"Heterodox" Does Not Mean What You Think

How the Absence of a Moral Value System Has Created an Ideologically-Lopsided Intellectual Landscape

“I don’t know.”

It’s the most common response I receive from teenagers when I ask them a simple question. You might think that I am referring to the answer to a math problem or asking them to parse a sentence, but every year, I pose the same question to my students that generates few concrete responses.

“What are your values?”

At my college admissions consulting firm Invictus Prep, I help students craft college essays that land them offers at America’s top colleges and universities. Before we start working on the essay, however, I present them with an exercise developed by The College Essay Guy that asks them to identify and rank their core values—democracy, culture, family, stability, empathy, to name a few. Establishing these values helps us collaborate with students on their personal statements as we determine which colleges best align with the value systems of each individual student. Yet in recent years, I have observed a troubling trend: many of my students struggle to identify what matters most to them. While it is understandable that a teenager might not yet have a clear picture of who they really are, the degree of befuddlement that many of my students express at having to complete such a simple exercise points to a larger problem in our society: we have deemphasized the importance of having a set value system.