David Brooks has a piece in the Atlantic called How the Ivy League Broke America: The meritocracy isn’t working We need something new that is generating a lot of discussion. Brooks recounts the history of how selective American universities transformed from seeing good breeding Episcopalian standing as proper criteria for admission to one based upon meritocracy. Of course, we all like meritocracy in theory, but Brooks makes the case that in practice focusing on things like SAT scores tends to reduce people to a single attribute, which can and has been manipulated. Brooks moves on to proposed remedies that come across as both fuzzy and problematic, but his critique of the Ivy League and similar universities (henceforth Ivy+) certainly stings, although perhaps not as much as it could.
Before discussing the Brooks piece further, you should go read Andy Smarick’s delightful critique of the Brooks hypothesis, which argues that the Ivy+ is not so much destructive as it is overrated. Smarick’s takedown is both insightful and hilarious, but toward the end might begin to argue against the piece’s own hypothesis:
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% 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.
A dismissal of the New York Times or Atlantic might seem appropriate and tempting given the obvious waning influence of such publications. Other such Ivy+ echo chambers might prove more worrisome; more on that in a bit.
Both the Brooks critique of the Ivy+ and the Smarick critique of Brooks could have been stronger still if they had included a discussion of the Harvard vs. Penn State outcome research. By tracking the long-term outcomes of students who were admitted into Harvard but chose to attend Penn State, researchers have found that the relative value-added proposition of attending Harvard approximates that of attending Penn State. In other words, the best thing about Harvard seems to be the ability to get in rather than actual attendance.
The Brooks critique of a meritocracy gone wrong rings broadly true. Human beings are more than an ACT score. ACT scores can and have been manipulated in various ways, and some high demand universities seem to expect middle schoolers to found a multimillion-dollar organization to merit consideration. There are sections of our country where people would view it as a grave family dishonor to send their children to the University of State X. Thus, the selection bias might be seen as one toward a particular attribute (intelligence albeit imperfectly measured) and perhaps even more so toward an endurance of admission rituals.
Where does all this land? One might describe this as overrated people desperate to get into overrated institutions. If so, the Smarick critique might ring even more true, but what if another one of the echo chambers of these folks lies within the federal government and academia?
Wile E. Coyote is the patron saint of the American technocratic class. On the rare occasions in which he speaks, Wile E. occasionally would explain to the Looney Tunes audience that he is a “supra-genius” in an upper crust accent. Wile E. would of course constantly make elaborate and complex schemes to capture the Road Runner, only to have them backfire again and again and again. Fortunately, the only victim of Wile E. Coyote’s repeated folly was Wile E. Coyote himself.
This is alas not the case for many of the misbegotten schemes of Ivy Leaguers. Take for example Columbia Teacher College’s Lucy Calkins’ hugely destructive misadventure into reading instruction. Or Harvard’s Franklin Raines who helped bring us the subprime mortgage crisis. Or Cornell’s Anthony Fauci, who by my reading of accounts seems to have evaded prohibitions on gain-of-function research, including that conducted in Wuhan. These things didn’t just blow up in the faces of the “supra-geniuses.” They backfired on all of us.
Personally, I suspect that the selection process Brooks describes as denuded a dangerous number of American grandees of an attribute even more important than intelligence: humility. The lack of humility led previous generations to embrace horrible practices such as eugenics. The creation of the public school system in America also included absurdly overconfident assurances that prisons would be emptied, and innumerable benefits would rush forth.
As Douglas Carswell wrote in The End of Politics, “The elite gets things wrong because they endlessly seek to govern by design in a world that is best organized spontaneously from below. They constantly underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangement, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.” Whether Ivy+ universities are destructive or overrated, I propose that they can and have been some of both.
