Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.
A leading cause of peripheral vision loss (a.k.a. tunnel vision) is attending an Ivy+ school.[i] Thankfully, not all Ivy+ graduates will be afflicted, but, for those who are, the symptoms, sadly, may be permanent. In such cases, they will, for the rest of their days, fixate on Ivy+ institutions.
A view from the world of Ivy+
If you want to read about Ivy+ schools, simply look for articles written by journalists who went to Ivy+ schools. If you want to hear from those who went to or teach at Ivy+ schools, just listen to a podcast hosted by an Ivy+ grad. If you want to know who will be hired for a job being selected by a committee of Ivy+ products, bet the farm on “an Ivy+ product.”
This creates a world similar to the one famously parodied by The New Yorker’s cartoon, “View of the World from 9th Ave.” Some folks act as though these schools and their graduates are at the center of the universe. Other schools (and their graduates) are somewhere out there in the savage hinterlands.
But as I demonstrated in my recent study, in most of America, Ivy+ schools cast an exceedingly small shadow. Leaders in most places instead come from public colleges, especially flagships, and an array of nearby, respected private schools. Only in a few places (like California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York) will you find a critical mass of Ivy+ grads in major positions. Nevertheless, some Ivy+ grads seem to believe (and want you to believe) that they dominate everywhere.
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In my report, I described at length how a recent, otherwise excellent, research paper demonstrated this tunnel vision. Written by three Ivy+ graduates who teach at Ivy+ institutions, the study makes it seem as though the only elite positions in public life are those controlled by (and often selected by) Ivy+ graduates.[ii] I also discussed how three Ivy+ journalists who work for publications heavy with Ivy+ graduates wrote at length about the study’s pro-Ivy+ findings.
In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll be writing more about this phenomenon and how it hurts higher education and American egalitarianism and how it energizes populism. More personally, it frustrates me because it inflates the value of institutions that privilege the rich and connected, denigrates the work of many great non-elite institutions, and limits the opportunities of countless talented people.
I’m curating evidence for all of this, but I’ve assumed that this research paper would always serve as the best example of Ivy+ tunnel vision.
Until I read David Brooks’ recent cover story in The Atlantic.
The ostensible social ideal
Brooks—a good man and talented writer whose previous work I’ve admired—explains early on, “I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities.” Yes, and therein begins the problem.
To him, those schools are at the center; America’s thousands of public colleges and universities and the accomplished people who’ve graduated from them seem to be somewhere out there in the hinterlands.
Though Brooks’ piece and the research paper mentioned above criticize aspects of Ivy+ schools, the authors repeatedly point out how very important these schools are. If you’ve not attended an Ivy+ school, both works will probably strike you as extended humblebrags. I found myself comparing them to the infamous “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” commercials.
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This is how Brooks begins.
Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late nineteenth century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.
Later he writes, “And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.”
This is a staggeringly limited, even elitist, vision of America. Maybe you’d believe this if you grew up in these small areas or went to these small schools. But I’m sure most people in Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, etc. did not consider such people the social ideal. The rest of America had its own schools, employers, institutions, and traditions. They didn’t need to look to Ivy grads for inspiration.
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Brooks blames James Conant for ushering in an era where colleges prefer intelligence over wealth. Conant, the president of Harvard (so, obviously, an extraordinarily powerful person), wanted a more egalitarian America, one with more social mobility. He set out to change college admissions. This was, in my mind, a welcome social development.
But, somehow, Brooks leaps from this shift to an imaginary bifurcated world of the modestly educated who’ve been left behind and those who go to a few elite private schools and then become masters of the universe. This has never been the case. For most of our history, few people went to college. Today, it’s still well less than half. From the past up to today, public colleges have educated more public officials, community pillars, and private-sector leaders than this handful of elite privates.
Brooks seems to believe that America’s parents obsess over elite privates. Maybe the following vision of America obtains in certain tiny social circles. But this is not the experience of most Americans.
Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.
Maybe if you are surrounded by people trying to “hone their kids into little avatars of success” you are likelier to believe that everything revolves around the Ivy+. But for every one family behaving that way there are hundreds enjoying healthy, content lives and who love the state’s public flagship and who never even think about Dartmouth.
And then there is this:
By eleventh grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like eighteenth-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby.
Again, maybe this is true in some neighborhoods and at some social-club happy hours. But I’d bet my bottom dollar that most great parents of most great kids who will go on to do great things have no idea where Williams and Colby are and don’t much care. And they sure don’t care which has more prestige.
Ohio doesn’t need the Ivy+
Toward the end of the article, while listing the sins of meritocracy, Brooks writes, “The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation. Segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you’re a valedictorian in Ohio, don’t go to Ohio State; go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.”
This sentiment is untethered from the real world of higher education. In most of America, most families of college-going students would be thrilled if their kids went to a good close-to-home school, especially the public flagship. Perhaps Brooks doesn’t know that the average SAT score of the Ohio State honors college is comparable to Ivy League schools.
Moreover, maybe Brooks doesn’t know that the governor of Ohio graduated from a public college in Ohio (Miami University). Or that Ohio’s attorney general went to Ohio State. Maybe he doesn’t know that five of Ohio’s seven supreme court justices went to an Ohio public college. Or that six of seven went to a college inside the state. Maybe he doesn’t know the board chair of the Cleveland Clinic, the state’s largest employer, is a public flagship grad or that the CEO and Chairman of Kroger, the second largest employer headquartered in the state, is a public flagship grad.
The elite bubble
How is it that Brooks, who genuinely cares about opportunity, could have such a 9th-Avenue view of higher education? How is it that no one around him suggested that he broaden his lens?
Here’s one possibility:
As a columnist for the NY Times, he’s surrounded by other columnists who have undergrad and/or grad degrees from Ivy+ schools: Douthat (Harvard), Dowd (Columbia), Edsall (Brown), French (Harvard Law), Kristoff ((Harvard), Krugman (Yale, MIT), Leonhardt (Yale), and Stephens (Chicago).
So does the Times’ opinion editor, Kingsbury (Columbia).
Moreover, the paper’s publisher (Brown), executive editor (Harvard), and managing editor (Cornell) all have Ivy+ degrees; 54 percent of the American degrees earned by members of the paper’s editorial board are from Ivy+ schools.
As for The Atlantic: its owner (Penn, Stanford), CEO (Stanford), and editor-in-chief (Penn) all went to Ivy+ schools.
In short, there is an Ivy+ bubble, and for those inside of it, Ivy+ schools loom very, very, very large. I appreciate that some of these folks are willing to criticize aspects of these schools. But they don’t need to feel that bad about it. Honestly. In fact, I bet they’d care much less what we thought of Ivy+ schools if they realized how seldom we did.
[i] “Ivy+” refers to the eight Ivies and four other selective privates (Duke, Stanford, MIT, Chicago). I am not a licensed physician; if you believe you might have Ivy-induced tunnel vision, consult with a trained medical professional and/or move out of New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., or California.
