Member-only story

Don’t go to an Ivy League school

Serge Faldin
3 min readJun 1, 2022

People brag about their kids going to Harvard. The famed Ivy League. Uh. The whole industry of schools that cost $70,000 per year — putting students into literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt which you can’t even declare bankruptcy againsthad been built around playing on our innate desire to seek approval from our parents.

“My kid is going to Harvard. Wow,” parents think.

“I’m going to Harvard. Wow,” kids think. Then, after several months, “I am in Harvard. Eh…is that it?”

I didn’t go to Harvard — although I was accepted to Stanford — I went to a pretty expensive school in Boston. It cost my father $68,000 per year. My family was roughly and singlehandedly financing an entire professor’s salary.

As I went from class to class, looking at other kids whose parents also sent them to study the most pointless subject in the Universe — ‘business’ — I couldn’t stop thinking, “What was my family paying for?” The campus looked more like a daycare for young adults. Students were generously fed three times a day, had only 2–3 classes per day, and spent most of our time alone jerking off in their rooms. And this, I should point out, was the #1 business school in the country. (No wonder there are so many narcissistic morons making the world a better place from their glass-window offices in Silicon Valley.)

Needless to state, I dropped out seven months in. But five years later, today, I am considering going back to school. And because I’ll have to pay…

--

--

Serge Faldin
Serge Faldin

Written by Serge Faldin

Honest thoughts. Unpopular opinions. Not necessarily true or smart. | Bylines: The Guardian, Truthout, Meduza, Prospect | Personal essays: sergeys.substack.com

Responses (4)