We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments – that is, the sacrifices – to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.
~ William Deresiewicz

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We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place.
~ William Deresiewicz

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The compulsive overachievement of today’s elite college students – the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can – is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn’t capable of handling the pressure.
~ William Deresiewicz

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What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.
~ William Deresiewicz

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Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state.
~ William Deresiewicz

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What’s the return on investment of college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake.
~ William Deresiewicz

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A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself.
~ William Deresiewicz

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You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he’d never be another Shakespeare.
~ William Deresiewicz

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