Good insights Noah! Educational elitism is common the world over. I like your approach of addressing the insider/outsider issue by investing in lower cost state schools. Elitism is hard to crush because we will just find something new to label “the best” and then gravitate to it.
Your observation rings true regarding elite schools and the networking they may afford. I applaud your son’s choice! The truth is state university education (BA U of Florida, MA, PhD U of Minnesota) in many ways prepares one for the challenges of the real world. I have found those elite educated individuals lack a real world view of how most people think, live, work, and survive. Noah is quite right in focusing on state universities, and. It just for education and training, but how that complements the lived experience of those students who are not sheltered and who know and see the world for what it is, the good, bad, ugly. Many work their way through school (as I did) teaching them life lessons that will benefit them, their employers, or the companies they run for years to come.
Thank you for this piece! And as a UMICH alum (as well!), would love to see more great state systems leveraging regional campuses (UMICH-Dearborn, UMICH-Flint) to provide greater access and learning opportunities to more (ie) UVA, UNC, U of I, U of WI, so many great state systems. Thank you for sharing the rankings focused on social mobility, look forward to diving deeper in how these are measured but so very important! GO BLUE!
Spot on! We have the same problem of elitism in higher education here in the UK. We used to think it was an aristocratic hangover but that wouldn't explain why the US suffers from it as well. More likely it's a by-product of Anglo-Saxon culture's emphasis on the individual and the competitiveness and ranking mentality that it fosters. Another of our rather ambivalent gifts to the world! You're welcome!
What I think is missed here is the fact that though Ivy's might not decide your eventual wealth, they do seem to decide whether you get to be a Supreme Court justice and do quite a bit in deciding whether you get important judicial clerkships which eventually translate to being on the federal court. I'm not really sure why this is, but if there were one trend I'd reverse in appointments, it's this odd need to focus exclusively on Ivy graduates, as it skews the court hard toward the wealthy and the completely divorced from every day life.
Institutional pedigree is not driving Supreme Court nominations. It is the strong preference for academics and appellate judges (many of whom were academics). Clerkships do generally go to the most talented law students, at least among those who want to clerk for a judge before practicing or teaching.
Sorry, what? Institutional pedigree is obviously driving nominations. Or is it just a coincidence that only 1 of the 9 justices are from a school other than Harvard or Yale?
I’m really not. The Supreme Court is an old boys club. You get in by getting a clerkship (which you get by having a professor who knows the justice), which gets you a federal circuit court judgeship. Then the president is given a list of people to nominate from that federal circuit court and narrows it down to the least objectionable people, and ANYONE who comes from a non-Ivy gets winnowed out because it’s easier to object to a non-Ivy.
This is one of those things that makes me depressed whenever it comes up, to the extent that it ruins the rest of my motivation for the day.
Society shouldn't care that I went to a state school, but yet it clearly does according to the affirmative action plaintiffs. I've basically been defined as an academic failure at 17 for not doing the right extracurriculars and only getting a 1500 instead of a 1600. What's even the point of working hard when I've already been condemned to have a life that's guaranteed to be worse than any Stanford or MIT undergrad?
I don’t think anybody would be impressed by my resume, let’s just say that. It feels like a lot of hard work and effort for nothing. I’d wager all MIT and CMU students would consider me a cautionary tale for if they fail.
For the record nobody forced them to apply to UNC out of state. I got in in-state.
You have a weird and self-defeating definition of success if all paths to it have to pass through just a few schools. If you are unhappy, you should think about what you can do from your current position to improve your situation. If you can't come up with anything, then you're probably depressed.
I recently read a book -- Confessions of a Cairo Bookseller. In it she writes that there are 2 Cairos. One where people like herself are educated at elite foreign schools where they learn English and French better than Arabic while most others go to poorly funded public schools; where people like herself have their shopping malls were they purchase goods using foreign currency while everyone else uses Egyptian pounds; and so on. I worry that America is going in that direction. The elite universities that Noah mentions are basically finishing schools for the elite and people who attend these often refer to other schools as "podunk U". That does not mean that Noah is correct that public universities can make huge strides in helping people move up the economic ladder.
But as someone who has attended both private, public and Catholic universities there is one big difference between them. At private universities there is a belief that all the students are capable of doing the work. When a student fails its seen as a failure of the admission process. Students at private Universities can not really know what they are doing and where they want to go and still be alright. This is not really true for public universities. At public universities faculty generally believe that there is a certain percent of students who have no business in being in college and that there is nothing that can be done for them. One can succeed both as a students in a public university but one needs to have a clear idea of goals and that is not always the case for an 18 year old, especially for one is the first one in the family to attend college. At Catholic Universities there is a built in paternalism where students are seen as part of the family which creates slightly different dynamics in both the student experience and in support provided to alumni. Its both touching and annoying.
I think that increasing the number of undergrads at elite schools would is terrible idea. Arguably it would be better tif they shut down their undergrad programs. Why? (1) As Raj Chetty has convincingly demonstrated they are laughably inefficient vehicles for reducing inequality (vs CUNY or Cal Poly, for example). (2) The competition for admission to these schools warps the participants, (3) They are unmatched in the world for their research and grad student training, (4) They suck resources from the next tier of schools. (5) A large proportion of the undergrad students in these elite school are there so they can fast track to Wall Street, not to learn.
That’s a great idea. Undergrad education is primarily a money grab to fund grad schools and their endowments. This whole lottery concept of Ivy League admissions is such an unnecessary exercise, that causes so much stress and disappointment for 99% of the people that go through it. It’s hard to tell your daughter who worked so hard through high school getting perfect grades and accumulating awards and extracurricular achievements that mommy and daddy could probably scrape up the money for tuition and room and board but probably cannot be counted on to contribute enough to the annual fundraising drive so your hard work doesn’t matter. That girl you beat at every competition has parents that do so she gets to go there. They went there, too, and so did her grandparents. Don’t worry, you’ll do great at that “safety school” and these schools will be begging to get you in four years so you can bing them NIH grants. That’s pretty much how it goes, or at least that’s how it did for my daughter. Why do we put them through this?
I wonder, though, what difference it makes trying to apply policy to an issue that may be more values-driven.
If a child, gifted in mathematics, is taught how to best use this skill, they will still have to make a personal decision where to apply it.
Whether this is at graduate level or at undergrad level.
If their value system, gained from wherever, prioritises using these skills in pursuits that don't add much value to society (e.g. in figuring out how to get people to click on ads, or on how to structure funds to make the most money move back and forth between people with the most money), this would not change even with a more diversified student body or at whatever level they gained more advanced skill, would it?
Great post. Yesterday I was at a cookout talking with a friend’s daughter about college applications (she’s starting her senior year at a competitive public high school in a posh DC suburb). One of her crew teammates was recruited by the University of Alabama and is going, with a full scholarship. She noted how unselective the school is (though their crew program is apparently great) and seemed bewildered that her friend would choose to go there (while also fretting about her AP test scores coming out today). I (UMich alum with a mid career CUNY master’s degree) observed that I know several UAlabama grads and they are smart people with good jobs, so her friend probably doesn’t have anything to worry about.
It makes me sad to see kids like her stress out so much about this. Her dad (my friend) is a widower who can barely afford to live in the posh burb on his government salary. He wants to provide for his kids, so he stays (and pays for stuff like crew, an expensive club sport). It seems like a horrible treadmill for everyone involved.
The sad fact is they think the rest of us are stupid if we didn't go to a top school. I think the best thing to do is confront them and interrogate their conceptions of the rest of us.\
2) Our boardrooms, newsrooms, and courtrooms are disproportionately drawn from the Ivy and Ivy+ schools. To me, this is a big part of why they receive so much attention - especially in the media. How can we break Ivy grads’ stranglehold on the discussion of higher education so that more focus can go on the schools actually educating Americans?
I've been going on about this for a while. The reason for the attention is that so much of the elite (in this context, "elect" might be more appropriate) are graduates of these schools.
The Ivies have an oversized influence on public policy, because they are massively over-represented in the highest decision making levels of the Government. Can you even get a high-level foreign policy job in a Democratic administration without a degree from Yale?
In my career I hired plenty of state school graduates that outperformed IVY grads. I chalked it up to a better work ethic. The plastic spoon crowd with a chip on their shoulder that a legacy probably kept them out of Cornell were out bread and butter. Plus they tended to stick around longer.
I don’t know about that (Cornell Birds is top notch in one of my biggest enthusiasms, and they don’t come loaded with attitude) — but the one friend I have who did go to Cornell has *all* the elitist qualities in spades, totally reversing what values we used to share when we were bright young things (I maintained and deepened the most important of those, namely environmentalism, philosophy, and certain amount of religious tolerance, while he jettisoned these completely because status signalling requires one to consider them as unimportant and serious impediments to social climbing). And to what Jeff says, I would have to agree that the one thing, the only thing, he does exceptionally well is job hop.
In terms of undergraduate class size, bear in mind that most of these entering classes are at least 50 percent larger than they were at the peak of the baby boom high school graduation years (1978-1979) which had about 3.1mm students (graduating HS senior population is about 15-20 pct higher now, but is expected to decline back to those baby boom levels within a decade). And this 50 percent increase applies to much of the private University tier immediately below the Ivies, Stanford and MIT.
There are actually many more spaces per capita for that top 5 percent of students than there were for the boomers. Schools have compensated for this by admitting foreign students paying full price (nearly 20 pct of Harvard’s class), and also more of the top 5 percent choose these top schools than they did in 1979 (when many top students, particularly in the Midwest, West and South) were happy to go to their state universities.
The top 5 percent are the top 5 percent, today or back in 1979, though the rigor of the coursework, homework expectations and grading at the university level has declined precipitously since then.
What has most changed since then is the second quartile of graduating HS students are mostly going to college whereas few of them did back then- this a huge population increase for the second and third tier schools and community colleges, and the former have overexpanded and overcharged as a result (using the notional price the top schools charge as a benchmark and aided by student loans). This is alarming given the performance on basic competency tests like the NAEP, where you’d think a person capable of doing university work would be able to earn at least a “proficient” rating at their HS grade level. Only about 35-40 percent of HS 12th grade students are rated proficient or higher in reading comprehension and 24 percent in math. For African-American students the numbers are closer to 15 percent.
What this says to me is that way too much money and focus is on college and not enough on basic education. Some combination of better primary and secondary education, fewer people attending 4 year colleges and more training and opportunities for non-college graduates would be beneficial. The top 5 percent are always going to go to good schools and there are plenty of spaces for them at good schools. The Affirmative Action ruling may be beneficial to the top 10-100 schools as many more talented minority students will be at these schools rather than the Ivies and corporate recruiters and grad schools will have to take more students from this tier. We’ll see.
I think the admissions rates falling are in part due to schools juicing their application numbers. The Common App is part of the reason, making it much easier to apply to multiple schools. Also, U Chicago, for example, is notorious for aggressively marketing in order to boost applications (and decrease the admissions rate), thus boosting their perceived selectivity.
That being said, competition is *also* getting fiercer, just as you say.
SAT scores can't be directly compared over time. They have been made easier more than once. When boomers were in high school, only a relative handful of kids in the entire country got 800s.
This is true, but SAT scores are also percentile scores in disguise - that 800 means that you did really good compared to other students, not that you met a fixed standard. Also, many more people take the SAT, so the absolute number of people scoring in the top 1% is bigger, too.
“Elite private schools are unlikely to change your destiny“. I’m sorry, but I disagree. They change all our destinies by being way, way over-represented at the highest policy making levels of Government, particularly when a Democrat is in the White House, and particularly in foreign policy.
Good insights Noah! Educational elitism is common the world over. I like your approach of addressing the insider/outsider issue by investing in lower cost state schools. Elitism is hard to crush because we will just find something new to label “the best” and then gravitate to it.
I tried to convince my son to chase an Ivy League school because of the networking power that comes from it. He didn’t favor the common attitude of students that attend these schools and chose a state engineering school instead. His choice was Missouri S&T and they do offer some competition with Ivy Leagues. https://news.mst.edu/2023/03/new-york-times-tool-identifies-missouri-st-as-top-10-high-value-university/
I think upgrading STEM in State Schools is probably an easier place to compete. These jobs are needed and companies won’t be picky.
Your observation rings true regarding elite schools and the networking they may afford. I applaud your son’s choice! The truth is state university education (BA U of Florida, MA, PhD U of Minnesota) in many ways prepares one for the challenges of the real world. I have found those elite educated individuals lack a real world view of how most people think, live, work, and survive. Noah is quite right in focusing on state universities, and. It just for education and training, but how that complements the lived experience of those students who are not sheltered and who know and see the world for what it is, the good, bad, ugly. Many work their way through school (as I did) teaching them life lessons that will benefit them, their employers, or the companies they run for years to come.
There is a way to solve the issue Noah is talking about. I have the solution. Unfortunately, I can't share it here unless any Government pays.
Thank you for this piece! And as a UMICH alum (as well!), would love to see more great state systems leveraging regional campuses (UMICH-Dearborn, UMICH-Flint) to provide greater access and learning opportunities to more (ie) UVA, UNC, U of I, U of WI, so many great state systems. Thank you for sharing the rankings focused on social mobility, look forward to diving deeper in how these are measured but so very important! GO BLUE!
Spot on! We have the same problem of elitism in higher education here in the UK. We used to think it was an aristocratic hangover but that wouldn't explain why the US suffers from it as well. More likely it's a by-product of Anglo-Saxon culture's emphasis on the individual and the competitiveness and ranking mentality that it fosters. Another of our rather ambivalent gifts to the world! You're welcome!
What I think is missed here is the fact that though Ivy's might not decide your eventual wealth, they do seem to decide whether you get to be a Supreme Court justice and do quite a bit in deciding whether you get important judicial clerkships which eventually translate to being on the federal court. I'm not really sure why this is, but if there were one trend I'd reverse in appointments, it's this odd need to focus exclusively on Ivy graduates, as it skews the court hard toward the wealthy and the completely divorced from every day life.
Institutional pedigree is not driving Supreme Court nominations. It is the strong preference for academics and appellate judges (many of whom were academics). Clerkships do generally go to the most talented law students, at least among those who want to clerk for a judge before practicing or teaching.
Sorry, what? Institutional pedigree is obviously driving nominations. Or is it just a coincidence that only 1 of the 9 justices are from a school other than Harvard or Yale?
Yale attracts top students and Harvard is an enormous law school with top students. You are confusing correlation with causation, badly.
I’m really not. The Supreme Court is an old boys club. You get in by getting a clerkship (which you get by having a professor who knows the justice), which gets you a federal circuit court judgeship. Then the president is given a list of people to nominate from that federal circuit court and narrows it down to the least objectionable people, and ANYONE who comes from a non-Ivy gets winnowed out because it’s easier to object to a non-Ivy.
The fact ACB was nominated at all is a miracle
Brown vs. BOE was decided without a 8-Ivy League Law school supreme court. Even on this Supreme Court it's it's only 7 went to Ivy League undergrads
That's why I refer to it as a trend. Historically, it hasn't been all Ivy's. For whatever reason, that just seems to be the way it's going.
Right, but Harvard and Yale combined don’t graduate 88% of law students, which is the problem I’m pointing out
This is one of those things that makes me depressed whenever it comes up, to the extent that it ruins the rest of my motivation for the day.
Society shouldn't care that I went to a state school, but yet it clearly does according to the affirmative action plaintiffs. I've basically been defined as an academic failure at 17 for not doing the right extracurriculars and only getting a 1500 instead of a 1600. What's even the point of working hard when I've already been condemned to have a life that's guaranteed to be worse than any Stanford or MIT undergrad?
I don't understand what you mean? What makes you think that you are condemned to be worse off?
And FWIW, one of the defendants was UNC. This is about state schools too.
I don’t think anybody would be impressed by my resume, let’s just say that. It feels like a lot of hard work and effort for nothing. I’d wager all MIT and CMU students would consider me a cautionary tale for if they fail.
For the record nobody forced them to apply to UNC out of state. I got in in-state.
You have a weird and self-defeating definition of success if all paths to it have to pass through just a few schools. If you are unhappy, you should think about what you can do from your current position to improve your situation. If you can't come up with anything, then you're probably depressed.
It’s literally impossible to improve - I’ve been marked as a mediocrity for life. What’s the point?
Therapy just masks the problem of me having never accomplished anything, at least compared to the typical Yale or MIT admit
Get help dude, seriously.
What? Am I wrong? Can you tell me I’m not a failure objectively?
Skeptical that anything would help.
I recently read a book -- Confessions of a Cairo Bookseller. In it she writes that there are 2 Cairos. One where people like herself are educated at elite foreign schools where they learn English and French better than Arabic while most others go to poorly funded public schools; where people like herself have their shopping malls were they purchase goods using foreign currency while everyone else uses Egyptian pounds; and so on. I worry that America is going in that direction. The elite universities that Noah mentions are basically finishing schools for the elite and people who attend these often refer to other schools as "podunk U". That does not mean that Noah is correct that public universities can make huge strides in helping people move up the economic ladder.
But as someone who has attended both private, public and Catholic universities there is one big difference between them. At private universities there is a belief that all the students are capable of doing the work. When a student fails its seen as a failure of the admission process. Students at private Universities can not really know what they are doing and where they want to go and still be alright. This is not really true for public universities. At public universities faculty generally believe that there is a certain percent of students who have no business in being in college and that there is nothing that can be done for them. One can succeed both as a students in a public university but one needs to have a clear idea of goals and that is not always the case for an 18 year old, especially for one is the first one in the family to attend college. At Catholic Universities there is a built in paternalism where students are seen as part of the family which creates slightly different dynamics in both the student experience and in support provided to alumni. Its both touching and annoying.
I think that increasing the number of undergrads at elite schools would is terrible idea. Arguably it would be better tif they shut down their undergrad programs. Why? (1) As Raj Chetty has convincingly demonstrated they are laughably inefficient vehicles for reducing inequality (vs CUNY or Cal Poly, for example). (2) The competition for admission to these schools warps the participants, (3) They are unmatched in the world for their research and grad student training, (4) They suck resources from the next tier of schools. (5) A large proportion of the undergrad students in these elite school are there so they can fast track to Wall Street, not to learn.
That’s a great idea. Undergrad education is primarily a money grab to fund grad schools and their endowments. This whole lottery concept of Ivy League admissions is such an unnecessary exercise, that causes so much stress and disappointment for 99% of the people that go through it. It’s hard to tell your daughter who worked so hard through high school getting perfect grades and accumulating awards and extracurricular achievements that mommy and daddy could probably scrape up the money for tuition and room and board but probably cannot be counted on to contribute enough to the annual fundraising drive so your hard work doesn’t matter. That girl you beat at every competition has parents that do so she gets to go there. They went there, too, and so did her grandparents. Don’t worry, you’ll do great at that “safety school” and these schools will be begging to get you in four years so you can bing them NIH grants. That’s pretty much how it goes, or at least that’s how it did for my daughter. Why do we put them through this?
I wonder, though, what difference it makes trying to apply policy to an issue that may be more values-driven.
If a child, gifted in mathematics, is taught how to best use this skill, they will still have to make a personal decision where to apply it.
Whether this is at graduate level or at undergrad level.
If their value system, gained from wherever, prioritises using these skills in pursuits that don't add much value to society (e.g. in figuring out how to get people to click on ads, or on how to structure funds to make the most money move back and forth between people with the most money), this would not change even with a more diversified student body or at whatever level they gained more advanced skill, would it?
Great post. Yesterday I was at a cookout talking with a friend’s daughter about college applications (she’s starting her senior year at a competitive public high school in a posh DC suburb). One of her crew teammates was recruited by the University of Alabama and is going, with a full scholarship. She noted how unselective the school is (though their crew program is apparently great) and seemed bewildered that her friend would choose to go there (while also fretting about her AP test scores coming out today). I (UMich alum with a mid career CUNY master’s degree) observed that I know several UAlabama grads and they are smart people with good jobs, so her friend probably doesn’t have anything to worry about.
It makes me sad to see kids like her stress out so much about this. Her dad (my friend) is a widower who can barely afford to live in the posh burb on his government salary. He wants to provide for his kids, so he stays (and pays for stuff like crew, an expensive club sport). It seems like a horrible treadmill for everyone involved.
The sad fact is they think the rest of us are stupid if we didn't go to a top school. I think the best thing to do is confront them and interrogate their conceptions of the rest of us.\
Two things:
1) Grade inflation in the ivies is a thing!
2) Our boardrooms, newsrooms, and courtrooms are disproportionately drawn from the Ivy and Ivy+ schools. To me, this is a big part of why they receive so much attention - especially in the media. How can we break Ivy grads’ stranglehold on the discussion of higher education so that more focus can go on the schools actually educating Americans?
I've been going on about this for a while. The reason for the attention is that so much of the elite (in this context, "elect" might be more appropriate) are graduates of these schools.
https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/20/the-eye-of-the-needle/
https://crookedtimber.org/2019/04/14/the-eye-of-the-needle-again/
Great piece
Hopefully the new supreme court actions will help dispose of this false superiority
The Ivies have an oversized influence on public policy, because they are massively over-represented in the highest decision making levels of the Government. Can you even get a high-level foreign policy job in a Democratic administration without a degree from Yale?
In my career I hired plenty of state school graduates that outperformed IVY grads. I chalked it up to a better work ethic. The plastic spoon crowd with a chip on their shoulder that a legacy probably kept them out of Cornell were out bread and butter. Plus they tended to stick around longer.
Above a basic level of academic competence almost all success is individual.
I don’t know about that (Cornell Birds is top notch in one of my biggest enthusiasms, and they don’t come loaded with attitude) — but the one friend I have who did go to Cornell has *all* the elitist qualities in spades, totally reversing what values we used to share when we were bright young things (I maintained and deepened the most important of those, namely environmentalism, philosophy, and certain amount of religious tolerance, while he jettisoned these completely because status signalling requires one to consider them as unimportant and serious impediments to social climbing). And to what Jeff says, I would have to agree that the one thing, the only thing, he does exceptionally well is job hop.
Excellent post.
In terms of undergraduate class size, bear in mind that most of these entering classes are at least 50 percent larger than they were at the peak of the baby boom high school graduation years (1978-1979) which had about 3.1mm students (graduating HS senior population is about 15-20 pct higher now, but is expected to decline back to those baby boom levels within a decade). And this 50 percent increase applies to much of the private University tier immediately below the Ivies, Stanford and MIT.
There are actually many more spaces per capita for that top 5 percent of students than there were for the boomers. Schools have compensated for this by admitting foreign students paying full price (nearly 20 pct of Harvard’s class), and also more of the top 5 percent choose these top schools than they did in 1979 (when many top students, particularly in the Midwest, West and South) were happy to go to their state universities.
The top 5 percent are the top 5 percent, today or back in 1979, though the rigor of the coursework, homework expectations and grading at the university level has declined precipitously since then.
What has most changed since then is the second quartile of graduating HS students are mostly going to college whereas few of them did back then- this a huge population increase for the second and third tier schools and community colleges, and the former have overexpanded and overcharged as a result (using the notional price the top schools charge as a benchmark and aided by student loans). This is alarming given the performance on basic competency tests like the NAEP, where you’d think a person capable of doing university work would be able to earn at least a “proficient” rating at their HS grade level. Only about 35-40 percent of HS 12th grade students are rated proficient or higher in reading comprehension and 24 percent in math. For African-American students the numbers are closer to 15 percent.
What this says to me is that way too much money and focus is on college and not enough on basic education. Some combination of better primary and secondary education, fewer people attending 4 year colleges and more training and opportunities for non-college graduates would be beneficial. The top 5 percent are always going to go to good schools and there are plenty of spaces for them at good schools. The Affirmative Action ruling may be beneficial to the top 10-100 schools as many more talented minority students will be at these schools rather than the Ivies and corporate recruiters and grad schools will have to take more students from this tier. We’ll see.
I think the admissions rates falling are in part due to schools juicing their application numbers. The Common App is part of the reason, making it much easier to apply to multiple schools. Also, U Chicago, for example, is notorious for aggressively marketing in order to boost applications (and decrease the admissions rate), thus boosting their perceived selectivity.
That being said, competition is *also* getting fiercer, just as you say.
SAT scores can't be directly compared over time. They have been made easier more than once. When boomers were in high school, only a relative handful of kids in the entire country got 800s.
This is true, but SAT scores are also percentile scores in disguise - that 800 means that you did really good compared to other students, not that you met a fixed standard. Also, many more people take the SAT, so the absolute number of people scoring in the top 1% is bigger, too.
.
“Elite private schools are unlikely to change your destiny“. I’m sorry, but I disagree. They change all our destinies by being way, way over-represented at the highest policy making levels of Government, particularly when a Democrat is in the White House, and particularly in foreign policy.
Where'd this democrat go to undergrad again?
not everything is about you. Get off the internet and go render someone a service IRL.
You are aware I’m talking about Joe Biden, university of Delaware graduate, yes?