This Is Where Elite Schools Went Wrong

Credit...Melania Espinal

Ms. Leibowitz is an editor at Times Opinion. For this essay, she spoke to two dozen students, teachers and alumni and visited Deep Springs College.

When I was in college in the 2010s, some of my classmates would go to the dining hall, take their meals to their dorm rooms, eat and then dispose of everything that was left — food scraps, ceramic dishes and stainless steel utensils — in the dorm trash cans. It wasn’t like we had to wash the dishes ourselves. We were just supposed to walk them a few yards back........

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