The Dorky Social Climbers of the College Novel

Americans are obsessed with elite colleges, so where are all the college novels, films, and TV shows?

For the longest time, I was obsessed with writing the perfect college novel that would encapsulate my undergraduate experience. Part of that was because, for better or for worse, college was a very formative time—much more so than high school—and I wanted to capture that time, if only for my own sake. But another part was because I’d found it so difficult to find many cultural works about that American college experience. How useful it might’ve been for me to have read or watched such works before I went to an American college. Some healthy disillusioning might’ve happened sooner than it did.

But aside from a handful of novels, I didn’t find much out there on this front and it puzzled me. Weirdly, I found more well-known novels told from the faculty’s point of view (Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, The Human Stain by Philip Roth, Stoner by John Williams). In contrast, how many famous novels are there about high school teachers?

In many ways, Americans are obsessed with college: who gets in, which tests should be used (if at all), what students are allowed to say, what the sexual culture is like on campus, how many alumni from certain schools dominate powerful institutions, and so forth. The elite American university is, along with Apple and Hollywood, one of the last American products that still hold the highest prestige around the world. While other countries may place a high value on university educations, none of them mythologize that experience like American ones do, which is probably why even though Asian countries are obsessed with university educations, their cultural obsession is centered around high school. There, university is more of a place to get ready for adult life. It may even be a sad place, the scene of an unwanted transition to a life of newfound pressures and obligations.

In contrast, elite American colleges disdain the idea of their campuses being mere job-training grounds or brain factories. Rather, they are supposed to be places where you find yourself, make lifelong friends, experience freedom away from the constricting watch of parents, and if you are going to be financially successful, to become so doing what you love.

Perhaps Americans loathe elitism and elite American colleges, by definition, revel in it. But Americans can never get enough of rich-kid drama, from Cruel Intentions to Beverly Hills 90210 to The OC to Gossip Girl. Shows like Freaks and Geeks and Malcolm In The Middle stand out for being some of the few depictions of working and middle-class high school life. If Americans are averse to elite college narratives but not to privileged-kid ones, then what is it about the former that is so repellant?

In searching for the “college narrative,” I realized that what I was seeking and finding was in fact a very narrowly defined experience, one that had more or less the following elements: (1) an academically bright and culturally ambitious protagonist (2) from some unglamorous tier of the American middle-class (3) for whom college was their stage where they could leverage their academic success into entering a higher social class. Even though the majority of Americans do not attend college, even among the minority of those with a college education, there is a huge range of experiences. But there is a stark contrast between the typical college and high school narratives in our media. Whereas many high school stories are set in anyschool USA, college narratives are almost exclusively set in elite universities, with the Ivy Leagues (especially Harvard) disproportionately overrepresented. Of the novels that I’ve come across in my searches, I can’t think of one set at a state school, much less a directional state school.

In Teddy Wayne’s Loner, the main character is David Federman, an academically gifted but socially anonymous kid who sees Harvard as the place where he will finally be inducted into the elite social stratum befitting someone of his gifts. His has nothing but disdain for his own New Jersey roots, “that of the fairly successful professionals who weren’t quite able to hack it across the river and so had settled for suburban convenience, good public schools, and affordable real estate while living in the shadows of glittering skyscrapers.” At Harvard, he plots his social ascent by trying to date the rich and popular girl in his class, a Chapin grad named Veronica Morgan Wells (whom he imagines reading cloth-bound Russian novels on a secluded private beach) while fuming that, just like in high school, the only friends he can make are those banal normies who are “studious but not collectively brilliant enough to be nerds, nor sufficiently specialized to be geeks” and who “joked about sex with the vulgar fixation of virgins.” As the weeks and months pass in his freshman year, David’s resentments grow as he realizes that not even an invitation to the most prestigious university in the world grants him the social standing he feels he deserves.

The fictional David is partially brought to life in Walter Kirn’s memoir, Lost in the Meritocracy. The details are slightly different—Walter is from Minnesota and he attends Princeton—but their resentments and aspirations are remarkably similar. Like David, Walter has a stalwart pre-college academic career full of spelling bee triumphs, forensic medals, and speeches at Model UN, all for a chance to attend Princeton, to which he aspires not out a love of learning or desire for a glittering career, but to belong to a higher social class. Like David, Walter aims to date up. Unlike David, he succeeds with Nina, who runs in an elite campus theatre circle. Still, Nina proves to be an exception, as Walter that his ilk’s “shape-shifting, agile, approval-seeking brains may have entitled [them] to live and study with the children of the ruling class, but not to mate with them.” Bitterly, he realizes that a “pure meritocracy . . . can confer success but can’t grant knighthood.”

Elif Batuman’s The Idiot follows its protagonist Selin in her first year at Harvard, where she studies linguistics, becomes obsessed with an unobtainable older male student, and spends a few weeks in Hungary teaching English. It is less overtly about social climbing than the other novels I’ve mentioned, but reading between the lines, it’s clear that Selin doesn’t come from the well-traveled and well-financed lifestyles of the beautiful and glamorous friends she meets during her freshman year at Harvard like Svetlana—the daughter of culture-class Serbian parents (father is a famous academic and mother was an artist) who, sensing her noblesse oblige to someone like Selin, pays for her CVS purchases—and Lakshmi, who is British Pakistani and does a lot of drugs and has had an globetrotting upbringing. In contrast, Selin has a mother who, in true immigrant parent mindset (in other words, a lower-class mindset), disapproves of her getting a work study job as it would take away from her studies, which presumably are to be pursued for a financial payoff (given Selin’s desire to be a writer and study art or linguistics, that is unlikely to happen). Furthermore, she, like David, is from the accursed state of New Jersey.

In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Richard Papen makes a throwaway decision to study Ancient Greek at his small hometown college, and that allows him to escape his drab working-class Californian heritage by transferring to (the fictional) Hampden College. To Richard, Hampden is a place where “even the name had an austere Anglican cadence,” which was music to his ears that “yearned hopelessly for England and was dead to the sweet dark rhythms of the little mission towns.” He loathes those “little mission towns” of his upbringing so much that once he leaves, he makes up a new personal history “full of swimming pools” and “charming show-biz parents.” When he arrives for the first time Hampden’s campus, it’s as if he’s settling into a fine boutique hotel than an academic institution, where “[t]he dormitories weren’t even dorms—or at any rate not like the dorms [he] knew, with cinderblock walls and depressing, yellowish light—but white clapboard houses with green shutters, set back from the Commons in groves of maple and ash.” Richard manages to break into a socially elite circle, albeit a creepy and murderous classics-obsessed one, but at least before the bloodshed happens, he enjoys oyster lunches and country home getaways.

The title character in I Am Charlotte Simmons rises from her impoverished West Virginian roots—her family uses a picnic table as an indoor dining table—to attend Dupont University (a thinly veiled Duke University). There, thanks to her beauty and Appalachian charm, she catches the eye of a popular frat star and is invited into the world of exclusive Greek life. In the beginning of the novel, when Charlotte’s graduation party is rudely interrupted by some of her boorish classmates, her consolation is how she will leave behind all those losers soon, whom she pictures “spend[ing] the rest of his days chewing and spitting Red Man while he pumped gasoline at the Mobil station” while “spend[ing] his nights rutting around after Regina and girls like her who would be working in the mail room at Robertson’s…” This sentiment is encouraged by her biggest supporter, her teacher Miss Pennington, who’s not financially well-off but has “taste” and “cultivation,” which she displays when in her final pep talk to Charlotte, she references Nietzsche to compare her classmates to “tarantulas” whose “sole satisfaction is bringing down people above them, seeing the mighty fall.”

All the characters mentioned above are just following the narrative in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, in which Amory Blaine, by joining the best Eating Club or extracurricular activity (football team vs newspaper vs theatre troupe) seeks to distinguish himself at Princeton. The primary difference is that Amory comes from an already privileged background, mainly through his mother, a Midwesterner who nevertheless had the kind of European upbringing where she was privy to the gossip of the oldest Roman families. Despite his family standing, handsome looks, and prep school pedigree, Amory laments being stuck in the “middle class” at Princeton, whose “spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent,” only to “overawe him” and make him “aware of his own impotency and incompetence.”

Now, in the name of meritocracy and diversity, Amory’s existential college angst has been inherited by new demographics of class, race, and gender. In The Sex Lives of College Girls, one of the rare TV shows about college, one of the main characters, Bela (who also non-coincidentally is creator Mindy Kaling’s stand-in), strives to join her school’s humor magazine The Catullan, the same way Amory strives to join the Triangle Club, the elite musical theatre group at Princeton. Except when Bela does it, it’s revolutionary, or so they want us to think.

So why such a narrow focus on college narratives being all about academically gifted and socially ambitious kids from below the elite classes? An obvious answer is that it reflects the biases of the industry and creators. It’s no coincidence that college narratives are more popular in contemporary literary fiction than in other media forms like television and film that are more beholden to popular appeal and aren’t as credentials-obsessed. Nobody is more obsessed with these narratives than the almost-elites who, as Kirn notes, are granted “front-row seats” to “everything” but not allowed on stage. These types, not so coincidentally, are the ones who not only become mainstream published authors, but are also allowed to be them in the first place.

But don’t people love the idea of an ingenious social climber whose rise confirms the stupidity of the hierarchy? We love outsiders trying to break into elite circles, and the scammier and more underhanded, the better. Figures like Anna Delvey become folk heroes, not villains. If the victims are the famous and wealthy, we deem such transgressions to be victimless crimes. Or crimes of just desserts. However, the difference is that the elite college striver is not a rogue scammer. In fact, he or she is the exact opposite of that, a meticulous rule follower trying to succeed wholly within the system of purported meritocracy.

In Bobos In Paradise, David Brooks notes the American transition from aristocracy to meritocracy by tracking the write-ups for the New York Times wedding announcements. Once boasting of the bride and groom’s lineage, those announcements eventually morph into highlighting their education backgrounds. In a more egalitarian America, college became the path up the social ladder where, theoretically, a poor kid from nowhere could rise up to the upper tiers of society, thanks to Harvard, etc.

There is an inherent problem with meritocracy, however. Ivan Krastev has written about how aristocracies and meritocracies both breed winners and losers, except only in meritocracies are the losers blamed for their own situation. Jason, the aggressively honest semi-antagonist in Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., articulates this same consequence of meritocracies inviting blame upon its losers, citing Jude the Obscure as unfair to all the non-Jude stonemasons who can’t blame a hereditary class system for not going to Oxford. And this is before even factoring in that no meritocracy can be perfect and is bound to be biased in some way, with the winners working constantly to further consolidate their advantages. If you’re an outsider and you’re going to be a loser anyway, wouldn’t you prefer the system that at least doesn’t let the winners with their ill-gotten spoils feel ever so smug?

The meritocracy problem with elite colleges is not that it crowns an intellectual royalty, because as much as we find brainiacs annoying or even socially repellant, we find them at least useful. They invent household appliances, cure diseases, make our internet faster, and do other things that make our lives tangibly better. If every elite college were a CalTech or MIT type of school, I don’t think most people would dislike them or even envy them. If some kids really want to fight and claw for the reward of torturing themselves with theoretical math, then so be it. We’d rather be partying and fucking anyway.

But the elite American college prides itself on being more than a nerd factory and as such, it bestows meritocratic legitimacy not just because of one’s intelligence, but because they’ll shape you in their culturally superior ways. Then you’ll maybe get to be a member of the royal court, but you won’t have to feel guilty about it because a large part of that rise will have been because of your superior morals. I think this is why many are resistant to the elimination of standardized testing in college admissions. Nobody loves the SAT, but such exams at least stand for some notion that elite colleges prize some form of intelligence. Despite the wishful idea that all it takes is an expensive test prep class to boost one’s score, the SAT is very resistant to dramatic jumps in results. Its opponents claim that the main problem is that it can be gamed, but deep down, their real issue is that it’s exactly the opposite: the SAT isn’t that teachable at all.

Without these tests, what would the standards be? Grades are easy to manipulate, and essays and recommendations even more so. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that the standards would then become completely arbitrary, reflecting the whims and desires of the admissions authorities to form the ruling class in their image. It was never about merit or equality; it was who got to be on top of the hierarchy.

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them!” - This Side of Paradise

My own desires for attending college were hardly entirely noble. I didn’t want to go just because I wanted to better serve society or even just indulge a love of learning. Much of it had to do with wanting to leave what I felt was a limiting upbringing that I was now above. I didn’t care for making intelligent friends. Rather, I cared more about meeting connected friends, cultured friends, the kind of “kids who’d been raised at the center of everything,” as Kirn describes his classmates. It was the embodiment of ideology that encouraged you to cut ties to whatever was disadvantageous. If your background wasn’t what the ideology deemed ideal, then regard it as a bad dice roll and reset.

This is why I have such disdain for so-called progressive Asian Americans who, having received their own tickets to the Ivy League big dance, then chastize other Asian Americans for wanting the same things. Most of these grand-standers are masking their own desire for exclusivity, especially from their own unwanted kind, as some righteous crusade. If they truly thought it was such a terrible thing to be among the tiny percent that gained admissions to these schools, why are they at these schools themselves? I don’t see any of them renouncing their own supposedly ill-gotten gains. No, they’ll cling onto their Yale degrees for dear life, knowing that it will propel them to the elite status they’ve been striving for all their lives. If there is any Asian American I’d want to hear from on this front, it’d be from those who did choose to go to a less prestigious school and now boast about how much better the parties were, the hotter sex they had with far more attractive people, and the smaller debts they had. But of course, this wouldn’t be allowed because it’d hurt the feelings of the Asian American Ivy League-educated members of the culture class, and protecting their self-esteem as they make their upward ascent has always been the only thing that matters in Asian American mainstream discourse.

The potentially good news is that the prestige of college is being chipped away for younger students. Given that seats at elite American universities are, by design, a finite resource whose primary value comes from extreme scarcity, this is realistically the only way to resolve the neverending battles over admissions. Millennials will likely be the last generation with unquestioned veneration for the college experience. That so many of us have little to show for it except negative net worths and useless degrees must function as a warning sign for younger generations, in addition to scandals like Operation Varsity Blues that have made a mockery out of the purposely opaque and complicated American college admissions system.

Technological advances have also eroded many of the lofty benefits of attending an elite college. The promise of an exclusive campus in a gated community loses much of its allure when so much of socialization moves into the borderless ether of the online world. In my senior year, I remember my classmates fretting about how on earth they’d make friends and meet girlfriends/boyfriends after graduation. It was a genuine concern at the time. The only social sphere that could come close to a campus setting was the workplace and having to enter the working world was depressing enough as it is without having to also consider it as the primary well of romance. Do today’s college students even bother much with going to dorm parties anymore? In retrospect, I only went to them because it was the only way to meet people and after graduation, I shook my head at all the binge drinking I’d done to get myself through those social chores. I suspect there were many who felt the same, so why do that when you can just use apps and social media to find sex and relationships, even friends?

I don’t dwell much on college anymore, but I did for a very long time, and I do have to wonder if that in and of itself was indicative of some kind of personal shortcoming. The adult who can’t get over high school is a frequently ridiculed character in our cultural consciousness, but is the one who can’t over college just as pathetic? Maybe even more so because he’s deluded into thinking his obsessions are somehow a cut above stereotypes like the fat middle-aged guy who’s always droning on about that night he scored 3 touchdowns or some former wallflower who’s still seething she never got asked to prom.

In the spring and summer of 2021, my wannabe-perfect college novel garnered some interest from literary agents, but now, it resides in the old folks home of my utility closet. I don’t regret the many years I spent on it, but I am glad it never saw the light of day. It was a bullshit narrative all along.