Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Here's a Substack post about the Ivy Leagues, and our unhealthy obsession with them, and what that says about our society.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-ab…

2/Americans are OBSESSED with the Ivies and a few other small elite private schools.

The bribery scandal.

The Asian discrimination lawsuit.

Cornell changing the name of its English department.

Every story about the Ivies is Big News.

3/@mattyglesias writes that Ivies should let in more poor kids. He's right, of course...BUT, they won't.

slowboring.com/p/fancy-colleg…

4/The economic incentives of elite private schools are all against letting in poor kids.

5/But OK, let's step back and ask ourselves WHY we're so obsessed with who gets into Harvard or Yale.

These schools are TINY. All together, they educate less than 0.5% of America's college students!!

All the undergrads at Harvard could fit into Michigan Stadium 15 TIMES OVER.

6/Now OK, maybe that's a very elite half percent, and we care about the composition of our elite, etc. etc.

But there is no way in which marginal changes to the Ivy League student body composition will change anything about education, opportunity, or inequality in America.

7/Should the Ivies let in a lot more students? Double their undergrad student body? Quadruple it?

Yes, they absolutely should. But first of all, they won't, since selectivity -- fanciness for the sake of being fancy -- is their whole shtick.

8/But also, it's questionable whether quadruple the size of the Harvard graduating class would even improve educational outcomes.

Economics research casts strong doubt on whether elite schools actually boost students' future outcomes.

nber.org/papers/w17159

9/In fact, there are lots of rankings of colleges' effectiveness in generating social mobility, and Ivies and pseudo-Ivies don't rank highly on any of them.

equality-of-opportunity.org/college/

10/Now let's step back and ask a bigger question: What is the point of elite private universities in the first place?

The only answer is: Matching.

Send the best people to the best jobs, and productivity will benefit, blah blah blah.

11/But I mean...to some extent we're just matching rich kids with jobs in finance and consulting.

How socially valuable of an activity is that? I don't know.

12/And as @tylercowen writes in his excellent book The Complacent Class, which you should definitely read, our society has over-indexed on matching.

amazon.com/Complacent-Cla…

13/Not only does isolating and concentrating our rich and talented people have diminishing returns, it also seems like it will have some pretty negative side effects.

14/And this brings me to my final point: American culture is far too obsessed with the elite.

We're obsessed with winner-take-all jobs (including academia!), Instagram influencers, superstar companies, megabillionaires.

15/It feels like American society has become this theater where a few Glittering People dance on a stage and everyone else watches from the cheap seats.

I don't like it.

16/Of course, we should try to reverse actual inequality in order to make the Glitterati less important and the Everyperson more important again.

Redistribution, unions, and all that stuff. Hire more people from Howard and Cal State Long Beach for top positions. Etc.

17/But when it comes to education, I think we should talk less about Harvard and Stanford, and more about HBCUs and Cal State and CUNY schools.

Fortunately, Joe Biden -- a guy I am growing to really like -- is doing this.

insidehighered.com/quicktakes/202…

joebiden.com/beyondhs/

18/We in the commentariat should hop on that bandwagon. We should think less about Harvard and more about the schools that really matter for American opportunity, equality, and prosperity!

(end)

noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-ab…

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