If you let the professors pick the kids, you'd get very few "leaders" coming out of the elite schools and lots of eggheads and tinkerers. Knowing this, the schools use recent grads and professional bureaucrats whose job is to carry out mandates handed down, not by faculty, but by the trustees, who have a broader, and more worldly perspective on who should be admitted.
In this day and age where we consider everything a learnable skill, from ice hockey (Gladwell) to math (Asian culture) to seduction (Neil Strauss et al), why are eggheads and tinkerers seemingly considered unteachable in the ways of leadership (real leadership, as espoused in the article)?
You can inspire somebody like that to change, but it's a lot more work than taking somebody who's already seeking it on their own.
schools use recent grads and professional bureaucrats whose job is to carry out mandates handed down, not by faculty, but by the trustees, who have a broader, and more worldly perspective on who should be admitted.
Admitted according to what criteria? I'm genuinely curious.
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In my experience, for the most part success in pre-collegiate academia is overwhelmingly contingent on your willingness to follow directions and do a lot of busy work. There are exceptions of course, like a challenging math class or thought-provoking history class, but these are, as I said, the exception not the rule.
Most kids don't give a shit about learning - they care about getting good grades. And from what I'm reading in this speech, this is also an issue in Ivy League schools. This seems like a negative feedback loop. Maybe something needs to change?
Also, you say that we'd get very few "leaders" if we let professors pick the kids. Well the majority of these leaders, many of them from Ivy League schools, are dogmatic, stick-to-the-talking-points idiots, incapable of or unwilling to produce original thought. I think just what we need are more tinkerers.
Anyway, I was always under the impression it was primarily professors who sat on admission boards. But then again I never bought any of those "how to get into college" books.
You clearly don't have much experience with NCOs.
In any army in the world, call an NCO 'sir', and they'll respond: "Don't call me sir; I work for a living."
('Sir' is usually reserved for officers, and in UK & Commonwealth countries, Warrant Officers Class 1 & 2)
However, anecdotal experience later made me question the reality of that, and suspect admissions officers are still overly impressed by teens who sleep four hours a night and have 10 or 12 relatively shallow extracurriculars that require little more than the ability to manage lots of busywork and multitasking.
Which of course is what most of the corporate workforce has become - lots of 'managers' schedules'. Coincidence?