Bobo has seen fit to present us with something called “The Employer’s Creed.” He gurgles that the hiring process deeply affects the kind of people we have in our society. He says a little healthy bias in decision-making might cultivate deeper, fuller human beings. You know you’re in for a rough ride when he uses the phrase “moral ecology” in the first sentence. In “A Step Toward Justice in College Sports?” Mr. Nocera says a players’ union would help. But several lawsuits could bring about even bigger changes. Mr. Bruni considers “Our Crazy College Crossroads” and says: Accepted? Rejected? Neither seals your fate. Here’s Bobo:
Dear Employers,
You may not realize it, but you have a powerful impact on the culture and the moral ecology of our era. If your human resources bosses decide they want to hire a certain sort of person, then young people begin turning themselves into that sort of person.
Therefore, I’m asking you to think about the following principles, this Employer’s Creed. If you follow these principles in your hiring practices, you’ll be sending a signal about what sort of person gets ahead. You may correct some of the perversities at the upper reaches of our meritocracy. You may even help cultivate deeper, fuller human beings.
Bias hiring decisions against perfectionists. If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated job applicants, you’ve probably been flooded with résumés from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success. They got 3.8 grade-point averages in high school and college. They served in the cliché leadership positions on campus. They got all the perfect consultant/investment bank internships. During off-hours they distributed bed nets in Zambia and dug wells in Peru.
When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there’s something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity. Either they have no desire to chart out an original life course or lack the courage to do so. Shy away from such people.
Bias hiring decisions toward dualists. The people you want to hire should have achieved some measure of conventional success, but they should have also engaged in some desperate lark that made no sense from a career or social status perspective. Maybe a person left a successful banking job to rescue the family dry-cleaning business in Akron. Maybe another had great grades at a fancy East Coast prep school but went off to a Christian college because she wanted a place to explore her values. These peoples have done at least one Deeply Unfashionable Thing. Such people have intrinsic motivation, native curiosity and social courage.
Bias toward truth-tellers. I recently ran into a fellow who hires a lot of people. He said he asks the following question during each interview. “Could you describe a time when you told the truth and it hurt you?” If the interviewee can’t immediately come up with an episode, there may be a problem here.
Don’t mindlessly favor people with high G.P.A.s. Students who get straight As have an ability to prudentially master their passions so they can achieve proficiency across a range of subjects. But you probably want employees who are relentlessly dedicated to one subject. In school, those people often got As in subjects they were passionate about but got Bs in subjects that did not arouse their imagination.
Reward the ripening virtues, not the blooming virtues. Some virtues bloom forth with youth: being intelligent, energetic, curious and pleasant. Some virtues only ripen over time: other-centeredness, having a sense for how events will flow, being able to discern what’s right in the absence of external affirmation. These virtues usually come with experience, after a person has taken time off to raise children, been fired or learned to cope with having a cruel boss. The blooming virtues are great if you are hiring thousands of consultants to churn out reports. For most other jobs, you want the ripening ones, too.
Reward those who have come by way of sorrow. Job seekers are told to present one linear narrative to the world, one that can easily be read and digested as a series of clean conquests. But if you are stuck in an airport bar with a colleague after a horrible business trip, would you really want to have a drink with a person like that? No, you’d want a real human being, someone who’d experienced setback, suffering and recovery. You’d want someone with obvious holes in his résumé, who has learned the lessons that only suffering teaches, and who got back on track.
Reward cover letter rebels. Job seeking is the second greatest arena of social pretense in modern life — after dating. But some people choose not to spin and exaggerate. They choose not to make each occasion seem more impressive than it really was. You want people who are radically straight, even with superiors.
You could argue that you don’t actually want rich, full personalities for your company. You just want achievement drones who can perform specific tasks. I doubt that’s in your company’s long-term interests. But if you fear leaping out in this way, at least think of the effect you’re having on the deeper sensibilities of the next generation, the kind of souls you are incentivizing and thus fashioning, the legacy you will leave behind.
It’s really time for him to find something else to do, and give poor Moral Hazard a break. Here’s Mr. Nocera:
If you were going to hold up a school as being exemplary in the way it puts athletics in, as they say, “the proper perspective,” Northwestern University would certainly be one you’d point to. For instance, although it lacks the kind of winning tradition — at least in the big-time sports — that other schools in the Big Ten can boast of, it proudly points to the 97 percent graduation rate of its athletes.
Yet buried in last week’s decision by Peter Sung Ohr, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board — in which he said that the Northwestern football team had the right to form a union — was this anecdote about Kain Colter, the former Northwestern quarterback who is leading the union effort. In his sophomore year, dreaming of going to medical school someday, Colter “attempted to take a required chemistry course.” However, “his coaches and advisors discouraged him from taking the course because it conflicted with morning football practices.” Eventually, after falling behind other pre-med students, he wound up switching his major to psychology, “which he believed to be less demanding,” according to Ohr.
Ohr’s essential point was that unlike the rest of the student body at Northwestern, football players had little control over their lives. Their schedules were dictated by the needs of the football team. They had bosses in the form of coaches and other university officials who could fire them. They had to abide by a million petty N.C.A.A. rules, and they lacked many of the freedoms and rights taken for granted by students who didn’t play sports. They put in up to 50-hours a week at their sport — vastly more than is supposedly allowed under N.C.A.A. rules. But then, every school finds ways to evade those rules, whether they have athletics “in perspective” or not.
Anyone who cares about justice had to be encouraged by Ohr’s ruling. In outlining the many ways that Northwestern’s football players were primarily employees of the university, recruited to the campus to generate revenue, Ohr ignored the idyllic myth of the “student-athlete” and dealt in cold, hard facts. (“Student-athlete,” it’s worth remembering, is a phrase invented by the N.C.A.A. in the 1950s precisely to avoid having to grant workers’ compensation to injured college football players on the grounds that they fit the classic definition of employees.)
Having said that, it seems to me that both the fans and the critics of Ohr’s decision have been getting a little ahead of themselves. It is only one team at one school, and while I hear reliably that other teams at other schools are investigating the possibility of forming a union, we are years away from knowing whether a union would necessarily mean players are eventually paid (as proponents hope) or that their scholarships will be taxed (as critics warn). Given the N.C.A.A.’s fierce resistance to anything that might dilute its power — or worse, give power to the athletes themselves — it is a certainty that Ohr’s decision will wind up in a federal appeals court.
The buzz over the union effort has also had the effect, at least temporarily, of distracting attention from other efforts that have the potential to upend the system even more radically. One is a class-action lawsuit that has been active for several years now, the O’Bannon case, named for Ed O’Bannon, the former U.C.L.A. basketball star. Although ostensibly about the licensing and image rights of former college athletes, it is aimed directly at the heart of “amateurism” that is the central rationale of the N.C.A.A.’s refusal to consider paying players anything beyond their scholarships.
Already, I’m told, the legal team driving the case is devising the means to pay players royalties and other compensation, which they will undoubtedly propose to the judge, assuming it goes to trial.
Meanwhile, lawyers on both coasts have recently filed straightforward antitrust class-action suits against the N.C.A.A., arguing that universities and the N.C.A.A. simply lack the legal right to cap players’ compensation. When I asked Jeffrey Kessler, a New York lawyer who has spent years representing professional athletes, why he had taken on this case, he replied, “Our sense is that the world has changed so radically in college sports that even the most casual observers recognize that this is not amateurism. This is a gigantic business.”
Maybe that is what the Ohr decision really represents: a government acknowledgment that college sports is not what it once was, and that no amount of N.C.A.A. propaganda can hide the money-soaked reality anymore. If judges come to these upcoming cases with the same lack of blinders that Ohr showed last week — if they view the cases strictly through the prism of the law rather than the gauzy sheen of amateurism — well, then, a union will be the least of the N.C.A.A.’s worries.
And now we get to Mr. Bruni:
Over recent days the notices have gone out, an annual ritual of dashed hopes.
Brown University offered admission to the lowest fraction ever of the applicants it received: fewer than one in 10. The arithmetic was even more brutal at Stanford, Columbia, Yale. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had a record number of students vying for its next freshman class — 31,321 — and accepted about one in six who applied from outside the state. Notre Dame took about one in five of all comers.
And right now many young men and women who didn’t get in where they fervently longed to are worrying that it’s some grim harbinger of their future, some sweeping judgment of their worth.
This is for them. And it’s intended less as a balm for the rejected than as a reality check for a society gone nuts over the whole overheated process.
If you were shut out of an elite school, that doesn’t mean you’re less gifted than all of the students who were welcomed there. It may mean only that you lacked the patronage that some of them had, or that you played the game less single-mindedly, taking fewer SAT courses and failing to massage your biography with the same zeal.
A friend of mine in Africa told me recently about a center for orphans there that a rich American couple financed in part to give their own teenage children an exotic charity to visit occasionally and mine for college-application essays: admissions bait. That’s the degree of cunning that comes into this frenzy.
Maybe the school that turned you down ranks high in the excessively publicized “College Salary Report” by PayScale.com, which looks at whose graduates go on to make the most money.
What a ludicrous list. It’s at least as imperfectly assembled as the honor roll that U.S. News & World Report puts together every year. And even if you trust it, what does it tell you? That the colleges at the top have the most clout and impart the best skills? Or that these colleges admit the most young people whose parents and previously established networks guarantee them a leg up?
Maybe it tells you merely that these colleges attract the budding plutocrats with the greatest concern for the heft of their paychecks. Is that the milieu you sought?
About money and professional advancement: Shiny diplomas from shiny schools help. It’s a lie to say otherwise. But it’s as foolish to accord their luster more consequence than the effort you put into your studies, the earnestness with which you hone your skills, what you actually learn. These are the sturdier building blocks of a career.
In “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that a less exclusive university may enable a student to stand out and flourish in a way that a more exclusive one doesn’t. The selectiveness of Gladwell’s science doesn’t nullify the plausibility of his argument.
Corner offices in this country teem with C.E.O.s who didn’t do their undergraduate work in the Ivy League. Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin went to the University of Alabama. John Mackey of Whole Foods studied at the University of Texas, never finishing.
Your diploma is, or should be, the least of what defines you. Show me someone whose identity is rooted in where he or she went to college. I’ll show you someone you really, really don’t want at your Super Bowl party.
And your diploma will have infinitely less relevance to your fulfillment than so much else: the wisdom with which you choose your romantic partners; your interactions with the community you inhabit; your generosity toward the family that you inherited or the family that you’ve made.
If you’re not bound for the school of your dreams, you’re probably bound for a school that doesn’t conform as tidily to your fantasies or promise to be as instantly snug a fit.
Good. College should be a crucible. It’s about departure, not continuity: about turning a page and becoming a new person, not letting the ink dry on who, at 17 or 18, you already are. The disruption of your best-laid plans serves that. It’s less a setback than a springboard.
A high school senior I know didn’t get into several of the colleges she coveted most. She got into a few that are plenty excellent. And I’ve never been more impressed with her, because she quickly realized that her regrets pale beside her blessings and she pivoted from letdown to excitement.
That resiliency and talent for optimism will matter more down the line than the name of the school lucky enough to have her. Like those of her peers who are gracefully getting past this ordeal that our status-mad society has foisted on them, she’ll do just fine.
