Whither the Ivies?

The New Republic has done us all a favor by hosting a terrific debate on the public good of America's elite institutions. Now, there is no doubt that the Ivies and other major private American universities are the best in the world. The problem stems from their role in encouraging economic inequality and furthering the gap between the sliver  of the elite that attends these universities and everyone else.

William Deresiewicz does a brilliant job summarizing these issues, and it's worth reading the entire article. But to pull just one quote selectively,

This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.

The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools. The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely. Today, fewer than half of high-scoring students from low-income families even enroll at four-year schools.

The problem isn’t that there aren’t more qualified lower-income kids from which to choose. Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.

And so it is hardly a coincidence that income inequality is higher than it has been since before the Great Depression, or that social mobility is lower in the United States than in almost every other developed country. Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.

While it is easy to dismiss this problem as the jeremiads of a particular class and those that aspire to join this class, consider this: we offer these institutions massive subsidies through federal financial aid, the largesse of the national research budget and tax exempt status. My alma mater, Yale University, regularly hands out multimillion dollar salaries, has an endowment worth billions and would owe the city of New Haven as much as 100 million dollars a year of its property was actually taxed. Many aren't aware that New Haven is a poor city, and that money is badly needed to address distressed schools, crime and drug problems. Money not paid by Yale ends up being money drawn from the rest of the city. As Milton Friedman often stated, there is almost no justification in taxing the poor to give to the rich and upper middle class.

Of course, like many issues concerning the distribution of wealth and public benefits, a lot of your opinion about the Ivy League depends on your personal perspective.  This makes it very much a glass half full, glass half empty issue. Without a doubt, I am a pure product of this system. Yale transformed me in an uncountable number of ways, and my life is profoundly different than that of my peers in Wyoming. And for each of these differences, I am much better off.

This is the heart of J.D. Chapman's response to Deresiewicz. For those people who are able to take advantage of the system's benefits, almost nothing has the same transformative power as an Ivy League education.

One of Deresiewicz's central contentions, that students at elite institutions are particularly emotionally dislocated and wayward, is presented with two kinds of evidence. The first is anecdotal and personal with no counter-examples of peers from lower profile institutions, or from outside of higher education altogether. The second is a glancing mention of what I assume was the survey "The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010," which did not appear to disaggregate data by selectivity at all. ("A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history," Deresiewicz writes.) One wonders, does he know other 18-21 year olds? My own experience suggests that thoughtful, curious people in this age group are widely prone to confused self-loathing no matter where they are.

Most of my friends today are not Ivy League graduates. They are, like most middle class people in America not in the trades, graduates of lower-profile liberal arts colleges and state universities. The ones with whom I have discussed this article are unanimous on that last point: They all felt like they were wandering around with no clear direction at that age and object to the premise that that is a special property of the Ivy Leaguer. They are also unanimous on this point: they are proud of their educations, but do not conclude from that pride that an Ivy League education is “overrated” in comparison.

I agree with Deresiewicz that liberal arts colleges like Sarah Lawrence and Reed are uniquely positioned to nurture and challenge students, and I champion them when I can. I don’t believe the Ivies are for every bright kid, and I have occasionally counseled students capable of admission to them to favor other options. And I agree that class lines are hardening in dangerous ways; the Ivies have too much money and power; and meritocracy is a delusion. That does not mean that an Ivy League diploma isn’t valuable, especially for someone whose family has no history of access to elite careers like teaching at Yale or writing for The New Republic. It means that it is valuable. Whether it should be is another discussion altogether.

During a time of increasing class disparity, the Ivies are both institutions that cater to the elite and offer some bit of meritocracy. Those that criticize the Ivies believe that we should some much more of the latter function and a lot less of the former. They believe that the inequality gap is big enough already. We would hope that the criticism of Yale would make the admissions process much more fair in the end. In the same way, we hope that people can still get ahead despite the chasm between the elite and everyone else in America. Both of those things might not be possible anymore, but it's a credit to our innate values and aspirations that we dream for something else.

This gets to the heart of Americans' difficulty in addressing the overall problem of inequality, one that John Oliver did a brilliant job of addressing recently. Americans, without question, all believe that we all have a real shot of getting rich one day. It is part of the national fantasy, and it is one of our most endearing traits. This dream, by and large, is not true, but we can't help but cheer at the incredibly few people who actually make it.

No metaphor captures this better than the major lotteries, which are terrible fiscal policies that amount to little more than a tax on the poor that also justifies cutting services. It is hard to deny the harm, but Americans love the lottery! And there is always a big emotional buildup whenever the jackpots get especially large. We get so excited about winning even though we know, as a nearly irrefutable fact, that we won't win!

Looking at the real lottery or its educational counterpart, Harvard,  means addressing fundamental philosophical questions about ourselves and our nation. Do we justify the existence of a purely elitist institution because there's an incredibly slim chance that a few poor kids might sneak in? Do we stop ourselves from addressing the huge problems of income inequality because we can't help but dream about someday, somehow, ending up on the winning side of the divide? There aren't easy questions here, but we cannot fully grapple with the state of our nation in the 21st century without trying to tackle them.