Do I Care Where You Went To School?
Well, sure, but should I?
In June, the Supreme Court decided that Harvard University could not practice race-based affirmative action in its admissions, which prompted President Joe Biden’s administration to investigate its use of legacy in the admissions process, adding another war about privilege to our social discourse.
The facts are that more people want to got to Harvard than Harvard ever can or will educate, that their selective process will never be perfect meritocratic and that some worthies will always be left out and that this is true throughout life: great books will forever go unpublished, not everybody will get to work at Google or Goldman Sachs and just forget about professional athletics or being a rock star. It’s very rare in life to be Merrick Garland — denied a seat on the Supreme Court but in the company of friends who can make you Attorney General instead.
So, with all of life’s exclusions and denials, in a society where most individuals feel an inertia towards lives of quiet desperation in all fields and endeavors, why do we fixate on Harvard in particular and more generally a handful of private universities known in academia as “Ivy Plus”? The typical answer is that these schools are the gates that the elite pass through. Attending them and graduating doesn’t make you automatically elite, but it helps.
In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research called Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges study test scores, high school grades, admissions data and post-graduate employment and earnings to see if this is true. The professors, all from Harvard (and all talking their book a bit) determine that graduating from Ivy League schools (plus Stanford, MIT, Duke, and The University of Chicago) “increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm when compared to students who attend highly selective public universities (solid schools like Rutgers, the University of Virginia or schools in the UCLA system, for example).
Ivy League schools prioritize children of alumni, students with non-academic credentials (extracurriculars) and student athletes — who all come from wealthier homes. Their public competitors, say the authors, do not similarly weight their admissions (by athletics, we are talking rowing and lacrosse here, not money sports like football and basketball). Because of this, the authors say, the Ivy’s give preference to students from wealthy families which creates a conformist elite that is maintained through generations. Admissions policies that don’t favor the wealthy, they say, will help diversify America’s economic and political elite over time and this, we are told, is why we should care.
A few things here — I quipped that the authors are all Harvard professors “talking their book.” They do not question the role of the Ivy League Plus schools as cultural gatekeepers. They just assume that is their function and that it’s right. They don’t argue that these schools are better than their public counterparts or that they produce people more worthy of wealth and power — they just accept it.
Really, this is society’s problem. As voters, employers and even neighbors, we have decided to use Ivy League credentials as a shorthand for judging people’s quality. We do this even though we know that, once we get into the workplace, an Ivy League graduate and a State school graduate, given fair opportunities, have pretty even chances for success.
The best way to diversify the elite is not to change Harvard’s admission priorities but to change the way we think and act in the world to give more people who were educated elsewhere (including not at colleges) chances to succeed. For example, I once worked at a mid-sized investment bank where the chief operating officer, a very wealthy and successful person and no dummy, I assure you, sheepishly told me that he did not have a college degree while I was writing his professional biography for him. He had no talent for school, he said, and was working as a trader for the company founder part time. He left school to devote himself to the investment business and made more than he ever would have had he gone to Harvard. It’s a rare story, but trading stocks at the level this guy did wasn’t something you learned in the classroom anyway, you had to be in the market.
As an aside, one of the saddest things that happened to upward mobility was the computerization of the stock and commodities exchanges, which eliminated human traders in the pits. Those trader jobs were a place where anybody, from any background, could learn to make a fortune. It’s where the son of a plumber succeeded to send their kids to study dramatic writing at Yale.
We can’t expect The Ivy League to give up its position in society. The only way to reduce its influence is to be more thoughtful about how we judge each other’s qualities. There’s another aspect to the Ivy League successes that is missed in the study — these schools protect their networks. They maintain fancy clubs in global cities and they encourage alumni to help each other. They invest time and money in each other’s projects, they make introductions and vouch for each other. It’s a big ask for cash-strapped public universities, but they need to do better at encouraging post-graduate networking and support.
The question of how the elite gets sorted is extremely important but a better question then, “So how should Harvard do it?” is “Should Harvard do it at all?”