In William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” a senior professor at Yale who also attended the school decades ago as an ...

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that lack of ambition coupled with a congenital lazy streak saved me from becoming one of William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep.” A child of the upper-middle ...

There are perhaps no better exemplars of the products of our current meritocratic system than three of the most important recent figures in the education reform movement: Secretary of Education Arne ...

William Deresiewicz’s July article for The New Republic, “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League,” launched a insightful, heated debate about the nature and meaning of education. In the newest edition ...

This book, in many ways, is a letter to my twenty-year-old self. It talks about the kinds of things I wish that someone had encouraged me to think about when I was going to college -- such as what the ...

Ex-Yale professor William Deresiewicz published an essay called “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education” in the summer of 2008 that struck a societal nerve. How could attending Harvard, Yale, ...

A new book questioning whether an education at one of the country’s elite colleges prepares students to find true meaning in their lives is getting a lot of buzz in education circles this fall.

Is it even possible to talk about the Ivy League rationally these days? If you’re a product of it, you partake of its prestige even when criticizing it and, more often than not, end up endorsing its ...

William Deresiewicz is an under­appreciated essayist and thinker, not to mention a literary critic whose acumen is comparable to James Wood’s. After writing an essay he felt was doomed to obscurity, ...