My background is very similar to yours. I grew up in a blue-collar family, attended a rural midwestern school (although my school was way bigger than yours -- my graduating class was over 60!), had very high test scores, and had not the first clue about how higher education worked, much less the existence of the 'ladders' you're talking about here. My parents were happy with my academic success, but were not in a position to help me financially or with any useful advice. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I pursue a teacher-training degree at a state university regional campus.
I ended up at a very middle-of-the-road -- and now struggling -- liberal arts college, essentially because it gave me the most money. I had no concept of rankings; for me, college = college.
I'm not bitter about any of this -- except maybe for my school counselor's malpractice. I've had a surprising and interesting life as a long-term expat in Hong Kong, and although my job is not especially high-status, it's engaging and quite well-compensated.
Another thing I didn't really expect was to be exposed to the other extreme of the 'choose your ladder' continuum. My daughter turned out to be an exceptional student -- much better than me. She attended an extremely selective school, and then went on to one of the UK's top universities. She, like all of Hong Kong's top students, has had status ladders pushed in front of her throughout her growing-up years.
I'm jealous of this sometimes, but it also has its downsides. The pressure of expectations is real, and I do look back and marvel at the radical freedom I had growing up to read and think about just what I liked, as my schoolwork was so undemanding it didn't occupy much of my time or energy. But I also think about what I missed out on learning then because I was so utterly undisciplined intellectually, and I do wonder . . . .
Anyway, thanks, Aaron, for a piece that's both personal and provocative. I hope 'Choose Your Ladders' will go even more 'nuclear viral' than your three worlds framework.
I just don't get these people triggered by a Christian talking about status. Clearly status, reputation, and ranks of all kinds are simply tools to identify people qualified for certain responsibilities. Like any tools, the will be abused in our fallen world.
Thanks for writing this; I found it very helpful. I do wonder how much the ladder-climbing shapes you, how different your goals would be if you had been more ambitious earlier and moved off to silicon valley? Not necessarily negative, of course, but not exactly easy to predict?
I wonder if the advisor role is key here. Having an advisor push you to pursue ambitious goals feels helpful not only to help direct you toward ambitions but also hopefully shape that pursuit to avoid the potential pitfalls?
This post is timely. As a young military attending physician who made a mid career switch after brief time as an officer, I have been thinking a lot about what career pathway I want to take (and the associated personal, family, missional, status considerations) but didn’t have a vocabulary until now for the issues I am trying to sort out. Thank you.
Terrific article. I didn't recognize until my late 40s what ladders I could have climbed at one time, but which I did not know even existed, let alone were possible for me to reach. I was limited by the circumstances of my working-class youth, and how it formed my view of how the world worked and what was possible in it.
Status and hierarchy are built into nature and I believe are part of God’s design even before the fall.
That being said, this worlds status hierarchies are a pale imitation of glory, real glory from God. We should know about these things of course but the only real mission in anyone’s life is walking with God. Acknowledging Him in all your ways so He directs your path.
“Reasoning” things out has limits; I put that in quotes advisedly. Our reason has limits because we are always working on less information than is pertinent. Only God can do the math. John Wesley went super low status and changed the world. Ulysses Grant would have been a drunk shopkeep in Ohio without the civil war. You don’t know what’s going to work, FOR YOU.
Also be warned that not only God and man are at work in the world. A lot of the status game is set up to seduce Christians away from the truth and distract heathens with job titles and CS Lewis’ “inner circle” to render us useless and them damned.
By all means get whatever wisdom you can, go as far as you can. But don’t confuse our current hierarchies with some kind of genuine measure of real value.
This is a very good article and very timely for me. I have often taken decisions that gave no thought to my eventual status, thereby going backwards, and also wasted time in hierarchies I had no desire to climb. I think that finding a hierarchy that you WANT to climb is one of the most important goals in life, and will motivate you to be the best version of yourself.
Regarding the importance of ambition, my favourite quote is Plato: "“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to you." Jordan Peterson is even more direct - to paraphrase: "any power you don't take will be picked up by your enemies and used against you"! In the real world, "just wanting to be left alone" is not an option.
Thank you for the article. I took a similar-ish path in that after my MBA at a great school, great network, I worked in "mid-tier consulting" at a spin off of a consulting group that was once Andersen Consulting (before I came along). My time in consulting and as an employee at companies like Amazon gave me a very cynical view of traditional status and "elite ladders". Granted, I didn't do true ELITE. And yet I feel like I got close enough to earn the view that there's not a lot of substance there. At least for me and what I want to do with life, those ladders were definitely the wrong ladders. Glad I'm not still on them.
Good article, I hope you will explore this topic further over time. However I would not show this article to anyone in our New England district where kids and parents spend years unhealthily obsessing over the Ivy League and following the perfect path.
The problem that parents and kids have to deal with is that our entire assessment system and path to selective colleges is falling apart. Firstly, everyone knows that GPA is not comparable between schools, however it is increasingly being treated as being comparable by colleges. As a result there is a significant "good school penalty" for kids pursuing selective universities. Even if you are not pursuing an elite college, this GPA differential can make a big difference to merit aid. All the parents rushing into these "good" districts in many cases are actually sabotaging their kids.
Starting around 1990, in order to give girls an edge over boys, American schools started using increasingly extreme forms of continuous assessment that is not used anywhere else in the world. Basically grading in America became more of a test of relentless compliance and conscientiousness than academics which is why even kids in good schools struggle to compete with their European counterparts. However some schools are starting to back off from this and slowly shifting to what the rest of the world does, emphasize what kids can do by the end of the course as opposed to treating grades as payment for tasks performed.
This is a totally different measure and the type of kid that performs well in one system is not always the sort that performs well in the other. Of course the grades are treated as comparable, so there again success may depend on choosing your high school carefully.
While one should apply and take the opportunity if it arises, targeting these elite colleges have become a hit and miss affair for even highly talented students.
I’m glad you followed up the X posts with a longer article!
We recently sent our very driven firstborn off to college and worked through these ideas when helping him choose where to go. I’d note that he has very high aspirations (and had the scores, grades, etc. to match) but only made the waitlists at the very elite schools. We encouraged him to choose a strong state school where kids can still go on to elite graduate schools (unfortunately, it’s out of state for us). One very nice surprise in all has been the strength and size of the college Christian community, which he wouldn’t have had at one of the elite schools he’d hoped for. I don’t think there could be a better combination of academics and community for him anywhere else.
This is really a wonderful article, Aaron. Another one of your writings that summarizes an obvious, but often neglected truth. Many forms of evangelicalism fuel this eschewing of hierarchy.
The question is how will the prestige and status of Harvard be affected by DEI in the next few years as indoctrination has led the way. We all know several Elites who seem as dumb as a doorknob let alone lack critical thinking skills. The argument is that even with DEI, Harvard is so elite that good outcomes still will come from it, and yet Bill De Blasio and Lori Lightfoot received patronage professorships there. So you can't be learning that much from them. Perhaps the legacy elites aren't elite to begin with, as we can see by everything that is crumbling around us, and as they gave us the unimpressive woke system of today. Are our institutions strong enough to handle the woke, like a stupid cousin of nepotism's past? We shall see, however, the point is, why are we (on the right) continuing to regard unimpressive people elite when they clearly are not. We continue to elevate fools, when they should be ignored.
Great essay. A question I do have is, when given a choice between an elite mainstream ladder, and a counter-elite ladder that may align more closely to an aspirant’s values, which should one choose? Like if a traditionalist Christian was accepted into both Harvard and Hillsdale, which institution would allow for the student to unlock their highest potential?
Hillsdale is a great school, but I suspect that very few people today would choose Hillsdale over Harvard if they were admitted to both. And the ones that would choose Hillsdale are probably from subaltern backgrounds themselves.
Even if your life's objective is to do the most to build up Hillsdale as an institution, I'd say you're better off going to Harvard.
The conservative sour grapes mentality around Harvard is very unproductive. The idea that it's just an education in DEI, you'll never learn anything useful there, etc. I hear stuff like this all the time, drives me bananas. If nothing else, at Harvard you'll learn how the game is played from the inside. Your peers will be running the world, that's information you can't pick up in a formal education at a lesser school.
You're less likely to read Boethius at Harvard, I guess, but if it's that important he'll still be waiting for you after you graduate, $7.99 on Amazon.
Only thing I'll speculate in favor of Hillsdale is you're almost certainly more likely to find a wife there. Which seems like a bad reason to choose a school, but if you go there and do manage to find an excellent wife, I can't fault the decision.
One other comment: I wouldn't downplay the importance of finding a good spouse. Aaron's right that one's place in the world is certainly important, but I think most people (although certainly not all) would trade quite a few status points for an excellent marriage. Of course, it's not impossible to find one's spouse in an 'elite' setting -- the odds may be worse, but it only takes one.
Yes, I'm a heavy Gutenberg user (though I happen to have a physical copy of Boethius) but half the time I bring up reading classic books as e-books in rightist spaces it seems to offend someone and sidetrack the discussion.
But while we're at it I'll mention there's a long list of mostly Reformed (but a few pre-Reformation) free Christian e-books here:
And yes, I agree with you on marriage. It would be stupid not to rate a good marriage as one of your most important life decisions: "An excellent wife is her husband's crown."
But I guess the question is, how much is it worth sacrificing for maybe a 30-40% chance of finding an excellent wife in a 4-year period, as opposed to perhaps a 10% chance? Hard to answer that question except to know yourself and if you're going to be ready and eager to marry at 22. One factor is whether you hope to have a large family.
Right, but will you though? Assuming they let you in, big if, it’s just concentric inner circles all the way down. You’re Harvard, but are you in the right class, the right club, are you “one of us”?
I’m not even saying don’t go to Harvard if God opens a door you’re a fool not to walk through it. I am saying maybe think less about joining your enemies institutions and more about defeating them.
Besides you know how it works from the inside. Read the Bible, conspiracies and corruption abound. Next there are reliable accounts of McKinsey, NGOs, academia, etc. also these places have immune systems. They weed out enemies, suborn you if they can, etc. listen I’m not saying be black pilled either. It’s getting hard enough to have a mainstream job and not be on board with the program, you think it’s easier the closer you get to an enemy citadel?
A deeply thought-provoking piece, thank you,
Thanks for this fantastic post, Aaron.
My background is very similar to yours. I grew up in a blue-collar family, attended a rural midwestern school (although my school was way bigger than yours -- my graduating class was over 60!), had very high test scores, and had not the first clue about how higher education worked, much less the existence of the 'ladders' you're talking about here. My parents were happy with my academic success, but were not in a position to help me financially or with any useful advice. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I pursue a teacher-training degree at a state university regional campus.
I ended up at a very middle-of-the-road -- and now struggling -- liberal arts college, essentially because it gave me the most money. I had no concept of rankings; for me, college = college.
I'm not bitter about any of this -- except maybe for my school counselor's malpractice. I've had a surprising and interesting life as a long-term expat in Hong Kong, and although my job is not especially high-status, it's engaging and quite well-compensated.
Another thing I didn't really expect was to be exposed to the other extreme of the 'choose your ladder' continuum. My daughter turned out to be an exceptional student -- much better than me. She attended an extremely selective school, and then went on to one of the UK's top universities. She, like all of Hong Kong's top students, has had status ladders pushed in front of her throughout her growing-up years.
I'm jealous of this sometimes, but it also has its downsides. The pressure of expectations is real, and I do look back and marvel at the radical freedom I had growing up to read and think about just what I liked, as my schoolwork was so undemanding it didn't occupy much of my time or energy. But I also think about what I missed out on learning then because I was so utterly undisciplined intellectually, and I do wonder . . . .
Anyway, thanks, Aaron, for a piece that's both personal and provocative. I hope 'Choose Your Ladders' will go even more 'nuclear viral' than your three worlds framework.
Thanks for sharing.
I just don't get these people triggered by a Christian talking about status. Clearly status, reputation, and ranks of all kinds are simply tools to identify people qualified for certain responsibilities. Like any tools, the will be abused in our fallen world.
There will be status hierarchies in Heaven.
Thanks for writing this; I found it very helpful. I do wonder how much the ladder-climbing shapes you, how different your goals would be if you had been more ambitious earlier and moved off to silicon valley? Not necessarily negative, of course, but not exactly easy to predict?
I wonder if the advisor role is key here. Having an advisor push you to pursue ambitious goals feels helpful not only to help direct you toward ambitions but also hopefully shape that pursuit to avoid the potential pitfalls?
This post is timely. As a young military attending physician who made a mid career switch after brief time as an officer, I have been thinking a lot about what career pathway I want to take (and the associated personal, family, missional, status considerations) but didn’t have a vocabulary until now for the issues I am trying to sort out. Thank you.
Terrific article. I didn't recognize until my late 40s what ladders I could have climbed at one time, but which I did not know even existed, let alone were possible for me to reach. I was limited by the circumstances of my working-class youth, and how it formed my view of how the world worked and what was possible in it.
Thanks, Jim.
Status and hierarchy are built into nature and I believe are part of God’s design even before the fall.
That being said, this worlds status hierarchies are a pale imitation of glory, real glory from God. We should know about these things of course but the only real mission in anyone’s life is walking with God. Acknowledging Him in all your ways so He directs your path.
“Reasoning” things out has limits; I put that in quotes advisedly. Our reason has limits because we are always working on less information than is pertinent. Only God can do the math. John Wesley went super low status and changed the world. Ulysses Grant would have been a drunk shopkeep in Ohio without the civil war. You don’t know what’s going to work, FOR YOU.
Also be warned that not only God and man are at work in the world. A lot of the status game is set up to seduce Christians away from the truth and distract heathens with job titles and CS Lewis’ “inner circle” to render us useless and them damned.
By all means get whatever wisdom you can, go as far as you can. But don’t confuse our current hierarchies with some kind of genuine measure of real value.
This is a very good article and very timely for me. I have often taken decisions that gave no thought to my eventual status, thereby going backwards, and also wasted time in hierarchies I had no desire to climb. I think that finding a hierarchy that you WANT to climb is one of the most important goals in life, and will motivate you to be the best version of yourself.
Regarding the importance of ambition, my favourite quote is Plato: "“The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to you." Jordan Peterson is even more direct - to paraphrase: "any power you don't take will be picked up by your enemies and used against you"! In the real world, "just wanting to be left alone" is not an option.
Thank you for the article. I took a similar-ish path in that after my MBA at a great school, great network, I worked in "mid-tier consulting" at a spin off of a consulting group that was once Andersen Consulting (before I came along). My time in consulting and as an employee at companies like Amazon gave me a very cynical view of traditional status and "elite ladders". Granted, I didn't do true ELITE. And yet I feel like I got close enough to earn the view that there's not a lot of substance there. At least for me and what I want to do with life, those ladders were definitely the wrong ladders. Glad I'm not still on them.
Good article, I hope you will explore this topic further over time. However I would not show this article to anyone in our New England district where kids and parents spend years unhealthily obsessing over the Ivy League and following the perfect path.
The problem that parents and kids have to deal with is that our entire assessment system and path to selective colleges is falling apart. Firstly, everyone knows that GPA is not comparable between schools, however it is increasingly being treated as being comparable by colleges. As a result there is a significant "good school penalty" for kids pursuing selective universities. Even if you are not pursuing an elite college, this GPA differential can make a big difference to merit aid. All the parents rushing into these "good" districts in many cases are actually sabotaging their kids.
Starting around 1990, in order to give girls an edge over boys, American schools started using increasingly extreme forms of continuous assessment that is not used anywhere else in the world. Basically grading in America became more of a test of relentless compliance and conscientiousness than academics which is why even kids in good schools struggle to compete with their European counterparts. However some schools are starting to back off from this and slowly shifting to what the rest of the world does, emphasize what kids can do by the end of the course as opposed to treating grades as payment for tasks performed.
This is a totally different measure and the type of kid that performs well in one system is not always the sort that performs well in the other. Of course the grades are treated as comparable, so there again success may depend on choosing your high school carefully.
While one should apply and take the opportunity if it arises, targeting these elite colleges have become a hit and miss affair for even highly talented students.
I’m glad you followed up the X posts with a longer article!
We recently sent our very driven firstborn off to college and worked through these ideas when helping him choose where to go. I’d note that he has very high aspirations (and had the scores, grades, etc. to match) but only made the waitlists at the very elite schools. We encouraged him to choose a strong state school where kids can still go on to elite graduate schools (unfortunately, it’s out of state for us). One very nice surprise in all has been the strength and size of the college Christian community, which he wouldn’t have had at one of the elite schools he’d hoped for. I don’t think there could be a better combination of academics and community for him anywhere else.
Bekah, glad to hear you were consciously working through these with your son.
This is really a wonderful article, Aaron. Another one of your writings that summarizes an obvious, but often neglected truth. Many forms of evangelicalism fuel this eschewing of hierarchy.
It eschews them, often as not.
Thanks.
The question is how will the prestige and status of Harvard be affected by DEI in the next few years as indoctrination has led the way. We all know several Elites who seem as dumb as a doorknob let alone lack critical thinking skills. The argument is that even with DEI, Harvard is so elite that good outcomes still will come from it, and yet Bill De Blasio and Lori Lightfoot received patronage professorships there. So you can't be learning that much from them. Perhaps the legacy elites aren't elite to begin with, as we can see by everything that is crumbling around us, and as they gave us the unimpressive woke system of today. Are our institutions strong enough to handle the woke, like a stupid cousin of nepotism's past? We shall see, however, the point is, why are we (on the right) continuing to regard unimpressive people elite when they clearly are not. We continue to elevate fools, when they should be ignored.
I had never thought about ambition and goals this way before. It is hugely helpful.
Thanks.
Great essay. A question I do have is, when given a choice between an elite mainstream ladder, and a counter-elite ladder that may align more closely to an aspirant’s values, which should one choose? Like if a traditionalist Christian was accepted into both Harvard and Hillsdale, which institution would allow for the student to unlock their highest potential?
Oh that’s easy, whichever God leads you to go to as best you know.
Hillsdale is a great school, but I suspect that very few people today would choose Hillsdale over Harvard if they were admitted to both. And the ones that would choose Hillsdale are probably from subaltern backgrounds themselves.
Hard agree.
Even if your life's objective is to do the most to build up Hillsdale as an institution, I'd say you're better off going to Harvard.
The conservative sour grapes mentality around Harvard is very unproductive. The idea that it's just an education in DEI, you'll never learn anything useful there, etc. I hear stuff like this all the time, drives me bananas. If nothing else, at Harvard you'll learn how the game is played from the inside. Your peers will be running the world, that's information you can't pick up in a formal education at a lesser school.
You're less likely to read Boethius at Harvard, I guess, but if it's that important he'll still be waiting for you after you graduate, $7.99 on Amazon.
Only thing I'll speculate in favor of Hillsdale is you're almost certainly more likely to find a wife there. Which seems like a bad reason to choose a school, but if you go there and do manage to find an excellent wife, I can't fault the decision.
Boethius is *free* on Project Gutenberg!
One other comment: I wouldn't downplay the importance of finding a good spouse. Aaron's right that one's place in the world is certainly important, but I think most people (although certainly not all) would trade quite a few status points for an excellent marriage. Of course, it's not impossible to find one's spouse in an 'elite' setting -- the odds may be worse, but it only takes one.
Yes, I'm a heavy Gutenberg user (though I happen to have a physical copy of Boethius) but half the time I bring up reading classic books as e-books in rightist spaces it seems to offend someone and sidetrack the discussion.
But while we're at it I'll mention there's a long list of mostly Reformed (but a few pre-Reformation) free Christian e-books here:
https://www.monergism.com/1100-free-ebooks-listed-alphabetically-author
And yes, I agree with you on marriage. It would be stupid not to rate a good marriage as one of your most important life decisions: "An excellent wife is her husband's crown."
But I guess the question is, how much is it worth sacrificing for maybe a 30-40% chance of finding an excellent wife in a 4-year period, as opposed to perhaps a 10% chance? Hard to answer that question except to know yourself and if you're going to be ready and eager to marry at 22. One factor is whether you hope to have a large family.
Right, but will you though? Assuming they let you in, big if, it’s just concentric inner circles all the way down. You’re Harvard, but are you in the right class, the right club, are you “one of us”?
I’m not even saying don’t go to Harvard if God opens a door you’re a fool not to walk through it. I am saying maybe think less about joining your enemies institutions and more about defeating them.
Besides you know how it works from the inside. Read the Bible, conspiracies and corruption abound. Next there are reliable accounts of McKinsey, NGOs, academia, etc. also these places have immune systems. They weed out enemies, suborn you if they can, etc. listen I’m not saying be black pilled either. It’s getting hard enough to have a mainstream job and not be on board with the program, you think it’s easier the closer you get to an enemy citadel?