Cambridge graduates have been reduced to "waste from prestigious schools", how did the pride of heaven step down from the altar?

Letsight

2024-05-13 09:00Published in Guangdong

From 985/211 to Ivy League G5, the aura of famous schools has a high status in the hearts of Chinese, so that countless parents and students flock to it.

In the eyes of many parents, only by entering a prestigious school can they have a good job, a good future, and a winner in life.

The experience of many elites who are active on the world stage also confirms the establishment of this equation and makes the strongest endorsement for this equation.

But is it good to go to a prestigious school?

01

I worked as a waste in Cambridge and took a leave of absence after 2 months of graduate school

Some time ago, a video circulated on the Internet. A Cambridge graduate named TT went all the way to a prestigious school, but in the end he chose to take a leave of absence and is now unemployed.

In the interview, he mentioned that he went to a prestigious school since he was a child, and he studied in junior high school at the High School Affiliated to China Normal University, the best middle school in Guangdong.

After graduating from junior high school, he received a full scholarship to go to Anglo-Chinese Independent High School in Singapore, which has an average score among the top few in the world.

After graduating from high school, I got an offer from Cambridge University, studied economics, and later went to Imperial College for a master's degree.

looks like a typical example of an elite student bully going to the world stage, which is the "child of someone else's family" that many parents dream of.

However, after about two months at Imperial College, I began to feel lost.

At that time, he chose economics purely because it was simple to get points, because at that time, he was just trying to enter a prestigious school, and he didn't have much understanding of the major, and his vision was relatively short-sighted.

Eventually, he applied for a leave of absence from the school to try to find his way back.

Looking back on the time I studied at Cambridge, I was still very happy about the experience of studying, but job hunting also accounted for a large proportion, and I experienced the pressure of job hunting when I first entered university.

在新生欢迎会上，高年级的学长就来询问他spring program、summer internship申请了没。

At that time, he had just entered the university, and he was at a loss, and he didn't know what it was.

The senior broke his illusion of a good college life and said to him: If you don't apply, the deadline will be passed!

That night, he hurriedly made his resume and applied for investment banks and financial companies, choosing this industry not because he loved it, but because the people around him were applying, and it was a good job that the world thought was good.

When I applied for investment banking in the first year, I was rejected as expected, which was a great frustration for a student from a prestigious school.

The following year, I chose the wealth management department and was accepted by Deutsche Bank, but due to the pandemic, I didn't end up giving it a full-time job.

After a series of failures, he began to pay little attention to these top financial companies, and responded with a rotten mentality.

When he was complaining that the job search was very hard, a very good classmate asked him:

If you don't need to worry about money now, you don't need to worry about social status, and you don't need to worry about all utilitarian conditions, what would you want to do most? What are your dreams?

After some contemplation, he realized that he didn't know.

In his opinion, this is a very sad thing.

He reviewed his experience and found a truth:

If your self-motivation is always based on a utilitarian purpose, you will find that at some point this motivation is actually very empty.

When I was studying, I had a clear purpose, which was to get high scores. But what is the goal when applying for a job, whether it is money, social status, quality of life, or work-life balance.

No one was given a textbook telling me what to do.

The label of a prestigious school is a stepping stone to get you to your first interview, but that's about it.

Entering the social melting pot, depending on their ability, the label of a famous school will be much weaker, and even occasionally they will feel that they are not worthy of the school's fame and become a "waste of famous schools".

02

Graduating from a prestigious school to the pinnacle of life is the biggest lie in the education industry

The TT experience is also what many students from prestigious schools have experienced.

Many graduates of prestigious schools, who have been top students since they were children, have entered good primary, middle and university without accident, and they spend more time in flowers and applause.

When you enter the society with this confidence and pride, you find that a prestigious school is just a stepping stone, and the company will not directly issue an offer just because you graduated from a prestigious school.

Someone submitted dozens of resumes and only received a few interview notices; Someone interviewed more than a dozen companies, and in the end there was only 1 offer; Some people were picky and selective about companies at first, but later they tried to choose from any company, and the choice of positions became more and more extensive...

90% of the posts on Douban, a group of 50,000 returnees with 50,000 members, are employment-related.

In terms of social competition, everyone has their own ability, even if they have the halo of overseas famous schools, under the diversified evaluation or admission standards, you may not be able to compete with domestic ordinary undergraduate graduates.

Such a gap can easily cause strong psychological pressure.

"Graduating from a prestigious school to the pinnacle of life" and "It's good to go to college" can be arguably the biggest lies in the education industry.

Randall Collins, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in sociology, mentioned in his classic book "Diploma Society":

With education inflation and the depreciation of academic qualifications, more education does not lead to more equal opportunities and better jobs.

Graduating from a prestigious school will not go all the way, and after some struggle, you will find that you don't seem to have anything except the halo of a famous school.

It's like taking a good hand and ending up in a game of Go.

Although the students of elite schools are gifted students, they are gifted and intelligent, they can show outstanding talents from an early age, they stand at a higher starting point, and they have the ambition to change the world.

But Karen Arnold, a professor at Boston University, once followed 81 high school honors graduates to see how these gifted students would develop in the future.

In the short term, as expected, they continued their high school grades after entering college, and 95% of them successfully entered graduate school.

Ninety per cent are now working in professional fields such as lawyers and doctors, and 40 per cent of them have been promoted to the highest level of their positions.

From this point of view, this is already a success in the worldly sense.

However, there are very few of them who have made outstanding contributions to the world and profoundly influenced the world.

In this study, Professor Karen Arnold found that "it is difficult for the top students to change the world" is a universal law, not an accident.

The reason behind this phenomenon is that success in school is precisely what prevents them from achieving great things in the future.

For many middle-class families, most Chinese parents do not intend to "change the world" with the goal of raising their children.

Going to a prestigious school is just to find a good way out and earn more money in the future, and the most corresponding way out for a good student is a senior worker.

In recent years, the hottest topic in the international education circle is "spending millions to study abroad and returning with a monthly salary of 5,000".

When parents feel that they cannot reap the return on investment in studying abroad, they also question the return on investment in education.

Post-90s international student blogger @Xiaochen Diary once calculated an account:

She went abroad at the age of 16 and stayed in the United States for 8 years, spending 2.68 million yuan, but she graduated from the Ivy League school with an annual salary of only 150,000 yuan.

In other words, it takes nearly 18 years without food or drink to earn back the tuition fees.

Similarly, it took a Hangzhou girl 6 years to complete her bachelor's and master's degree in the United States, and roughly calculated that it cost about 4 million.

After graduating, I first went to a magazine, and then I went to a mother and child company to do publicity, but it was not a good job to give full play to my expertise.

In her parents' view, investing in education is not as cost-effective as buying a house.

03

Not up or down, the dilemma of returnees from prestigious schools

Some people say that if you start studying abroad in high school, you will basically not return to your home country; If you start studying abroad as an undergraduate, there is a probability that more than 50% of you will not want to come back; More than 25% of those who start studying abroad with a master's or doctoral degree are not expected to return.

A large part of the reason for these reluctance to return to China is "adaptation problems", the more people who have been exposed to foreign life since childhood, the more familiar they are with foreign life, and they are reluctant to return to China.

A large part of the reason why international students who are reluctant to return to China is because they "do not adapt to domestic life", and they stay abroad if they are able.

Those international students who cannot stay or are willing to return to China also need to deal with the "discomfort" problem that comes with it.

At present, the "overseas stay" in China has been basically disenchanted, except for a very few multinational companies that pay special attention to returnee talents, most enterprises treat overseas students and domestic students with the same academic ability.

If you return to your home country after graduation, your employment advantage may not be as good as that of domestic graduates.

For graduates of overseas returnees, how can they solve the dilemma?

1. Don't look at the high hand and the low hand 

There was once a survey of the expected salary of post-00s college graduates, and more than 6 percent of post-00s thought they could earn one million a year within 10 years.

Especially in the era of quick success, many students from prestigious schools do not have a clear understanding of themselves, and graduates of prestigious schools are reluctant to engage in ordinary jobs, thinking that they are "condescending" or "unworthy of academic qualifications".

In the economic downturn, they would rather gnaw at the old age or be full-time children than go out of the society to work.

But no profession is easy, and being ambitious will only limit our possibilities for exploring the future.

2. Develop a sense of purpose 

Many graduates of prestigious universities set their goal of getting high scores when they were young, but they don't have too many specific goals and ideas for choosing universities and majors.

I don't know what I want to do in the future and what my dreams are.

Without goals and dream schools, he will become confused in the planning and development of his life, have no motivation, and wait until he graduates from college.

Only to realize that I didn't know the direction at all, let alone life planning.

A ship can get lost without a goal, and a person will be lost without a goal.

Anyone who can make great achievements has a firm goal to guide the way forward.

3. Put an end to good student thinking 

Getting a high score and achieving perfection is a typical good student's thinking.

Graduates from prestigious universities also like to apply this methodology to job hunting, and every time they are rejected, they feel unbelievable why they chose someone who is not as good as me.

The workplace is never about scores, but about ability, emotional intelligence, and comprehensive ability.

The aura of a prestigious school that everyone is proud of is just a stepping stone, and what can stand tall in the trend of social development always depends on excellent skills and abilities.

It's good to go to a prestigious school, but it's actually just a paradox.

We live in uncertain times, and our definition of success is becoming more and more diverse.

Education is what makes us good people, not a guarantee of success.

When one day we no longer put ourselves in the traditional evaluation criteria, perhaps our education will not be involuted, the future of children will be broader, and education will return to its due meaning.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•