Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be
An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania
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3.8 • 34 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Read award-winning journalist Frank Bruni's New York Times bestseller: an inspiring manifesto about everything wrong with today's frenzied college admissions process and how to make the most of your college years.
Over the last few decades, Americans have turned college admissions into a terrifying and occasionally devastating process, preceded by test prep, tutors, all sorts of stratagems, all kinds of rankings, and a conviction among too many young people that their futures will be determined and their worth established by which schools say yes and which say no.
In Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be, Frank Bruni explains why this mindset is wrong, giving students and their parents a new perspective on this brutal, deeply flawed competition and a path out of the anxiety that it provokes.
Bruni, a bestselling author and a columnist for the New York Times, shows that the Ivy League has no monopoly on corner offices, governors' mansions, or the most prestigious academic and scientific grants. Through statistics, surveys, and the stories of hugely successful people, he demonstrates that many kinds of colleges serve as ideal springboards. And he illuminates how to make the most of them. What matters in the end are students' efforts in and out of the classroom, not the name on their diploma.
Where you go isn't who you'll be. Americans need to hear that--and this indispensable manifesto says it with eloquence and respect for the real promise of higher education.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With great energy and enthusiasm, New York Times columnist Bruni takes a pin to our society's warped obsession with elite colleges" and provides a commonsense check to the yearly admissions mania" of students competing for coveted slots at top schools. In taking apart the largely subjective" and fatally flawed" rankings of U.S. News & World Report and reviewing the dearth of class diversity and lack of imagination" at the pinnacle of higher education, Bruni tosses a rock through the undeserved veneration of elite schools" and celebrates the democratic insistence that a good student can get a good education just about anywhere." He fills the book with profiles of successful CEOs, politicians, entrepreneurs, and other known names to illustrate how self-starters turned their default school into a stepladder to success. Bruni's quick wit and slick style nimbly glosses over the systemic problems with American higher education and instead reassures floundering young adults and hand-wringing parents that college is and is not the most crucial years of a person's life, and that the true measure of success great careers and lives that matter" is not bought with a diploma but built with a robust and lasting energy for hard work." While Bruni's heartfelt argument ignores somewhat blissfully the deeper problems facing higher education, his insistence on an ideal liberal, humanistic college as a playground for the mind is a nostalgic and valuable contribution to the larger conversation.
