Bruni, Frank. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015).

Bruni, Frank. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015).

Bruni, Frank. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania. (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2015).

Where You Go is not Who You Will Be

This book joins others in challenging the prevailing mindset that attending an elite (Ivy League) university is the best (or only) path to a high paying, prestigious career and successful life. Using many personal stories and statistics from broader studies, Bruni explores the darker side of focusing all of one’s time, energy, and effort on resume-building for the sake of acceptance at a handful of highly select schools. As he draws his analysis to closure, he offers the following summary:

…I have two particular complaints about the [admissions] mania that I’d perhaps put above others, two primary reasons that I wish kids and their parents wouldn’t be drawn into it. The first is this…The mania’s focus on such a limited number of acceptable outcomes, coupled with its attention to minutely detailed instructions for achieving them, suggests that life yields to meticulous recipes. That’s a comforting thought but a fraudulent one. The second reason is that the admissions mania perverts the true meaning and value of hard work, encouraging such effort in the designated service of a specifically defined goal, as a pragmatic bridge from point A to point B, not as an act of passion, not as a lifetime habit, not as a renewable resource, which is what it should be and how it bears the ripest, sweetest fruit. (p. 201)