ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Time to Break Down the Ivy League Cartel: How Meritocracy Became Trickle-Down Education.
One of the great puzzles of American society is the position of the Ivy League. It is a bastion of privilege and power, and yet full of left-leaning professors who one might imagine would favor the redistribution of wealth. According to the Harvard Crimson, 77.6 percent of Harvard professors define themselves as left-leaning, and just 2.9 percent as conservative. What explains this dynamic? Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, said that such anti-conservatism gets to the basic point of the school, which is to advance radical ideas: “It’s almost by definition anti-preservationist because we place such a high value on the creation of new knowledge.”
A wildly different explanation is apparent from watching Netflix’s Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal, about a highly publicized fiasco in which wealthy parents used bribery to get their kids into top colleges. What is most interesting about this episode wasn’t the corruption, but a poignant feature of normal American meritocracy. Even in the midst of acts of bribery, many of the parents were beset with fear that their children might find out about the crooked machinations to win their admission to elite schools. They took desperate steps to shield their kids from facing questions of deservedness. Of course, most involved in our supposed meritocracy don’t use bribery, but a tremendous amount of energy now goes into preserving similar basic fictions about the nature of elite private education and its role in the United States.
We most often hear about inequality in terms of super-rich corporations and individuals or families. But the same gulf between haves and have-nots has opened in U.S. colleges and universities. Since the pandemic began, 570,000 jobs have disappeared in American academic institutions. More than 75 percent of college faculty in the U.S. are contingent workers or not on the tenure track. Meanwhile, as of 2020, the aggregate value of the endowments of the richest 20 U.S. colleges rose to over $311 billion, all of which are subsidized by taxpayers through the tax-free treatment we offer nonprofit educational institutions. The joke that Harvard is a hedge fund with an educational arm is not so far off.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the value of these endowment funds is greater than the GDP of New Zealand, Finland, or Chile. In the last five years, the U.S. has fallen in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, but its elite universities have risen in the world rankings — and gotten richer. America’s richest colleges and universities, in effect, exist in a country of their own (though paid for in part with the public’s money).
This inequity reflects a restructuring of political power toward an aristocracy. In historical perspective, we are seeing the collapse of the great post-World War II democratization of post-secondary arts and sciences education alongside the appearance of a meritocracy alienated from the public and at odds with democracy. If anyone points out the role of elite education in the reproduction of inequality today, Americans tend to see it as flawed or compromised meritocracy rather than “true” meritocracy. But such responses are signs of a kind of Stockholm syndrome. The “merit” of meritocracy has nothing to do with the worth or value of people as human beings and citizens. It has something to do with intelligence and ability, but also a great deal with résumé-building — which for some starts before kindergarten.
Meritocracy and democracy are not the same thing. The goal of meritocracy is to produce, or reproduce, an elite. There is nothing necessarily democratic about that. The Puritans who founded Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were very good at building stable and exclusive institutions, for many reasons, including that the elite, for them, were the elect: those specially chosen to receive God’s grace, the sanctified and saved few among the masses of the damned. In the early United States, however, New Englanders quickly discovered, to their dismay, that the fact that they thought themselves God’s elect did not mean much to many Americans, and they would be hard pressed to win national elections. Thomas Jefferson feared and reviled the Puritan schools, and founded the University of Virginia to counter what he saw as their anti-democratic influence.
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he United States has spent the last 30 years moving away from this kind of democratic education — and toward a gilded meritocracy. America’s elite private schools remain strongholds of the drunken post-Cold War triumphalism that hoards wealth and privilege to private institutions at the expense of public and democratic ones.
Elite universities in the United States use their collective power to set the terms of cultural discourse, but they also have a financial impact on the cost of education. Sometimes the collusion veers into violations of anti-monopoly law. In 1991, for instance, the Justice Department investigated 23 prestigious Northeastern universities — including Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — for holding an annual meeting in which they “discussed the financial-aid applications of 10,000 students who had been accepted to more than one institution in the group,” ultimately colluding to offer the same financial package to these students. The attorney general called them a “collegiate cartel.” After a settlement, top universities agreed to stop the meetings, but it’s hard to watch the Ivy League without concluding that they continue to mimic each other carefully. . . .
In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was 85 percent. In 1970, it was 20 percent. This year, for the class of 2025, it was 3.4 percent. On the surface, a far more selective Ivy League seems to support the notion of meritocracy as something approximating what Jefferson characterized as the purpose of (unrealized plans for) free public schooling in 18th-century Virginia: “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” In practice, however, American meritocracy has gone from producing an elite to reproducing one.
The economist Raj Chetty has found that nearly 40 of the country’s elite colleges and universities, including five in the Ivy League, accept more students from families in the top 1 percent of income earners than from the bottom 60 percent. The computer scientist Allison Morgan recently released a study examining 7,218 professors in Ph.D.-granting departments in the United States across the arts and sciences. She found that the faculty come from families almost 34-percent richer than average and are 25 times more likely than average to have a parent with a Ph.D. Faculty members at prestigious universities are 50 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a Ph.D. American meritocracy has become a complex, inefficient, and rigged system conferring its graces on ambitious children of highly educated and prosperous families.
It’s like all the talk of “equity” and “ending inequality” is just a smokescreen for elitist entrenchment.
And: “Incredibly, philanthropic organizations are still giving big grants to America’s richest universities, recirculating resources among the most exclusive and wealthy while chanting social-justice keywords. This has to stop if Americans want to restore their democracy.”