teaching, and has a necessary logic such that once you see it you understand why that could only have ended that way.

I’m being incredibly vague because I don’t want to spoil the book. Failing and getting the bad endings is the real teaching part of the exercise, and if it is “Spoiled” the actual teaching value is greatly reduced.

That’s your cue to get your own copy and run through it.

They came back determined on Monday to beat that damn Irishman

Saturday, August 3rd, 2024

In a recent Manifold Podcast, Steve Hsu and his guest were somewhat shocked that schools in Taiwan seat students by class rank, with the top student in the front left, and that reminded me of Robert McNamara describing his small-town school in California in Fog of War:

My class in the first grade was housed in a shack. A wooden shack. But we had an absolutely superb teacher. And this teacher gave a test to the class every month, and she reseated the class based on the results of that test. There were vertical rows, and she put the person with the highest grade in the first seat on the left-hand row. And I worked my tail off to be in that first seat.

Now the majority of the classmates were Whites, Caucasians, so on — WASPs, if you will. But my competition for that first seat were Chinese, Japanese, and Jews. On Saturday and Sunday, I went and played with my classmates. They went to their ethnic schools. They learned their native language, they learned their culture, their history. And they came back determined on Monday to beat that damn Irishman. But, they didn’t do it very often.

The preceding anecdote was apropos a few years ago:

My earliest memory is of a city exploding with joy. It was November 11, 1918. I was two years old. You may not believe that I have the memory, but I do. I remember the tops of the streetcars being crowded with human beings cheering and kissing and screaming. End of World War I. We’d won. But also celebrating the belief of many Americans — particularly Woodrow Wilson — we’d fought a war to end all wars. His dream was that the world could avoid great wars in the future. Disputes among great nations would be resolved.

I also remember that I wasn’t allowed to go outdoors to play with my friends without wearing a mask. There was an un—Godly flu epidemic. Large numbers of Americans were dying. 600,000 and millions across the world.

More on his education:

I applied to Stanford University. I very much wanted to go. But, I couldn’t afford it, so I lived at home and I went to Berkeley. $52 dollars a year tuition. I started Berkeley in the bottom of the depression. 25 million males were unemployed.

Out of that class of 3500, three elected to Phi Beta Kappa at the end of the Sophomore year. Of those three, one became a Rhodes Scholar. I went to Harvard. The third went to work for $65 dollars a month and was damn happy to have the job.

The Society was on the verge of — I don’t want to say “revolution.” Although, had President Roosevelt not done some of the things he did, it could have become far more violent. In any event, that was what I was thrown into.

I never heard of Plato and Aristotle before I became a Freshman at Berkley. And I remember Professor Lowenberg — the Freshman philosophy professor — I couldn’t wait to go to another class.

I took more philosophy classes — particularly one in logic and one in ethics. Stress on values and something beyond one’s self, and a responsibility to society.

After graduating University of California I went to Harvard graduate school of business for two years and then I went back to San Francisco.

Napoleon was a bona fide intellectual, and not just an intellectual among generals

Sunday, July 7th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsNapoleon, while still “merely” a general, was elected a member of the Institut de France, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), then (as now) the foremost intellectual society in France:

Thereafter he often wore the dark-blue uniform of the Institut with its embroidered olive green and golden branches, attended science lectures there, and signed himself as ‘Member of the Institut, General-in-Chief of the Army of England’ in that order.

[…]

His proposers and supporters at the Institut undoubtedly thought it a boon to have the foremost general of the day as a member, but Napoleon was a bona fide intellectual, and not just an intellectual among generals. He had read and annotated many of the most profound books of the Western canon; was a connoisseur, critic and even amateur theorist of dramatic tragedy and music; championed science and socialized with astronomers; enjoyed conducting long theological discussions with bishops and cardinals; and he went nowhere without his large, well-thumbed travelling library. He was to impress Goethe with his views on the motives of Werther’s suicide and Berlioz with his knowledge of music. Later he would inaugurate the Institut d’Égypte and staff it with the greatest French savants of the day. Napoleon was admired by many of the leading European intellectuals and creative figures of the nineteenth century, including Goethe, Byron, Beethoven (at least initially), Carlyle and Hegel; he established the University of France on the soundest footing of its history.

We know the ACT scores of all public-university students who applied to UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State during the test-waiver period

Saturday, June 8th, 2024

The University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors made admissions effectively test optional — but North Carolina public school students still take the ACT in 11th grade; it’s required by North Carolina law:

This set up an interesting natural experiment, since the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction collected these ACT scores from high schools and shared them with the UNC System. Therefore, we know the ACT scores of all public-university students who applied to UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State during the test-waiver period, regardless of whether they submitted those scores for use in the admissions process.

North Carolina ACT Scores

At both NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill, the test scores of students who chose to submit them as part of the admissions process were significantly higher than those of non-submitters.

And these discrepancies persist among admitted students. In 2022 (the year for which the best data exist), among admitted UNC-Chapel Hill freshmen, test submitters had a median ACT score of 29. Non-submitters had a median ACT score of 25. At NC State, the respective scores in the same year were 27 and 22. These are meaningful differences.

Parents hate it

Saturday, May 25th, 2024

Case Against Education by Bryan CaplanA reader of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education who recently caught Roland Fryer on EconTalk (Oct 2022 episode) suggested an unholy synthesis of Caplan and Fryer:

If we simply assert that it is desirable to have students master a subject, then it is at least valuable to know (if that is indeed what we know) that paying students directly to master material is much more effective than paying other people to offer free education to students who are completely unpaid in the near term for being compelled to encounter the material.

One could imagine an extreme synthesis of Caplan and Fryer that says the state is primarily interested only in teaching those skills you’ve called truly general purpose — literacy and numeracy — and to achieve student learning in these fields we have devised a system of payments to students that are contingent on reaching micro-milestones (e.g., what one might reasonably learn and demonstrate mastery of after spending 60 minutes on Khan Academy) in progress towards mastery of arithmetic, basic algebra, phonics, and reading comprehension. If students find it most cost-effective to earn those payments by subcontracting to tutors and educational coaches who help them reach these milestones (or even on-demand traditional in-class lectures if preferred), then we will primarily see the growth in supply of pedagogical methods which are most capital efficient relative to a desired learning outcome.

Caplan added that it would be better to pay periodically for continuing good scores to avoid mere cramming, and that led to this comment:

Our kids’ elementary school recently started doing cumulative testing throughout the year. Basically every week they have a test that goes back and tests on material covered earlier. I’d say maybe 80% new material, 20% old material, but that’s a pretty big test. Parents hate it, partly because they just hate having a significant test each weak, partly because they don’t have a way to help the kids prepare, and partly because kids are doing poorly on them.

In the parents defense, I think a lot of the tests are poorly constructed and have poor questions. (I think but do not know that they are mostly taking questions from prior state tests that students did poorly on, with no understanding of whether that’s because it’s a poorly phrased question or whether it was really a harder question intended to distinguish between top tier students.)

But the school administrators I think have been somewhat shocked by how little interest the parents have in what information their children have retained versus making sure their kids have good grades. In elementary school. Not even grades that will show up on a college application.

Again, in the parents defense, there has been grade inflation for so long it’s hard for 3rd or 4th grader that’s formerly a straight A student to understand suddenly routinely get B’s and C’s or worse on tests each week. And it’d be less frustrating if the people doing the testing understood something about constructing tests (if almost all of the class is failing because of the current material and not the past material, that’s almost certainly a reflection of the teacher and/or the test, not the children). But the parents weren’t really even interested in trying to continue tweaking the process. They were just worried about getting bad grades and the need to study for a test each week interfering with travel sports practices.

Parents want their children to do well, but not in the objective sense of learning and retaining more.

Ultimately, it comes down to luck

Friday, May 24th, 2024

Troubled by Rob HendersonWhile working as a summer research assistant at Stanford, Rob Henderson explains (in Troubled), he discovered another pernicious luxury belief:

I asked a housemate who was working on a start-up how he’d gotten into Stanford and what steps he was taking to build his company.

He paused for a moment and then said, “Ultimately, it comes down to luck.”

As soon as he said that, it occurred to me that this mind-set is pervasive at Yale as well — far more common than among the people I grew up around or the women and men I served with in the military. Many of my peers at Yale and Stanford would work ceaselessly. But when I’d ask them about the plans they’d implemented to get into college, or start a company, or land their dream job, they’d often suggest they just got lucky rather than attribute their success to their efforts.

[…]

A 2019 study found that people with high income and social status are the most likely to attribute success to mere luck rather than hard work.

Both luck and hard work play a role in the direction of our lives, but stressing the former at the expense of the latter doesn’t help those at or near the bottom of society. If disadvantaged people come to believe that luck is the key factor that determines success, then they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives. One study tracked more than six thousand young adults in the US at the beginning of their careers over the course of two decades, and found that those who believed that life’s outcomes are due to their own efforts as opposed to external factors became more successful in their careers and went on to attain higher earnings.

[…]

“If your sister asked you how to get into Stanford or start a company, would you shrug and say ‘I just got lucky’ or would you explain whatever it was that you actually did — ‘You have to study, sacrifice, work on the weekends, or whatever’?”

He rolled his eyes before replying, “Yeah, I get it.”

Educate yourself

Friday, May 10th, 2024

Troubled by Rob HendersonPrestigious universities encourage students to nurture their grievances, Rob Henderson explains (in Troubled), giving rise to a peculiar situation in which the most advantaged are the most well-equipped to tell other advantaged people how disadvantaged they are:

To become fully acculturated into the elite requires knowing the habits, customs, and manners of the upper class. To stay up to date, you need lots of leisure time or to have the kind of job that allows you to browse Twitter. A common rebuke to those who are not fully up to date on the latest intellectual fads is “educate yourself.” This is how the affluent block mobility for people who work multiple jobs, have children to care for, and don’t have the time or means to read the latest bestseller that outlines the proper way to think about social issues.

[…]

Thus, it seems the affluent secure their positions by ensuring that only those who attend the right colleges, listen to the right podcasts, and read the right books and articles can join their inner circle.

Occasionally, I raised these critiques to fellow students or graduates of elite colleges. Sometimes they would reply by asking, “Well, aren’t you part of this group now?” implying that my appraisals of the luxury belief class were hollow because I moved within the same institutions. But they wouldn’t have listened to me back when I was a lowly enlisted service member or back when I was washing dishes for minimum wage. If you ridicule the upper class as an outsider, they’ll either ignore you or tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you ridicule them as an insider, they call you a hypocrite. Plainly, the requirements for the upper class to take you seriously (e.g., credentials, wealth, power) are also the grounds to brand you a hypocrite for making any criticism of the upper class.

Once a piece of art becomes mainstream, elites must distance themselves from it

Friday, May 3rd, 2024

Troubled by Rob Henderson Before his first year of college, Rob Henderson had never even been to a musical, he explains (in Troubled):

No one I knew from Red Bluff had ever been to one. But it seemed like everyone on campus had seen Hamilton, the acclaimed musical about the American founding father Alexander Hamilton. I looked up tickets: $400.

This was way beyond my budget. So in 2020, I was pleased to see that five years after Hamilton’s debut, it was available to view on Disney+. But suddenly, the musical was being denigrated by many of the same people who formerly enjoyed it, because it didn’t reflect the failings of American society in the eighteenth century. The creator of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, even posted on Twitter that “All the criticisms are valid.” This reveals how social class works in America.

[…]

Once a piece of art becomes mainstream, elites must distance themselves from it and redirect their attention to something new, obscure, or difficult to obtain. The affluent relentlessly search for signals that distinguish them from the masses.

A former classmate recently told me that he didn’t enjoy Hamilton but never told anyone because everyone at Yale loved it. However, once the musical became unfashionable, he suddenly became open about his dislike of it.

Words like trauma meant something different for them.

Friday, April 19th, 2024

Troubled by Rob HendersonRob Henderson arrived at Yale nervous about the possibility of being intellectually limited compared with his peers on campus, he explains (in Troubled), because of his impoverished background and poor grades in high school, but his concerns evaporated:

Words like trauma meant something different for them.

At a party, a young woman told me about her family and how they’d always expected her to get into a top college.

“My mom was super strict growing up,” she explained. “Classic Asian mom, I’m sure you know what I mean.”

“Well, my mom is Korean,” I said. “But my family life wasn’t really like that.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “So, you didn’t have a traumatic childhood.”

[…]

At Yale, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of income than from the bottom 60 percent, and here they were ensconced in one of the richest universities in the world, claiming that they were in danger. Broadcasting personal feelings of emotional precarity and supposed powerlessness was part of the campus culture. Conspicuously lamenting systemic disadvantage seemed to serve as both a signal and reinforcer of membership in this rarefied group of future elites.

Many students would routinely claim that systemic forces were working against them, yet they seemed pleased to demonstrate how special they were for rising above those impediments. This spawned a potent blend of victimhood and superiority.

[…]

I’d thought that by entering such a place, we were being given a privilege as well as a duty to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves. Instead, many students seemed to be exploiting whatever commonalities they had with historically mistreated groups in order to serve their own personal, social, and professional interests.

[…]

A twenty-year-old at an expensive college is viewed as not much more than a kid. A twenty-year-old in the military is trusted to carry a weapon, repair multimillion-dollar equipment, and make life-and-death decisions.

[…]

I remember speaking with a fellow first-gen student at Yale who told me he was against legacy admissions—the practice whereby elite universities give an advantage to applicants with parents or family members who are graduates.

Intrigued, I replied to this student, “You had a harder upbringing than most students here, but you just got into law school, and will probably be very successful in your career. If you have kids and they apply to Yale, should they be favored for admission?”

“Yes,” he replied. “But I worked really hard to give them that opportunity.”

[…]

I watched students claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist oppression, and then discovered that they’d attended recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs. Gradually, I came to believe that many of these students were broadcasting the belief that such firms were evil in order to undercut their rivals.

[…]

But they didn’t see themselves this way. They viewed themselves as morally righteous and were surprisingly myopic about the virtuous image they held of themselves.

[…]

Another time, I was on a social media page where Ivy League students and graduates shared stories about their schools. Someone had posted a story about Yeonmi Park, a North Korean refugee who had graduated from Columbia University. Park described her alarm about how the monolithic culture at her Ivy League school reminded her of her home country. The top-rated comment, the one with the most “like” and “love” reactions: “She should have stayed in North Korea.” They couldn’t bear the criticism and posted endless mean-spirited comments mocking Park, with some saying she should “go back to Pyongyang.”

Ordinarily, the people who visited this webpage would have considered the statement that a refugee should have stayed where she came from to be reprehensible (and it is). But in this instance it was lauded because Park’s comments undermined these people’s view of themselves as morally righteous.

[…]

I was also mystified at how my peers kept up with the latest news headlines. More than once, someone would ask me what I thought about some trending event covered in the media. When I replied that I hadn’t heard of the event, people would look at me as if I were an alien. In the same way that you don’t notice how entrenched you are in your specific culture or nationality until you travel to another country, you also don’t notice your social class until you enter another one. I had never learned to keep up with the news.

Growing up, Mom and Shelly subscribed to our local paper, Red Bluff’s Daily News, but they never discussed political or social issues at the dinner table.

[…]

On campus, it wasn’t necessarily important to know about the concrete details of a newsworthy event. Rather, it was more critical to know what to think about the event by reading the opinions of others.

[…]

Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.

He read biographies of commanders who had fought there and had the courage to admit his ignorance when he didn’t know something

Sunday, April 14th, 2024

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsThe Directory gave Napoleon the best wedding present he could ever have hoped for, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), command of the Army of Italy:

In the nine days between receiving the appointment and leaving for his headquarters in Nice on March 11, Napoleon asked for every book, map and atlas on Italy that the war ministry could provide. He read biographies of commanders who had fought there and had the courage to admit his ignorance when he didn’t know something. ‘I happened to be at the office of the General Staff in the rue Neuve des Capucines when General Bonaparte came in,’ recalled a fellow officer years later:

I can still see the little hat, surmounted by a pickup plume, his coat cut anyhow, and a sword which, in truth, did not seem the sort of weapon to make anyone’s fortune. Flinging his hat on a large table in the middle of the room, he went up to an old general named Krieg, a man with a wonderful knowledge of detail and the author of a very good soldiers’ manual. He made him take a seat beside him at the table, and began questioning him, pen in hand, about a host of facts connected with the service and discipline. Some of his questions showed such a complete ignorance of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order and their rapidity, no less than the way by which the answers were caught up, and often found to resolve into other questions which he deduced in consequence from them. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.

[…]

When someone made the rather otiose point that he was very young, at twenty-six, to command an army, Napoleon replied: ‘I shall be old when I return.’

These places reject many smart (and rich) applicants every year

Friday, April 12th, 2024

Troubled by Rob HendersonAt Yale, Rob Henderson explains (in Troubled), he found that the vast majority of his peers were high performers:

One thing many people don’t understand is that it’s usually not enough to be smart (or rich) to get into a top college — these places reject many smart (and rich) applicants every year. You have to be diligent as well, and I respected their work ethic.

I came to understand that along with the fact that they were generally bright and hardworking, my peers on campus had experienced a totally different social reality than me and had grown up around people just like them.

[…]

On the midterm exam, my score placed me in the bottom quartile of the class.

I befriended some other students and picked up some tips. We held study sessions, and they showed me how to make flashcards, and how to review PowerPoint slides from the class. One simple approach I learned was to read a slide and then commit the information on it to memory and go through that exercise a few times with each slide. Spaced repetitions. Other students taught me that for the assigned readings, they read a page, and then wrote bullets at the bottom of the page summarizing the most important points. These strategies might sound simple, but for me they were a revelation.

[…]

My classmates taught me that I didn’t have to read every single item on course syllabi. At first, I thought if I wasn’t reading everything, then I was cheating myself out of my education. This, I discovered, is a common belief held by first-generation college students. I spoke with a variety of students about how they approached coursework and noticed a distinct difference. Students from well-to-do backgrounds, who had parents who were college graduates, seemed to have developed a good sense of how to manage their assignments and understood that reading everything wasn’t always necessary. Classmates showed me that we could split the heavy reading burdens by dividing it. We’d write up a summary of our share of the readings and notes.

[…]

The professor asked the class to anonymously respond to a question about family background. Out of twenty students, only one other student besides me was not raised by both birth parents. Put differently, 90 percent of my classmates were raised by an intact family. I felt a sense of vertigo upon learning this, because it was so at odds with how I’d grown up. Later, I read a study from another Ivy League school — Cornell — which reported that only 10 percent of their students were raised by divorced parents. This is a sharp juxtaposition with a national divorce rate of about 40 percent, which itself is quite low compared to the families I’d known in Red Bluff. When I explained to a classmate how disoriented I felt when I discovered these differences, she replied that this was how she felt when she learned that seven out of ten adults in the US don’t have a bachelor’s degree, because that was so out of line with her own experiences.