"The one thing you've got to say about Columbia is that it has courses that are famous. It has alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did"
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A careful compliment can be more revealing than a glowing one, and William Scott’s line about Columbia lands in that ambiguous space between brochure copy and backhanded candor. “The one thing you’ve got to say” sounds like praise that’s been lawyered down to its safest claim. It implies there are other things you might not want to say - about elitism, about cost, about the way prestige can launder uneven experiences into a single brand. The syntax narrows the aperture: not “Columbia is great,” but “it has courses that are famous.” Fame is a social metric, not an educational one. It frames learning as something you consume for its reputation, a credentialed story you can tell.
The second sentence pivots to the real engine of elite institutions: testimonial culture. “Alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did” isn’t evidence so much as a ritual of self-justification. People don’t only defend their alma mater; they defend the version of themselves that got in, paid up, survived, and benefited from the network. Memory, especially among the successful, edits out the mess and keeps the narrative arc.
Scott’s intent reads like a writerly distillation of how institutional prestige reproduces itself: famous courses create famous graduates who return to certify the experience as transformative. The subtext is that Columbia’s value may be less about what happens in the classroom than about the reputation loop outside it - a loop that converts education into mythology and mythology into market power.
The second sentence pivots to the real engine of elite institutions: testimonial culture. “Alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did” isn’t evidence so much as a ritual of self-justification. People don’t only defend their alma mater; they defend the version of themselves that got in, paid up, survived, and benefited from the network. Memory, especially among the successful, edits out the mess and keeps the narrative arc.
Scott’s intent reads like a writerly distillation of how institutional prestige reproduces itself: famous courses create famous graduates who return to certify the experience as transformative. The subtext is that Columbia’s value may be less about what happens in the classroom than about the reputation loop outside it - a loop that converts education into mythology and mythology into market power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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