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Frank Bruni is a New York Times columnist, who has written four nonfiction books. His most recent, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania, turns a gimlet eye toward college admissions—and the mythology surrounding it. In this week’s episode of the New York Public Library podcast, Bruni discusses the pitfalls of believing that elite schools are the sole path to a great life, why people put too much faith in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings, and what’s worthwhile about college.

It would be reductive to read the title of Bruni’s book and assume that the author thinks college is a waste of time. Bruni, in fact, notes many benefits:

“I believe in college. I have a big problem with the conversation about ‘Is college worth it?’ because that question and that conversation is entirely about professional utility, and it kind of casts college in a vocational role. And I think if you can, and you’re blessed if you can, but if college if economically attainable, if it’s within your reach, it’s not just about preparing for a job. It’s about becoming a better citizen. It’s about becoming a bigger person. And I would hate for us to lose sight of that as we do this dollars and cents analysis of whether college is financially worth it.”

Rather than critiquing the college experience, Bruni questioned the way that college reputations often precede the educations they offer, and there is no mechanism that drives the engine of college reputations more than the U.S. News & World Report:

“We’re as insecure about colleges as we are about washers and dryers, and you want to look in Consumer Reports—no, I’m not making a joke—you want to look in Consumer Reports and be told what car to buy or what washer and dryer. You also want to outsource your judgment and discretion when it comes to colleges and U.S. News & World Report has done, admittedly, the most comprehensive and best marketed rankings in the world. But what people I don’t think understand is exactly how these rankings are put together and how manipulable, gameable they are. So you take one thing: a big fraction of that ranking reflects what high school guidance counselors and then on the college level what university presidents, provosts, and admissions teams have said in surveys about the colleges they’re asked about. I’ve had college administrators say, ‘I don’t know what goes on at that college over there. So when I fill out the survey, I’m going by reputation. I’m going by how they ranked in U.S. News last year.’ So it’s a self-perpetuating phenomenon. It’s crazy.”

The craziness doesn’t end there. Bruni, who studied at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Columbia University, explained that college admissions anxieties are foregrounded by an unsubstantiated belief that college is the ultimate metric with which an individual can measure future success:

“It became clear to me that we’ve infused this process with so much anxiety that there are all these kids who really believe that they’re going to maximize substantially their chances of a great life or even be guaranteed one if they can just get into these schools, and there are these kids who conversely believe that if they get a no from these schools it is some binding verdict on their future and some meaningful judgment of their self worth. And as I watched kids go through that and then I looked around me at the New York Times, thought about it, I mean, I’ve been fortunate to work in a lot of different areas of journalism and to interview lots of people, this belief that success was only going to be attainable or was going to be so much more attainable only though the Ivy League and its ilk, it just didn’t match up to what I saw around me and the educational backgrounds and pedigrees of people I knew.”

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