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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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'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/
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“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.