David Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…But they’re more productive, right? They’re more productive than we ever were. There’s a young man in the audience named David Wignall, who I met at Williams College a couple of months ago, and who made an interesting observation to me over dinner. He said, “We’re the most rejected generation.” If you’re applying to Harvard, 96 percent of you are going to be rejected. Harvard is a rejection factory. You have to apply to 20 schools to get into one. Then you want to get into a summer internship. I’ve met some young students from Georgetown who have applied to 250 internships to get into one. Goldman Sachs internships — I forget the exact numbers, but 350,000 people apply, and 3,000 get the summer internship. These are massive rejection rates. I’m not even talking about the people who are not swiping right to you. I’m not even talking about those who don’t like your Instagram posts. Part of the problem is the opportunity structure is so slim that everybody is applying to the same few schools and the same few internships, so the rejections are massive. Then the young people who get out of college — and not only at elite schools, who are applying for their first job are in hell indeed. They’re sending out hundreds of resumés and nobody is ever coming back now. I think at the top and at the bottom of the demographic curve, you’ve got a lot of misery. The good news is, go to the middle, go to Penn State, go to Southern Methodist, where you don’t have quite the competition to get into these places, but they’re still great schools. They’re plenty smart, and they’re happy. What I notice is, if you go to Arizona State, you go to a lot of the middle ring schools, good schools, but not super exclusive, the mood is just happier than at the top or the bottom of the demographic. That’s 80 percent of the distribution, right? So, you’re pretty bullish on the whole thing?…

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