In the early 1900s, Harvard is where you went because you could not get into a state school. MIT is where you went because you studied.
How do we measure meeting ones potential? School seems to be a place to:
1) Learn
2) Supply child care
3) Drink
4) Have sex
5) Learn to socialize with orthogonal people
6) Operate a tax free hedge fund
If we want to improve society, it strikes me we should do a first principle introspection on education. And solve for child care. If rich people want to send their kids to Harvard to learn to drink and have sex, spending 700k on private schools to get there, so be it.
There are better solutions to all but the tax free hedge fund.
Not sure New York needs the suggestion to create a flagship. It is not widely known, but Cornell is a land grant institution and is part public. Depending on which college you enroll in, you get a steep discount as a NY resident. Also, SUNY is a great network with strong schools (e.g. U Buffalo, Binghamton).
Huh. I seem to be one of the victims of inequity with the 1500+ SATs, good grades, and commendations in all my extracurriculars all while in and out of homelessness. I genuinely have no idea what trajectory my life would be on had I moved east for school. My lovely fiancé went to uni with me, and on the other hand, the healthcare team at my uni heavily insisted it was perfectly normal for a college student to have symptoms of narcolepsy and that I needed more coffee. It went undiagnosed for 8 years, and I nearly failed out multiple times before finally making it. Would healthcare teams staffed at or near Ivy+ have been wiser? I have no idea.
Improving broad equity and healthcare would help people in my situation more thoroughly than this admission problem, even being at the margin in question, so it’s a very solid article.
He makes the point that class-based AA/outreach is desirable, and notes that by taking a chance on a small town kid from a working class community in Oregon farm country, Harvard bet right. It put Kristof on the path to a very high level career in journalism (NY Times! multiple Pulitzers!).
People on Twitter were roasting him a bit for failing to mention that both his parents were PhD academics—so his admission to Harvard wasn't exactly the platonic example of Harvard's engaging in class-based outreach.
But the thought that struck me (and to which Kristof appears oblivious) was the implication that a fancy degree is required to reach the commanding heights of American journalism. We'd probably be better off as a country if Nicholas Kristof could have embarked on an identical career after four years at Oregon or Gonzaga. And yet I doubt Kristof was wrong that admission to Harvard was a huge break. It's not the case that literally every fancy journalist in America went to a fancy college—just a massively oversized share.
At some point, to be really successful, in addition to doing good work (a pre-requisite), a person needs to catch a "break", where someone takes a chance on them and helps elevate them to the next level. I think for most people this ends up being university because it's the first major decision point in most people's lives, but there's no reason it has to be. I went to a no-name undergrad, so my break was getting into a really good graduate school. Others it was getting an interview with a top firm. Hard-working and talented people pretty consistently find a path to success, and that they tend to have gone to a top university is correlation more than it is causation.
Thanks for the super-interesting article. The surprisingly small Ivy-league influence on income has me updating my beliefs a little, but I still have concerns.
I’m an immigrant professor working in a non-elite US university. I studied in Canada and New Zealand, where there are no significant Ivys. The proportion of Ivy graduates I see working as professors in US universities resembles the remarkably high Ivy representation Matt reported for the elite courts and the New York Times. I suspect this representation multiplies the influence of an unhealthy Ivy worldview.
I heard about inequality in US education before I moved here. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised to find elite schools and universities selecting a small number of students for lavish funding, with selection occurring before the students left their parent’s homes. But I was surprised to hear so little US debate on such resource allocation. I was even more surprised by this: the elite educational institutions, which allocate resources unequally, to a non-representative demographic, while gaining status from exclusivity, have been influential in the recent discussions on equity, diversity, and inclusion. I’ve heard many US professors talk as if they believed in creating small, lavishly funded and selective programs especially to advance equity goals. Among professors, if ideas of equity trickling down from a small number of graduates do raise any self-doubt, then these doubts are almost never spoken. I suspect that professor’s faith in such small selective programs might echo their own educational backgrounds.
When I teach, I enjoy getting to know individual students and watching them learn. So I find small classes, which require high-per-student funding, much more fun than larger classes. Also, students who are well-prepared, because their parents know the educational system well, are more fun to teach than students who aren’t. Combining these incentives with the status gained by teaching at an elite institution, I can see why educators would be tempted to do so. But when educators prioritize such personal career comfort and advancement, while avoiding hard questions about resources and also talking a good game on equity, I’m concerned that students might learn that this is ok, or even good. Precisely because many Ivy students are eager, idealistic, talented, and hard-working, serious damage can be done by role models at such a formative stage. I worry that the lived values of Ivy educators may be carried from Ivys into influential institutions where graduates are over-represented, like non-Ivy universities, the courts, and the New York Times. When I raise such concerns with Ivy-educated friends, they often resort to arguing that such problems are too deeply-ingrained to fix. But they aren’t - Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have no Ivys of any significance (and, from what I can tell, less unequal school funding).
I think I see the values that I’m worried about showing up in several university-shaped US professions. For example, the US has fewer physicians-per-capita than other wealthy countries, particularly at the less prestigious family-practitioner level. Partly as a consequence, while US medical funding is lavish and the US does lead the world in medical R&D, provision of less prestigious basic medical care is so bad that the infant mortality rate among kids born to poor parents is the worst in the wealthy world by about a factor of 2. Doctors have some responsibility for this. The AMA (advocating for doctors) successfully lobbied to reduce the number of physicians trained in the US, to change immigration rules to reduce doctor immigration (I think by a factor of 2-ish, in the late 1990’s), and to block globalized trade (e.g. I understand that US radiologists have banned the outsourcing of diagnosis to foreigners). But I don’t think any of this violates the norms emphasized by Ivy educators. Physicians didn’t say that immigrants are taking American jobs, or that the “the Chinese are killing us on trade” (which, in Ivy-invented jargon, would be a “microaggression”, and in the Ivy value system, would be a sin worth calling out). After doctors, lawyers are the next biggest group in the top 1% of earners, are highly university-educated, and have at least some responsibility for exceptionally bad equity outcomes in the US legal system. Next, I believe that grouping together people making investment decisions (in Wall Street and elsewhere) gives the biggest remaining group in the top 1% of earners. Many in this profession, which recruits heavily from Ivys, advanced their careers in ways that devastated the wealth-building efforts of many poorer Americans. Some of these problems occur in all countries where I’ve lived, but usually not to the same degree - the examples above include some of the worst outcomes in the wealthy world, and difficult questions about resources are discussed less in the US. A common thread seems to me the career incentives drawing professionals away from the relatively thankless task of serving the needy, and towards serving the affluent. In this context, I think the choices of Ivy educators make them damaging role models.
There’s a sentiment running through most of the comments to the effect that Ivy+ are somehow overrated or broken. The opposite is true, and that complicates the discussion around admissions. These are awesome places, the envy of the entire world, combining smart, motivated, driven students, with similar faculty, plus great facilities, plus great extra-curriculars, plus great traditions that make for lifetime bonding, plus great alumni who care about the place, and producing tons of great research and academic and scientific output, and having graduates (I won’t say “producing” in order to avoid fight over cause vs correlation) who are by and large excellent or poised to be excellent in the working-, academic-, artistic- and professional worlds. In short, these institutions are doing a LOT right, and they are correctly reluctant to mess with the formula. And we should be reluctant to mess too much, too. The focus should be on massively increasing access to these kinds of settings, which includes (1) increasing the size of these institutions, (2) building new institutions (there’s no reason why more states can’t have multiple flagship institutions the way California does, and it would be great if there were a flagship national university, too), and (3) recognizing that the pool of institutions that are considered elite has grown and will continue to grow over time. In the mid 1980s, when H-Y-P were no less prestigious than they are no, their admission rates were in the rage of 18%. There are now dozens of institutions that are equally selective, if not substantially more selective, and their graduates are recognized as such.
There also seems to be an assumption running through the comments here that the wealthy and/or legacy kids getting in to Ivy+ are typically less smart and less qualified than those that don’t. That may have been true 30 years ago, but it’s not true anymore. The “failson” bogeyman is – if not non-existent – not at all the norm. It’s just that it has become so statistically difficult to get into these colleges that it’s become a lottery even for the extremely smart and well qualified, and the wealthy and legacies just have better odds in the lottery. From one perspective, that fact makes the problem worse (more unfair). But look at it from the perspective of the colleges: If they can get kids who are smart, well-prepared, hard-working and motivated who are also wealthy and or legacy, why wouldn’t they take those kids at a higher rate? From the colleges’ perspective, they get their cake and eat it too.
Again, I 100% understand why admissions process feels so unfair, and I am not arguing otherwise. Only to say that the real problem here is that there are 3x-4x as many qualified students as there are spots for, and better than focusing on changing the fate of 100 students at each of 12 schools (i.e, 1200-1300 kids per year), we ought to focus on doubling or tripling the supply of seats at desirable schools (i.e. impacting 15k - 45k kids per year)– which can come both from expansion and from people simply updating their views on which schools are elite.
Can you please do a full post on why top schools should expand their enrollment? I've proposed this before and the reaction has mostly been people thinking that I'm an idiot. So it'd be nice to have a Matt article that I can point to and say "No, see, smart intellectuals think we should do this"
I want to underscore a point that Matt makes toward the article's end. He writes: "The much larger problem is poor kids for whom K-12 school quality makes a huge difference but who often don’t have access to the best teachers or the best curriculum." If one understands the notion of equal opportunity in more than a superficial way, this inability of kids who are poor to access quality education is deeply troubling. One's initial economic position as a kid--something one cannot control--can hinder one's ability to develop one's talents, and thus decrease one's chances for prestigious opportunities later in life.
Harvard tuition costs 55K per year, so it would seem weird if a lot of poor people went there.
It still strikes me as unbelievable based on the data Matt presented here and my own personal experience that there is a move among left leaning people to eliminate standardized tests.
"It also might be good for state legislatures in the northeast to think about whether it wouldn’t make sense for New York and Massachusetts to try to invest the money needed to create prestigious flagships, along the lines of those in Michigan and Wisconsin and Texas and California."
Good article as always.
I am skeptical that the point above can be accomplished even if it is desirable. Public universities in the northeast suffer from a permanent status gap due to private universities getting a century+ head start. Even highly selective universities still draw students disproportionately from the local area. 15% of Harvard's class is from Mass.
NY has already created a public uni with high admission standards: SUNY Binghamton: 650-720, Math 660-750. But it doesn't have nearly the social status of a private uni in NY. I grew up in NY if you were competitive for selective unis you were pushed to apply for private unis. The public unis were seen as 2nd rate.
And that will stay true as long as SUNY Binghamton grads can't get jobs with firms that only hire from Ivy+.
Elite students are fighting for status as well as income.
This is such a big difference between the East Coast and California. In my day, long ago, there was no reason to consider any school outside of the U.C. system. Well, maybe Stanford, if you were rich and smart. But Berkeley was a very close second in prestige. And if you couldn't get into any of the U.C. campuses, the Cal State system was considered solid. I don't know if California high school students still have that attitude, but my generation certainly did.
I've lived in 3 areas: tri-state, Twin Cities and the Bay Area. I've only noticed the extreme private school bias in the tri-state area.
I'm an elder millennial but I have friends with kids who are approaching college age. UCLA/CAL are still considered Ivy League quality among my peer circle (HH Incomes 100k-250k) but from what I can tell Cal State Fullerton is considered a weaker option than going to a flagship in a different state.
But there is no emphasis on private the way there is in the tri-state area. And tri-state people aren't wrong to emphasize private schools. SUNY Binghamton, which I did not attend, has a very strong student body. But they can't get elite jobs in NYC. You're much better off going to a selective private rather than Binghamton.
And I'm not sure there is anything the state of New York can do. As long as NYC employers avoid hiring at unis like Binghamton a lot of NY/NJ/CT students are going to go out of state.
And the reason they are going out of state is status as much as wages. Top students do care about how their job and employer is regarded an 80k job with the New York Times is not the same as an 80k job with the City of New York.
A random survey of lawyer's biographies (partner through associate) in one of the larger divisions (M and A) at Kirkland and Ellis showed the following: about 1/3 were undergrads at Ivy+ schools, 1/3 at "Ivy+ adjacent schools (Northwestern, Georgetown, Hopkins, Vandy, Williams etc.) and 1/3 at large state universities (U of Cal, Rutgers, etc.). None had gone to any of the universities rated highly by the Social Mobility Index.
Undergraduate credentials of US educated physicians are harder to access, but in the General Surgery department of the hospital I go to, about 2/3 of the docs went to elite private colleges and 1/3 to selective state universities (Berkeley, UCLA,etc.). None have ever been anywhere near a non-selective university.
Matt has probably downplayed the degree to which failure to get a BA/BS degree from a Yale, Pomona, UNC, or similar college is absolutely disqualifying for entry into certain elite professions in "desirable" geographic locations. I agree with him that the reason must be mostly selection rather than training- the pre-med and liberal arts curriculum at SUNY Buffalo or Cal State LA is fairly close-sometimes very close- to that at Penn or Wisconsin, and the professors (all with doctorates) are probably just as good. There is no structural reason why someone couldn't go to a non-selective university and still score very highly on the LSAT, GRE or MCAT. But almost nobody does, because they don't need to. They got into a "better" college because they were good students in high school.
But what is the "Harvard" business model? If it is maximizing donations of alumni, why wouldn't it figure people who had benefited the most, be the most generous. So shoot for snatching a poor kid and thrusting him into the elite over elite offspring to elite alumnus?
Unfortunately, Americans are programmed for Magical Thinking about education. Don't ever say the items below out loud or people will think you are a bad, non-progressive person. However, they are still useful to know insofar as they explain and predict the reality of our education system with 100% accuracy.
-- IQ is Destiny. IQ is real, testable, and is the primary determinant of ability to succeed in a modern economy and society.
-- IQ is Genetic. Unless you are diseased, malnourished or raised by wolves, your IQ (like your height), is basically 100% genetic vs 0% "nurture" (Note: "Environment" is actually much broader and different from "nurture," and consists almost entirely of randomness that can't be controlled).
-- IQ varies consistently by race. Blacks are always one standard deviation below the mean, Ashkenazi Jews are always about 1 SD above the mean, East Asians are around 1/3 SD above the mean. (This has a massive and highly predictable effect on racial representation at the right tail of elite achievement -- i.e., the percentages of individuals who are +2SD or +3SD level).
-- The Education System Ranks People, it Doesn't Equalize Them. The education system is just a big competition to prove who's smarter and harder working. It sorts them and ranks them into a hierarchy (High School Grad; College Grad; Elite College Grad; High GPA vs. Low GPA; Hard Science vs. Social "Science" major, etc.) People learn a little bit along the way about Shakespeare or whatever. But the real purpose and effect of the system is to **signal** who's smartest and hardest working, not to actually add value to the students through the acquired substance of the education itself. A corollary to this rule is that anyone who says that education "raises all boats" or words to that effect is committing the Fallacy of Composition. Everyone can't be above average. In fact, even if you could invent a program that helped its participants "succeed" in moving up the hierarchy, they are only doing so by pushing everyone else down the relative "success" ranking. It's wasted effort from a society-level perspective.
-- Spending Extra Money has Zero Effect. Every scrap of empirical data for 75 years says that additional spending has **zero** effect (not just a small effect) on actual test scores or any other legitimate metric of educational achievement. School spending is basically a giant jobs program for adults.
The biggest factor is always luck. But that's hard to predict ahead of time. IQ is about the only thing you can actually *measure* ahead of time as a predictor, so it's definitely the most important thing (practically the only thing) to look at. The other variables he is attributing as potential causes of income are themselves highly confounded with IQ itself (employment status, marital status, education status). So I'm not enough of a statistics person to know if this kind of regression analysis is totally valid.
Even still, as the blog's author admits "you can correctly point out that .46 rivals the largest observed correlations in social psychology, sociology, and other relevant fields." And the correlation of IQ with income tends to break down at the higher ends of the spectrum because a lot of high IQ people go into academia or just choose to do something other than chasing the biggest bucks possible. (There's no reason to think that excessive greed is necessarily correlated to IQ).
-I push back at the idea that the actual education offered at Ivy+ schools is superior. They don't have access to esoteric knowledge or pedagogical methods.
- Most of the Ivy+ schools haven't increased their class size in decades. With One Billion Americans, how many are in "the elite"?
-Presently it feels like all this is just circular: the elite are in the best position to lead the people because they're the elite because they're in the best position to lead. Today's elite don't "feel" particularly meritorious or representative of the people, and they should be at least one of the two.
- It seems like the "elite" don't really have the kind of record to justify the amount of prestige they hold as a group. "The best and brightest" failed us in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; they bear responsibility for the S&L crisis, the 2007 economic collapse, the Hurricane Katrina response, the "Fast and Furious" scandal, and any number of other failures of public governance. Pobody's nerfect, but the results we get don't seem to be worth the damage done to our national sense of equality, fellowship and meritocracy.
If you believe as Matt does that a “good” school is mostly driven by inputs - ie the quality of the students you’re learning alongside - then it should follow that Ivy+ does offer superior education.
My sense is that’s probably true - even at flagship state schools, there are lots of in-state kids who did well enough in high school, but are mostly focused on getting through four years to get a credential. Whereas pretty much everyone who gets into an Ivy is a demonstrated striver.
"Going to a fancy college is a useful networking experience if you’re not from a fancy family, but if you’re from a fancy family then you already have the network."
That is the most important sentence from this post. Ivy+ schools are the place where people not from fancy families get to network with people from fancy families. Their coexistence is the utility of Ivy+ schools. They aren't "better" or "worse" than other schools, they just serve a very specific function in society. But because that function caters to rich people, we think they are superior; replace all fancy people at Harvard with equally smart, but non-fancy people and you'll recreate <your favorite state university/>. (But with worse athletics.) Replace all the non-fancy people at Harvard with equally smart fancy people and you'll recreate <school so exclusive you haven't even heard of it>.
A mediocre legacy student from a fancy family adds value to Ivy+ schools because they provide a networking opportunity to a brilliant student from a working class family. If you go into a STEM field, or whatever, you'll do fine at your non/somewhat selective state school. But if you want to be a Supreme Court Justice or a big-time CEO—or work for the New York Times, apparently—you need access to the elite upper-crust, and they congregate in the Ivy+.
I can even convince myself that the dip in admissions at the upper middle class makes sense; you need the spike at the top (see above), but there is more value bringing them into contact with people further down the fancy-family scale.
In the early 1900s, Harvard is where you went because you could not get into a state school. MIT is where you went because you studied.
How do we measure meeting ones potential? School seems to be a place to:
1) Learn
2) Supply child care
3) Drink
4) Have sex
5) Learn to socialize with orthogonal people
6) Operate a tax free hedge fund
If we want to improve society, it strikes me we should do a first principle introspection on education. And solve for child care. If rich people want to send their kids to Harvard to learn to drink and have sex, spending 700k on private schools to get there, so be it.
There are better solutions to all but the tax free hedge fund.
Not sure New York needs the suggestion to create a flagship. It is not widely known, but Cornell is a land grant institution and is part public. Depending on which college you enroll in, you get a steep discount as a NY resident. Also, SUNY is a great network with strong schools (e.g. U Buffalo, Binghamton).
Huh. I seem to be one of the victims of inequity with the 1500+ SATs, good grades, and commendations in all my extracurriculars all while in and out of homelessness. I genuinely have no idea what trajectory my life would be on had I moved east for school. My lovely fiancé went to uni with me, and on the other hand, the healthcare team at my uni heavily insisted it was perfectly normal for a college student to have symptoms of narcolepsy and that I needed more coffee. It went undiagnosed for 8 years, and I nearly failed out multiple times before finally making it. Would healthcare teams staffed at or near Ivy+ have been wiser? I have no idea.
Improving broad equity and healthcare would help people in my situation more thoroughly than this admission problem, even being at the margin in question, so it’s a very solid article.
Very late to the party here, but, did anyone see the recent Nicholas Kristof column about admissions?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/opinion/legacy-college-admissions.html?
He makes the point that class-based AA/outreach is desirable, and notes that by taking a chance on a small town kid from a working class community in Oregon farm country, Harvard bet right. It put Kristof on the path to a very high level career in journalism (NY Times! multiple Pulitzers!).
People on Twitter were roasting him a bit for failing to mention that both his parents were PhD academics—so his admission to Harvard wasn't exactly the platonic example of Harvard's engaging in class-based outreach.
But the thought that struck me (and to which Kristof appears oblivious) was the implication that a fancy degree is required to reach the commanding heights of American journalism. We'd probably be better off as a country if Nicholas Kristof could have embarked on an identical career after four years at Oregon or Gonzaga. And yet I doubt Kristof was wrong that admission to Harvard was a huge break. It's not the case that literally every fancy journalist in America went to a fancy college—just a massively oversized share.
At some point, to be really successful, in addition to doing good work (a pre-requisite), a person needs to catch a "break", where someone takes a chance on them and helps elevate them to the next level. I think for most people this ends up being university because it's the first major decision point in most people's lives, but there's no reason it has to be. I went to a no-name undergrad, so my break was getting into a really good graduate school. Others it was getting an interview with a top firm. Hard-working and talented people pretty consistently find a path to success, and that they tend to have gone to a top university is correlation more than it is causation.
One of the main reasons I chose to attend Dartmouth was the small class size. Not every school needs to be enormous.
Fellow Dartmouth alum!
Thanks for the super-interesting article. The surprisingly small Ivy-league influence on income has me updating my beliefs a little, but I still have concerns.
I’m an immigrant professor working in a non-elite US university. I studied in Canada and New Zealand, where there are no significant Ivys. The proportion of Ivy graduates I see working as professors in US universities resembles the remarkably high Ivy representation Matt reported for the elite courts and the New York Times. I suspect this representation multiplies the influence of an unhealthy Ivy worldview.
I heard about inequality in US education before I moved here. Therefore, I wasn’t surprised to find elite schools and universities selecting a small number of students for lavish funding, with selection occurring before the students left their parent’s homes. But I was surprised to hear so little US debate on such resource allocation. I was even more surprised by this: the elite educational institutions, which allocate resources unequally, to a non-representative demographic, while gaining status from exclusivity, have been influential in the recent discussions on equity, diversity, and inclusion. I’ve heard many US professors talk as if they believed in creating small, lavishly funded and selective programs especially to advance equity goals. Among professors, if ideas of equity trickling down from a small number of graduates do raise any self-doubt, then these doubts are almost never spoken. I suspect that professor’s faith in such small selective programs might echo their own educational backgrounds.
When I teach, I enjoy getting to know individual students and watching them learn. So I find small classes, which require high-per-student funding, much more fun than larger classes. Also, students who are well-prepared, because their parents know the educational system well, are more fun to teach than students who aren’t. Combining these incentives with the status gained by teaching at an elite institution, I can see why educators would be tempted to do so. But when educators prioritize such personal career comfort and advancement, while avoiding hard questions about resources and also talking a good game on equity, I’m concerned that students might learn that this is ok, or even good. Precisely because many Ivy students are eager, idealistic, talented, and hard-working, serious damage can be done by role models at such a formative stage. I worry that the lived values of Ivy educators may be carried from Ivys into influential institutions where graduates are over-represented, like non-Ivy universities, the courts, and the New York Times. When I raise such concerns with Ivy-educated friends, they often resort to arguing that such problems are too deeply-ingrained to fix. But they aren’t - Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have no Ivys of any significance (and, from what I can tell, less unequal school funding).
I think I see the values that I’m worried about showing up in several university-shaped US professions. For example, the US has fewer physicians-per-capita than other wealthy countries, particularly at the less prestigious family-practitioner level. Partly as a consequence, while US medical funding is lavish and the US does lead the world in medical R&D, provision of less prestigious basic medical care is so bad that the infant mortality rate among kids born to poor parents is the worst in the wealthy world by about a factor of 2. Doctors have some responsibility for this. The AMA (advocating for doctors) successfully lobbied to reduce the number of physicians trained in the US, to change immigration rules to reduce doctor immigration (I think by a factor of 2-ish, in the late 1990’s), and to block globalized trade (e.g. I understand that US radiologists have banned the outsourcing of diagnosis to foreigners). But I don’t think any of this violates the norms emphasized by Ivy educators. Physicians didn’t say that immigrants are taking American jobs, or that the “the Chinese are killing us on trade” (which, in Ivy-invented jargon, would be a “microaggression”, and in the Ivy value system, would be a sin worth calling out). After doctors, lawyers are the next biggest group in the top 1% of earners, are highly university-educated, and have at least some responsibility for exceptionally bad equity outcomes in the US legal system. Next, I believe that grouping together people making investment decisions (in Wall Street and elsewhere) gives the biggest remaining group in the top 1% of earners. Many in this profession, which recruits heavily from Ivys, advanced their careers in ways that devastated the wealth-building efforts of many poorer Americans. Some of these problems occur in all countries where I’ve lived, but usually not to the same degree - the examples above include some of the worst outcomes in the wealthy world, and difficult questions about resources are discussed less in the US. A common thread seems to me the career incentives drawing professionals away from the relatively thankless task of serving the needy, and towards serving the affluent. In this context, I think the choices of Ivy educators make them damaging role models.
There’s a sentiment running through most of the comments to the effect that Ivy+ are somehow overrated or broken. The opposite is true, and that complicates the discussion around admissions. These are awesome places, the envy of the entire world, combining smart, motivated, driven students, with similar faculty, plus great facilities, plus great extra-curriculars, plus great traditions that make for lifetime bonding, plus great alumni who care about the place, and producing tons of great research and academic and scientific output, and having graduates (I won’t say “producing” in order to avoid fight over cause vs correlation) who are by and large excellent or poised to be excellent in the working-, academic-, artistic- and professional worlds. In short, these institutions are doing a LOT right, and they are correctly reluctant to mess with the formula. And we should be reluctant to mess too much, too. The focus should be on massively increasing access to these kinds of settings, which includes (1) increasing the size of these institutions, (2) building new institutions (there’s no reason why more states can’t have multiple flagship institutions the way California does, and it would be great if there were a flagship national university, too), and (3) recognizing that the pool of institutions that are considered elite has grown and will continue to grow over time. In the mid 1980s, when H-Y-P were no less prestigious than they are no, their admission rates were in the rage of 18%. There are now dozens of institutions that are equally selective, if not substantially more selective, and their graduates are recognized as such.
There also seems to be an assumption running through the comments here that the wealthy and/or legacy kids getting in to Ivy+ are typically less smart and less qualified than those that don’t. That may have been true 30 years ago, but it’s not true anymore. The “failson” bogeyman is – if not non-existent – not at all the norm. It’s just that it has become so statistically difficult to get into these colleges that it’s become a lottery even for the extremely smart and well qualified, and the wealthy and legacies just have better odds in the lottery. From one perspective, that fact makes the problem worse (more unfair). But look at it from the perspective of the colleges: If they can get kids who are smart, well-prepared, hard-working and motivated who are also wealthy and or legacy, why wouldn’t they take those kids at a higher rate? From the colleges’ perspective, they get their cake and eat it too.
Again, I 100% understand why admissions process feels so unfair, and I am not arguing otherwise. Only to say that the real problem here is that there are 3x-4x as many qualified students as there are spots for, and better than focusing on changing the fate of 100 students at each of 12 schools (i.e, 1200-1300 kids per year), we ought to focus on doubling or tripling the supply of seats at desirable schools (i.e. impacting 15k - 45k kids per year)– which can come both from expansion and from people simply updating their views on which schools are elite.
Can you please do a full post on why top schools should expand their enrollment? I've proposed this before and the reaction has mostly been people thinking that I'm an idiot. So it'd be nice to have a Matt article that I can point to and say "No, see, smart intellectuals think we should do this"
I want to underscore a point that Matt makes toward the article's end. He writes: "The much larger problem is poor kids for whom K-12 school quality makes a huge difference but who often don’t have access to the best teachers or the best curriculum." If one understands the notion of equal opportunity in more than a superficial way, this inability of kids who are poor to access quality education is deeply troubling. One's initial economic position as a kid--something one cannot control--can hinder one's ability to develop one's talents, and thus decrease one's chances for prestigious opportunities later in life.
Harvard tuition costs 55K per year, so it would seem weird if a lot of poor people went there.
It still strikes me as unbelievable based on the data Matt presented here and my own personal experience that there is a move among left leaning people to eliminate standardized tests.
FWIW, Harvard is need blind in admissions. And I believe financial aid is generous, up to a full ride if one's parents make under a certain amount.
"It also might be good for state legislatures in the northeast to think about whether it wouldn’t make sense for New York and Massachusetts to try to invest the money needed to create prestigious flagships, along the lines of those in Michigan and Wisconsin and Texas and California."
Good article as always.
I am skeptical that the point above can be accomplished even if it is desirable. Public universities in the northeast suffer from a permanent status gap due to private universities getting a century+ head start. Even highly selective universities still draw students disproportionately from the local area. 15% of Harvard's class is from Mass.
NY has already created a public uni with high admission standards: SUNY Binghamton: 650-720, Math 660-750. But it doesn't have nearly the social status of a private uni in NY. I grew up in NY if you were competitive for selective unis you were pushed to apply for private unis. The public unis were seen as 2nd rate.
And that will stay true as long as SUNY Binghamton grads can't get jobs with firms that only hire from Ivy+.
Elite students are fighting for status as well as income.
This is such a big difference between the East Coast and California. In my day, long ago, there was no reason to consider any school outside of the U.C. system. Well, maybe Stanford, if you were rich and smart. But Berkeley was a very close second in prestige. And if you couldn't get into any of the U.C. campuses, the Cal State system was considered solid. I don't know if California high school students still have that attitude, but my generation certainly did.
I've lived in 3 areas: tri-state, Twin Cities and the Bay Area. I've only noticed the extreme private school bias in the tri-state area.
I'm an elder millennial but I have friends with kids who are approaching college age. UCLA/CAL are still considered Ivy League quality among my peer circle (HH Incomes 100k-250k) but from what I can tell Cal State Fullerton is considered a weaker option than going to a flagship in a different state.
But there is no emphasis on private the way there is in the tri-state area. And tri-state people aren't wrong to emphasize private schools. SUNY Binghamton, which I did not attend, has a very strong student body. But they can't get elite jobs in NYC. You're much better off going to a selective private rather than Binghamton.
And I'm not sure there is anything the state of New York can do. As long as NYC employers avoid hiring at unis like Binghamton a lot of NY/NJ/CT students are going to go out of state.
And the reason they are going out of state is status as much as wages. Top students do care about how their job and employer is regarded an 80k job with the New York Times is not the same as an 80k job with the City of New York.
A random survey of lawyer's biographies (partner through associate) in one of the larger divisions (M and A) at Kirkland and Ellis showed the following: about 1/3 were undergrads at Ivy+ schools, 1/3 at "Ivy+ adjacent schools (Northwestern, Georgetown, Hopkins, Vandy, Williams etc.) and 1/3 at large state universities (U of Cal, Rutgers, etc.). None had gone to any of the universities rated highly by the Social Mobility Index.
Undergraduate credentials of US educated physicians are harder to access, but in the General Surgery department of the hospital I go to, about 2/3 of the docs went to elite private colleges and 1/3 to selective state universities (Berkeley, UCLA,etc.). None have ever been anywhere near a non-selective university.
Matt has probably downplayed the degree to which failure to get a BA/BS degree from a Yale, Pomona, UNC, or similar college is absolutely disqualifying for entry into certain elite professions in "desirable" geographic locations. I agree with him that the reason must be mostly selection rather than training- the pre-med and liberal arts curriculum at SUNY Buffalo or Cal State LA is fairly close-sometimes very close- to that at Penn or Wisconsin, and the professors (all with doctorates) are probably just as good. There is no structural reason why someone couldn't go to a non-selective university and still score very highly on the LSAT, GRE or MCAT. But almost nobody does, because they don't need to. They got into a "better" college because they were good students in high school.
But what is the "Harvard" business model? If it is maximizing donations of alumni, why wouldn't it figure people who had benefited the most, be the most generous. So shoot for snatching a poor kid and thrusting him into the elite over elite offspring to elite alumnus?
Unfortunately, Americans are programmed for Magical Thinking about education. Don't ever say the items below out loud or people will think you are a bad, non-progressive person. However, they are still useful to know insofar as they explain and predict the reality of our education system with 100% accuracy.
-- IQ is Destiny. IQ is real, testable, and is the primary determinant of ability to succeed in a modern economy and society.
-- IQ is Genetic. Unless you are diseased, malnourished or raised by wolves, your IQ (like your height), is basically 100% genetic vs 0% "nurture" (Note: "Environment" is actually much broader and different from "nurture," and consists almost entirely of randomness that can't be controlled).
-- IQ varies consistently by race. Blacks are always one standard deviation below the mean, Ashkenazi Jews are always about 1 SD above the mean, East Asians are around 1/3 SD above the mean. (This has a massive and highly predictable effect on racial representation at the right tail of elite achievement -- i.e., the percentages of individuals who are +2SD or +3SD level).
-- The Education System Ranks People, it Doesn't Equalize Them. The education system is just a big competition to prove who's smarter and harder working. It sorts them and ranks them into a hierarchy (High School Grad; College Grad; Elite College Grad; High GPA vs. Low GPA; Hard Science vs. Social "Science" major, etc.) People learn a little bit along the way about Shakespeare or whatever. But the real purpose and effect of the system is to **signal** who's smartest and hardest working, not to actually add value to the students through the acquired substance of the education itself. A corollary to this rule is that anyone who says that education "raises all boats" or words to that effect is committing the Fallacy of Composition. Everyone can't be above average. In fact, even if you could invent a program that helped its participants "succeed" in moving up the hierarchy, they are only doing so by pushing everyone else down the relative "success" ranking. It's wasted effort from a society-level perspective.
-- Spending Extra Money has Zero Effect. Every scrap of empirical data for 75 years says that additional spending has **zero** effect (not just a small effect) on actual test scores or any other legitimate metric of educational achievement. School spending is basically a giant jobs program for adults.
The biggest factor is always luck. But that's hard to predict ahead of time. IQ is about the only thing you can actually *measure* ahead of time as a predictor, so it's definitely the most important thing (practically the only thing) to look at. The other variables he is attributing as potential causes of income are themselves highly confounded with IQ itself (employment status, marital status, education status). So I'm not enough of a statistics person to know if this kind of regression analysis is totally valid.
Even still, as the blog's author admits "you can correctly point out that .46 rivals the largest observed correlations in social psychology, sociology, and other relevant fields." And the correlation of IQ with income tends to break down at the higher ends of the spectrum because a lot of high IQ people go into academia or just choose to do something other than chasing the biggest bucks possible. (There's no reason to think that excessive greed is necessarily correlated to IQ).
A series of loosely connected thoughts:
-I push back at the idea that the actual education offered at Ivy+ schools is superior. They don't have access to esoteric knowledge or pedagogical methods.
- Most of the Ivy+ schools haven't increased their class size in decades. With One Billion Americans, how many are in "the elite"?
-Presently it feels like all this is just circular: the elite are in the best position to lead the people because they're the elite because they're in the best position to lead. Today's elite don't "feel" particularly meritorious or representative of the people, and they should be at least one of the two.
- It seems like the "elite" don't really have the kind of record to justify the amount of prestige they hold as a group. "The best and brightest" failed us in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; they bear responsibility for the S&L crisis, the 2007 economic collapse, the Hurricane Katrina response, the "Fast and Furious" scandal, and any number of other failures of public governance. Pobody's nerfect, but the results we get don't seem to be worth the damage done to our national sense of equality, fellowship and meritocracy.
If you believe as Matt does that a “good” school is mostly driven by inputs - ie the quality of the students you’re learning alongside - then it should follow that Ivy+ does offer superior education.
My sense is that’s probably true - even at flagship state schools, there are lots of in-state kids who did well enough in high school, but are mostly focused on getting through four years to get a credential. Whereas pretty much everyone who gets into an Ivy is a demonstrated striver.
"Going to a fancy college is a useful networking experience if you’re not from a fancy family, but if you’re from a fancy family then you already have the network."
That is the most important sentence from this post. Ivy+ schools are the place where people not from fancy families get to network with people from fancy families. Their coexistence is the utility of Ivy+ schools. They aren't "better" or "worse" than other schools, they just serve a very specific function in society. But because that function caters to rich people, we think they are superior; replace all fancy people at Harvard with equally smart, but non-fancy people and you'll recreate <your favorite state university/>. (But with worse athletics.) Replace all the non-fancy people at Harvard with equally smart fancy people and you'll recreate <school so exclusive you haven't even heard of it>.
A mediocre legacy student from a fancy family adds value to Ivy+ schools because they provide a networking opportunity to a brilliant student from a working class family. If you go into a STEM field, or whatever, you'll do fine at your non/somewhat selective state school. But if you want to be a Supreme Court Justice or a big-time CEO—or work for the New York Times, apparently—you need access to the elite upper-crust, and they congregate in the Ivy+.
I can even convince myself that the dip in admissions at the upper middle class makes sense; you need the spike at the top (see above), but there is more value bringing them into contact with people further down the fancy-family scale.