This is excellently written and an interesting perspective, but I think there are some points that merit some push back. The big one is that, as you indicate, Harvard is the exception even amongst its peers. In some ways this makes is a useful paradigmatic example of a larger trend (particularly because it is a trend setter and, in affirmative action, the foundational model is The Harvard Plan) but, I think, it does more work to distort our view of university function than it does illuminate it. While you're certainly not alone in focusing much of your attention on Harvard, I'm interested in how little attention gets paid to UNC in all of this. UNC, in my view, is a more interesting case because 1) it's not the elite of the elite (and in fact, it's not even the elite if the elite in class, that title better reserved for Berkeley, UCLA, and Michigan) 2) it's admissions policies have far impact on far more applicants than Harvard's and 3) the idiosyncratic nature of its statutorily established quotas for admissions for residents. There's a lot that comes with that, but I think there's a lot more meat on the bone for trying to sift through what the new admissions world might/should look like at UNC than at Harvard. And, possibly most importantly, there is a natural and tangible link between UNC and the K-12 system that precedes it. The thing I find most lacking in all of the discussions of the ruling and the future of admissions is that affirmative action is an arguably ineffective band-aid on a much larger issue. While I have a lot of issues with a lot of education research, one this is fairly clear: attainment, outcomes, and ability are established well before one is applying to college. UNC's use of affirmative action to counteract the problem of unequal primary and secondary education is such an obviously dumb approach. The same body that governs UNC has the power to impact and improve the problem they are trying to address well before UNC is involved.
I'd also push back on your characterization of Harvard's business. Yes, it makes a business of exclusivity in admissions and undergraduate admissions gets a lot of the attention. But I think its more accurate to say Harvard's (and it's peer's) business model is knowledge production. This includes teaching, training, and research. The allocation of funds to each is exceptionally difficult to divine (what percentage of a tenured faculty member's salary represents teaching undergraduates vs. advising PhD students vs straight research? Is spending on PhD stipends a teaching expense or a research expense?). But, the point here is that undergraduate instruction is but one piece, and not even necessarily the most significant piece, of Harvard's business. I'd also argue that Harvard and most other elite universities are vocational. While undergraduate education is unquestionably grounded in the liberal arts model, nearly all of its graduate education is vocational in one way or another. And, importantly, Harvard's graduate enrollment is more than 2x its undergraduate enrollment. The professional schools are obviously vocational (but we call them "professional" to differentiate them from things like trades programs) but so are its research degrees in Arts and Sciences. PhDs are, by default, assumed to be shooting towards some specialized job (most often the professoriate) and are being trained with that in mind.
This leads me to your Seals analogy. While I think you make an interesting point about graduation, retention, and graduation rates (and it's similar argument to one I've made myself, to horrified classmates, in various graduate education classes), I think you're off about the equivalency. If we look just among undergraduate programs, Harvard College is the elite. But if we look more specifically at how society's elite are made, Harvard College isn't the Seals, its basic training. If we, say, look at law (which makes sense as a relatively well defined path of progression), the better (though possibly strained) analogy is elite undergraduate education is basic training, T14 law school is the group trying to be Seals, and SCOTUS clerkships are the ones who make it. As I say, the analogy isn't perfect. Maybe Big Law is the Seals. Maybe an Article III judgeship is Seals training. My point, though, is that undergraduate education is a fairly narrow scope of the work and impact elite universities do. And, important to the conversation about universities' roles in crafting the elites, undergraduate education is an increasingly less significant part of the process.
All of that said, I agree that this ruling will likely not have the sweeping impact that some except (whether its a dire prediction or delighted hope). But I'm more optimistic about how things will change. If they aren't careful when trying to replicate the system they want, they'll just keep getting sued and keep getting shot down (i.e. I'd be very interested to see how Harvard could justify constant trends in racial make up year on year, if they do continue, when faces with the specific admonishment Roberts gave them about that fact). Most schools, including Harvard, simply aren't going to have the capacity to do the kind of close reading of every essay they receive to find the magic words. but not be too blatant in their search for race as determinant. They're going to have to use quantitative measures to winnow down the field which will tip in favor of documented academic performance.
As a side note, you're spot on that the Gorsuch concurrence was the most compelling, which makes its general dismissal pretty interesting. He's really pushing on a sort of "plain language" analysis (that was evidenced in Bostock as well) that I think is something more than just textualism that I'm very intrigued by.
Excellent points all around. I think you're correct to zero in more on UNC, and I appreciate the points you mention in that context.
On Harvard, perhaps the cleanest synthesis would be to say that its business is elite knowledge production. Its goal is to produce recognized experts presenting as among the highest authorities in their fields, reflected in indicators such as the number of professors elsewhere who are Harvard-trained at some point in their education. Importantly, it retains many of the quirks of its admissions process, including affirmative action, at all levels—while many elements are most pronounced in undergraduate education, there's enough commonality between all to prod at some comparisons.
To push back a bit on your Seals pushback—I confess I'm not fully in tune with how the Seals work, but for Air Force special forces (and for other rigorous pipelines like the language school I attended), people are launched into the pipeline immediately after basic training in a way that fits well with the timing and implications of undergraduate education. It's not a long-term, lifetime pinnacle achievement, but a choice to attempt a much more rigorous training process than most at the beginning of adulthood. I get your point and agree that there's much more to elite crafting than undergraduate education, though.
I think you're both missing Harvard's business model, at least as it applies to undergraduate education. I believe they have said (although I don't have a citation) that they don't seek to admit the best scholars, but rather the next generation of leaders for society. I think this is actually code for "people who will make large donations" - either the admittees after they graduate, or their parents in the short term. Harvard's prominence doesn't derive from the academic accomplishments of its alumni, nor from the academic prominence of its faculty, but from the social prominence of its students and alumni. So, it recruits heavily from the most prominent families (not necessarily extremely wealthy - Senators and Governors will do nicely), with the "right" mixture of Black and Hispanic students (hopefully also from prominent families) because today's upper crust wants diversity on the recruitment brochures.
I don't have direct knowledge, but I think UNC's model (as well as those of other not-really-Harvard schools) is to emulate Harvard's practices, in order to look more like Harvard. Also, the people who end up as faculty, leaders, administrators, and especially admissions officers spend years thoroughly marinating in the ideology of identity, so they are convinced they're doing God's work (not that there is a God, of course) by advancing social justice as they understand it.
For the professional schools, I think the objective is also prominence, but these are defined differently from school to school. For the medical school, probably prominent faculty developing new treatments. For the law school, prominent graduates who head prestigious firms or serve as judges.
Edit to add: I share Trace's scorn for the schools, because of the blatant, universal hypocrisy they engage in. Their justifications for racial preferences change depending on what's acceptable to the Supreme Court. They work very hard to hide the extent of their preferences. They don't even try to justify blatant discrimination against Asian Americans - actual Asians are fine, of course, because they pay full tuition and enhance the school's prestige internationally.
Actually, Harvard's mega-wealth today is not the result of increasing donations so much as of paying much more attention to rational financial investment. They've always had rich donors; but their endowment was essentially $0 in 1970, and is $53G today. See https://www.thecrimson.com/image/2020/5/28/commencement-2020-endowment-chart/
One other serious problem with having all the brightest students aspire and work for Harvard admission is that it flattens the breadth of the elite classes.
I'm sure others can come up with more controversial examples, but a very anodyne one: Barry Marshall once mentioned that one of the keys to his discovery of H. pylori as the primary cause of ulcers was his being as far as possible from Harvard. If he had gone to Harvard, he would have *known* that ulcers were caused by stress, because he would have been taught it by Harvard professors.
I'm sure you've seen the video from the early 80s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3un_VbXVefk) asking both Harvard graduates and local townies to explain why seasons exist. The notable difference between the two is not that Harvard graduates are more knowledgable or correct in their answers, but rather that they are much more confident in their wrong answers. After all, they're Harvard graduates!
Yes. That’s one reason I get so frustrated with the notion of holistic admissions. Yes, it works great for Harvard’s purposes to work to attract all the best by its measure, but the flattening effect you speak of is very real. When everyone is pursuing all the same factors, the same culture emerges everywhere, and with it a degree of stagnation. Right now, most compelling intellectual work seems to be happening at best in the fringes of the traditional institutions—but that itself is not a desirable or sustainable state of affairs.
"If you want me to prove I belong somewhere, hand me the test, tell me what it takes, and I'll stand or fail without nonsense or ambiguity."
Well put. I think there are benefits to this model that are under appreciated as well. There is a lot of distrust of elites in our society and some of that is likely coming from the ambiguity around how someone becomes one of these lauded elites. It is far more easy to trust and follow someone who has credentials you had a fair shot at obtaining, even if a shot far beyond your ability to make.
"you cannot simply impose your values by fiat on the university."
Sure you can. Congress could make any selection at universities that are not provably race blind illegal with jail time tomorrow if we all collective wanted that. I don't think they will or we do of course but this is a failure of imagination. We, for good reason, do not accept this kind of chicanery in other fields. Banks who use some obvious proxy for race in their loan practices should be, can be and have been shown the wrath of the state and this has instilled a fear of god in the hearts of all banking compliance officers. I agree that we will not do this but it does us no good not to acknowledge that there are calibers of weapon still on the table if this became something we as a society seriously wanted to stomp out.
To be clear, you can impose restraints in line with your values on hostile entities, but every act of legal fiat works on some level by consent of the ruled, and you cannot actually force them to adopt your values, even if you can get them to act in line with them for a time. There exists a sincere, deep-felt values difference between the Supreme Court and massive chunks of the institutional power structure around elite universities, meaning that compliance will be bitter and enforcement complex.
I think it's still an open question how widely these race conscious values are held. Would all it take be a purging of the Harvard leadership? "The governed" here don't seem to be all that large of a constituency. It's not the kind of thing we've done often in this country but imagine if someone expressed this kind of defeatism around ending red lining, that the banks can't have their values changed by fiat and were going to fight the compliance rules hopelessly. Today, fifty years later, banks fall over themselves to express the very values that were forcibly instilled in them at that time. Was it the civil rights act itself that did all of the lifting? Probably not. But the defeatism would have been miss placed at that time and I think it is miss placed now.
It’s not just leadership—it’s the student body, the faculty, most of the lower-level courts with jurisdiction over them. There are exceptions, but US progressivism as it stands is extremely race-conscious, and it’s the dominant value set in all of those spheres.
I don’t aim to encourage defeatism—I think the world is best dealt with as it is, not as one wishes it would be, and part of that involves frank acknowledgment of the values of others, particularly in a system that aspires to be democratic. The key part of the civil rights movement was a massive cultural push for a values shift—legislation to end some of what you mention came more than a century into that process.
Laws matter, don’t get me wrong. But culture can only be constrained so much.
The current state of progressive ideology and it's reach is fairly new. I don't think it's nearly as entrenched as you do. The faculty ands student body surely have true believers, but how many are just mouthing the right passwords? That said I'll happily settle for forced compliance using the state with some teeth if the real prize is beyond reach. The difficulty in wrangling compliance does not burn the commons, it burns the offenders hoard of gold, which I see as a kind of bonus win.
I don’t think the BUD/S is a perfect analogy because:
1. It is much easier to measure physical ability than intellectual ability—if Harvard washed out most of their students it would create massive incentive to cheat and/or undermine other students to game the measures used
2. The people in BUD/S are aligned with being washed out if they aren’t up to the task. Nobody wants to be the guy in a mission who can’t keep up with everyone else.
3. If Harvard were to wash out most of its applicants, they would have to deal with much worse mental illness/suicide rates. BUDS doesn’t have to worry as much about this because it’s much shorter and there is more control over participants.
4. BUD/S is the only way to become a SEAL, but people wanting to become an “elite” can shop around at the top 5 schools and choose the easiest one
I also don’t think that undergraduate degrees are meant to prove academic ability. PhD programs are a little bit closer to that ideal
"Harvard discriminates against Asians because it is not just an elite school, but the elite school, and Asians are simply not elite enough" is disturbingly accurate. Your point about the 98% graduation rate is also something I hadn't thought about.
I went through the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago Divinity School, many years ago. The Div School actually was a bit closer to the Special Forces model ("sink or swim"): they admitted a large number of very smart people to the Ph.D. program every year, but a pretty large percentage of students never completed the degree. One of our top competitors was Yale Divinity; Yale had much smaller incoming classes but a much higher percentage of them received their Ph.Ds. But nobody at Chicago was *advertising* their school as a "sink or swim" place: I certainly had no idea what I had gotten myself into when I somewhat randomly applied to Chicago but not to Yale. One wonders whether there are schools that accept all (or at least most) comers and put them through the meat grinder upon arrival -- and if not, why not.
This is a great piece from start to finish. I'll be thinking about it for a while.
What an excellent essay -- thank you for this. You are so right to point out that elite stratification is a constant in human society, and that this bizarre admissions gatekeeping is just the latest manifestation of it. That Harvard is making SATs optional but not getting rid of legacy admits tracks perfectly with what you are saying. And oh that 2% drop out rate . . . For Harvard to fail anyone would be for them to admit that they had made a mistake, that their badging system was imperfect. I think something like >75% graduate 'with honors'. Because, you know, the were *admitted*.
To me the biggest tragedy is that this conversation evades the far more important issue of city school systems producing students who cannot read. It is telling to me that those who most support affirmative action for elite badging overlap with those who also fight strongest to preserve the K-12 status quo. I would have more respect for the former if they disassociated with the latter.
And the flip side to that odd pairing is the Tiger Moms of the world who put their children in the crucible to ensure that they will not know the same instability that they did. [I had the Jewish refugee version of that in my father and -- yikes!] For the AA Admissions folks, that kind of thinking must be attributed a lower personality ranking. Hardly conducive to the *right kind* of elitism, what?
Your last point of not buying into the system is crucial. I wonder when the next Brandeis University will be founded? Or can the whole system be bypassed? I look at all the "uncredentialed" engineers and truckers and designers and welders who are working at Space X and hope that they might be considered among our elite.
“For any with eyes to see, Harvard's graduation rate should be a mark not of pride but of shame: an elite so confident in its own ability to pick winners and losers that it requires them to prove nothing at all once present...”
This rang true to me. Just one man’s experience, but the only 2 Harvard undergrads I’ve ever hired (startups in the Boston area) both ended up being let go within 12 months because they couldn’t hack it.
As am Ivy League graduate (Penn) and current Cornell Law student (I am very good at standardized tests), I can tell confidently say that you are wrong. Leadership and worth are not based on raw IQ alone - culture matter, will matters, experience matters, EQ matters. Not to mention the confounding variable of time committed to the standardized tests. Most of the people I met at the Ivy League were quite frankly so autistic and nonfunctional I wouldn't trust them with my goldfish let maintaining any critical element of society. The ex president of Penn (Magill) is literally one of the dumbest people I ever met in my life (sitting on an article on the subject).
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all have graduation rates over 98%, and I think this is because they're all obsessed with clinging to the top spots on the US News & World Report "Best Colleges" ranking. These rankings began in, IIRC, 1982. The perverse thing about them is that not a single one of the many criteria they rate colleges on measures the effectiveness of the education. That isn't what USN&WR's readers care about. They rank the colleges primarily on how much money people can expect to make if they /get admitted/ to a college. The graduation rate is one of the biggest factors, and they score a college as better rather than worse when it has a higher graduation rate.
"I landed in the awkward spot of having parents too well-off for real financial aid, but not well enough off that they could or would subsidize my tuition to the tune of tens of thousands a year, so I didn't even bother looking beyond state schools for undergrad."
You should think about that fact more carefully. Why did every single Ivy League school eliminate all merit scholarships in the 1960s? The official answer was to make football competition more fair. (The Ivy League is officially a football league.) The real answer was probably to get rid of the Jews.
Why did they then (A) jack the prices into the sky between 1970 and 1990, and (B) institute a financial aid program that was generous to the poor, but gave nothing to anyone whose parents owned a house?
The answer that leaps to my mind is, To shut out the middle class. Remove the academic scholarships, jack up the prices, and give generous aid to the very poor. This creates a clear 2-tiered class system: the deserving poor, and the actual elite.
The upper crust doesn't hate and fear the poor; they hate and fear the middle class. The whole handouts-to-the-underprivileged program today may be a scheme to ally the poor with them against the middle class. Far better to let in the poor, who know damn well they'll be welcome at the banquet only as long as they do as they're told, than the uppity middle class, who might think they really belong.
I'd be curious to find out what happens to the poor and non-white students admitted to Harvard. Do they get into the "best" fraternities? Do they get hired by McKinsey and Palantir? I was a full-scholarship student myself, at a college I could never have afforded without that scholarship; and I usually couldn't participate in student life off-campus and after-hours because I couldn't afford it.
This is all part of a larger story, which is how the Ivy Leagues seized control of America after 1970. Before 1970, the Ivy Leagues were good schools, and attending them was certainly a good thing to have on your resume, but it wasn't an absolute requirement for attaining high positions as it is today, including the Presidency, the Supreme Court, the best academic positions, the most grant money, the highest-paying jobs at law firms and financial institutions, and becoming a new billionaire.
I lived in Boston for a few years, and hung out at MIT and Harvard a lot. I attended the meetings of the Harvard Entrepreneurship Club. They had many of the biggest investors in the US come in and speak to this group of at most a dozen students about their investments, and the first thing all of them mentioned about all of the firms they invested in was that the firm's founders were from Ivy League (or equivalent--MIT, Stanford) universities. Check the Forbes list of the wealthiest individuals in the US; you'll see that nearly everybody who's gotten on that list since 1990 in the US except the Waltons attended an elite university, whether in the US or elsewhere. I checked a similar Forbes lists from around 1920, and few people on the list had even attended college.
Before 1970, full-tuition scholarships at elite universities were abundant, and about half of America's most-prestigious physicists attended an Ivy-level school on a full-tuition scholarship, while the other half attended some obscure undergraduate college. About half of those who attended an elite university could not have afforded to without the scholarship--and tuition in the 1960s was under $2000 per year. Since 1970, almost all of them attended an elite university; none of them that I investigated attended an obscure college or had a full-tuition scholarship. I think a large part of America's current dysfunction is that, before 1970, we had an educational system that promoted capable people; since 1970, we've had an educational system that filters them out, by a combination of not providing merit scholarships to elite colleges, and requiring attendance at an elite college to have any hope of joining the elite.
The responsibility for this lies less with the colleges than with their graduates. It's the people already in power, or already wealthy, who enforce the rule that only graduates of elite universities may join them. That rule barely existed in America before 1970. What we're seeing is the deliberate creation of an American aristocracy.
This is total crapola. They are good at academics nothing else. Half of them pay their way in. There are 1000 more competent smart and successful people in this world for every 1 person that went to Harvard, you know like Hemingway, Edison and all of the other nobel laureates that never attended Ivy Leagues. What is more comical is that almost all of the famous names associated with ivy leagues that ever achieved anything never even attended their schools but just were employed there, such as Einstein
An aside, the SEALs are really the Yale of SOCOM. Army SF has a near equal physical test, not fully as they are screening for a different sort of person (and they recruit about five years older / mid career) but they also add "teaming" where at any time the cadre can simply vote you out purely on Harvard standard of holistics and likewise , at anytime your fellow classmates can vote to "team you out" as well, simple majority no need for a reason at all, to eliminate people who just don't fit culturally. SEALs are the Marines of SOCOM, great if you want young, dumb, door kicking, kill them all, bad if you want to do that while also running an insurgency.
I remember saving a lot of seals, usually over dumb stuff they got themselves into because they couldn't think ten minutes ahead or about thinks like extracts gone wrong. Also they have that marine problem where it's buddy first, mission second. End of the day, Green Berets will get the mission done even if they have to leave every buddy dead or dying behind on the way.
Please explain how blacks meet these secret "wholistic" standards so much better than Asians?
Blacks were in the country for a long time before they started getting priveledged in Harvard admissions, yet Harvard managed to achieve its elite status without them. So why does Harvard need blacks now? Has Harvard become more prestigious since giving admissions privileges to blacks? No. Do the blacks let it have as good life outcomes as their non-black peers? No.
You've done nothing but hand wave towards invisible things.
This is excellently written and an interesting perspective, but I think there are some points that merit some push back. The big one is that, as you indicate, Harvard is the exception even amongst its peers. In some ways this makes is a useful paradigmatic example of a larger trend (particularly because it is a trend setter and, in affirmative action, the foundational model is The Harvard Plan) but, I think, it does more work to distort our view of university function than it does illuminate it. While you're certainly not alone in focusing much of your attention on Harvard, I'm interested in how little attention gets paid to UNC in all of this. UNC, in my view, is a more interesting case because 1) it's not the elite of the elite (and in fact, it's not even the elite if the elite in class, that title better reserved for Berkeley, UCLA, and Michigan) 2) it's admissions policies have far impact on far more applicants than Harvard's and 3) the idiosyncratic nature of its statutorily established quotas for admissions for residents. There's a lot that comes with that, but I think there's a lot more meat on the bone for trying to sift through what the new admissions world might/should look like at UNC than at Harvard. And, possibly most importantly, there is a natural and tangible link between UNC and the K-12 system that precedes it. The thing I find most lacking in all of the discussions of the ruling and the future of admissions is that affirmative action is an arguably ineffective band-aid on a much larger issue. While I have a lot of issues with a lot of education research, one this is fairly clear: attainment, outcomes, and ability are established well before one is applying to college. UNC's use of affirmative action to counteract the problem of unequal primary and secondary education is such an obviously dumb approach. The same body that governs UNC has the power to impact and improve the problem they are trying to address well before UNC is involved.
I'd also push back on your characterization of Harvard's business. Yes, it makes a business of exclusivity in admissions and undergraduate admissions gets a lot of the attention. But I think its more accurate to say Harvard's (and it's peer's) business model is knowledge production. This includes teaching, training, and research. The allocation of funds to each is exceptionally difficult to divine (what percentage of a tenured faculty member's salary represents teaching undergraduates vs. advising PhD students vs straight research? Is spending on PhD stipends a teaching expense or a research expense?). But, the point here is that undergraduate instruction is but one piece, and not even necessarily the most significant piece, of Harvard's business. I'd also argue that Harvard and most other elite universities are vocational. While undergraduate education is unquestionably grounded in the liberal arts model, nearly all of its graduate education is vocational in one way or another. And, importantly, Harvard's graduate enrollment is more than 2x its undergraduate enrollment. The professional schools are obviously vocational (but we call them "professional" to differentiate them from things like trades programs) but so are its research degrees in Arts and Sciences. PhDs are, by default, assumed to be shooting towards some specialized job (most often the professoriate) and are being trained with that in mind.
This leads me to your Seals analogy. While I think you make an interesting point about graduation, retention, and graduation rates (and it's similar argument to one I've made myself, to horrified classmates, in various graduate education classes), I think you're off about the equivalency. If we look just among undergraduate programs, Harvard College is the elite. But if we look more specifically at how society's elite are made, Harvard College isn't the Seals, its basic training. If we, say, look at law (which makes sense as a relatively well defined path of progression), the better (though possibly strained) analogy is elite undergraduate education is basic training, T14 law school is the group trying to be Seals, and SCOTUS clerkships are the ones who make it. As I say, the analogy isn't perfect. Maybe Big Law is the Seals. Maybe an Article III judgeship is Seals training. My point, though, is that undergraduate education is a fairly narrow scope of the work and impact elite universities do. And, important to the conversation about universities' roles in crafting the elites, undergraduate education is an increasingly less significant part of the process.
All of that said, I agree that this ruling will likely not have the sweeping impact that some except (whether its a dire prediction or delighted hope). But I'm more optimistic about how things will change. If they aren't careful when trying to replicate the system they want, they'll just keep getting sued and keep getting shot down (i.e. I'd be very interested to see how Harvard could justify constant trends in racial make up year on year, if they do continue, when faces with the specific admonishment Roberts gave them about that fact). Most schools, including Harvard, simply aren't going to have the capacity to do the kind of close reading of every essay they receive to find the magic words. but not be too blatant in their search for race as determinant. They're going to have to use quantitative measures to winnow down the field which will tip in favor of documented academic performance.
As a side note, you're spot on that the Gorsuch concurrence was the most compelling, which makes its general dismissal pretty interesting. He's really pushing on a sort of "plain language" analysis (that was evidenced in Bostock as well) that I think is something more than just textualism that I'm very intrigued by.
Excellent points all around. I think you're correct to zero in more on UNC, and I appreciate the points you mention in that context.
On Harvard, perhaps the cleanest synthesis would be to say that its business is elite knowledge production. Its goal is to produce recognized experts presenting as among the highest authorities in their fields, reflected in indicators such as the number of professors elsewhere who are Harvard-trained at some point in their education. Importantly, it retains many of the quirks of its admissions process, including affirmative action, at all levels—while many elements are most pronounced in undergraduate education, there's enough commonality between all to prod at some comparisons.
To push back a bit on your Seals pushback—I confess I'm not fully in tune with how the Seals work, but for Air Force special forces (and for other rigorous pipelines like the language school I attended), people are launched into the pipeline immediately after basic training in a way that fits well with the timing and implications of undergraduate education. It's not a long-term, lifetime pinnacle achievement, but a choice to attempt a much more rigorous training process than most at the beginning of adulthood. I get your point and agree that there's much more to elite crafting than undergraduate education, though.
Thanks for the reply!
I think you're both missing Harvard's business model, at least as it applies to undergraduate education. I believe they have said (although I don't have a citation) that they don't seek to admit the best scholars, but rather the next generation of leaders for society. I think this is actually code for "people who will make large donations" - either the admittees after they graduate, or their parents in the short term. Harvard's prominence doesn't derive from the academic accomplishments of its alumni, nor from the academic prominence of its faculty, but from the social prominence of its students and alumni. So, it recruits heavily from the most prominent families (not necessarily extremely wealthy - Senators and Governors will do nicely), with the "right" mixture of Black and Hispanic students (hopefully also from prominent families) because today's upper crust wants diversity on the recruitment brochures.
I don't have direct knowledge, but I think UNC's model (as well as those of other not-really-Harvard schools) is to emulate Harvard's practices, in order to look more like Harvard. Also, the people who end up as faculty, leaders, administrators, and especially admissions officers spend years thoroughly marinating in the ideology of identity, so they are convinced they're doing God's work (not that there is a God, of course) by advancing social justice as they understand it.
For the professional schools, I think the objective is also prominence, but these are defined differently from school to school. For the medical school, probably prominent faculty developing new treatments. For the law school, prominent graduates who head prestigious firms or serve as judges.
Edit to add: I share Trace's scorn for the schools, because of the blatant, universal hypocrisy they engage in. Their justifications for racial preferences change depending on what's acceptable to the Supreme Court. They work very hard to hide the extent of their preferences. They don't even try to justify blatant discrimination against Asian Americans - actual Asians are fine, of course, because they pay full tuition and enhance the school's prestige internationally.
Actually, Harvard's mega-wealth today is not the result of increasing donations so much as of paying much more attention to rational financial investment. They've always had rich donors; but their endowment was essentially $0 in 1970, and is $53G today. See https://www.thecrimson.com/image/2020/5/28/commencement-2020-endowment-chart/
One other serious problem with having all the brightest students aspire and work for Harvard admission is that it flattens the breadth of the elite classes.
I'm sure others can come up with more controversial examples, but a very anodyne one: Barry Marshall once mentioned that one of the keys to his discovery of H. pylori as the primary cause of ulcers was his being as far as possible from Harvard. If he had gone to Harvard, he would have *known* that ulcers were caused by stress, because he would have been taught it by Harvard professors.
I'm sure you've seen the video from the early 80s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3un_VbXVefk) asking both Harvard graduates and local townies to explain why seasons exist. The notable difference between the two is not that Harvard graduates are more knowledgable or correct in their answers, but rather that they are much more confident in their wrong answers. After all, they're Harvard graduates!
Yes. That’s one reason I get so frustrated with the notion of holistic admissions. Yes, it works great for Harvard’s purposes to work to attract all the best by its measure, but the flattening effect you speak of is very real. When everyone is pursuing all the same factors, the same culture emerges everywhere, and with it a degree of stagnation. Right now, most compelling intellectual work seems to be happening at best in the fringes of the traditional institutions—but that itself is not a desirable or sustainable state of affairs.
"If you want me to prove I belong somewhere, hand me the test, tell me what it takes, and I'll stand or fail without nonsense or ambiguity."
Well put. I think there are benefits to this model that are under appreciated as well. There is a lot of distrust of elites in our society and some of that is likely coming from the ambiguity around how someone becomes one of these lauded elites. It is far more easy to trust and follow someone who has credentials you had a fair shot at obtaining, even if a shot far beyond your ability to make.
"you cannot simply impose your values by fiat on the university."
Sure you can. Congress could make any selection at universities that are not provably race blind illegal with jail time tomorrow if we all collective wanted that. I don't think they will or we do of course but this is a failure of imagination. We, for good reason, do not accept this kind of chicanery in other fields. Banks who use some obvious proxy for race in their loan practices should be, can be and have been shown the wrath of the state and this has instilled a fear of god in the hearts of all banking compliance officers. I agree that we will not do this but it does us no good not to acknowledge that there are calibers of weapon still on the table if this became something we as a society seriously wanted to stomp out.
To be clear, you can impose restraints in line with your values on hostile entities, but every act of legal fiat works on some level by consent of the ruled, and you cannot actually force them to adopt your values, even if you can get them to act in line with them for a time. There exists a sincere, deep-felt values difference between the Supreme Court and massive chunks of the institutional power structure around elite universities, meaning that compliance will be bitter and enforcement complex.
I think it's still an open question how widely these race conscious values are held. Would all it take be a purging of the Harvard leadership? "The governed" here don't seem to be all that large of a constituency. It's not the kind of thing we've done often in this country but imagine if someone expressed this kind of defeatism around ending red lining, that the banks can't have their values changed by fiat and were going to fight the compliance rules hopelessly. Today, fifty years later, banks fall over themselves to express the very values that were forcibly instilled in them at that time. Was it the civil rights act itself that did all of the lifting? Probably not. But the defeatism would have been miss placed at that time and I think it is miss placed now.
It’s not just leadership—it’s the student body, the faculty, most of the lower-level courts with jurisdiction over them. There are exceptions, but US progressivism as it stands is extremely race-conscious, and it’s the dominant value set in all of those spheres.
I don’t aim to encourage defeatism—I think the world is best dealt with as it is, not as one wishes it would be, and part of that involves frank acknowledgment of the values of others, particularly in a system that aspires to be democratic. The key part of the civil rights movement was a massive cultural push for a values shift—legislation to end some of what you mention came more than a century into that process.
Laws matter, don’t get me wrong. But culture can only be constrained so much.
The current state of progressive ideology and it's reach is fairly new. I don't think it's nearly as entrenched as you do. The faculty ands student body surely have true believers, but how many are just mouthing the right passwords? That said I'll happily settle for forced compliance using the state with some teeth if the real prize is beyond reach. The difficulty in wrangling compliance does not burn the commons, it burns the offenders hoard of gold, which I see as a kind of bonus win.
"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Sure, Sarg; the test for admission to Harvard as a math major is first author proofs in large journals by age 20.
I suspect Harvard would have trouble filling up the class with that bar but if it were public maybe.
I don’t think the BUD/S is a perfect analogy because:
1. It is much easier to measure physical ability than intellectual ability—if Harvard washed out most of their students it would create massive incentive to cheat and/or undermine other students to game the measures used
2. The people in BUD/S are aligned with being washed out if they aren’t up to the task. Nobody wants to be the guy in a mission who can’t keep up with everyone else.
3. If Harvard were to wash out most of its applicants, they would have to deal with much worse mental illness/suicide rates. BUDS doesn’t have to worry as much about this because it’s much shorter and there is more control over participants.
4. BUD/S is the only way to become a SEAL, but people wanting to become an “elite” can shop around at the top 5 schools and choose the easiest one
I also don’t think that undergraduate degrees are meant to prove academic ability. PhD programs are a little bit closer to that ideal
"Harvard discriminates against Asians because it is not just an elite school, but the elite school, and Asians are simply not elite enough" is disturbingly accurate. Your point about the 98% graduation rate is also something I hadn't thought about.
I went through the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago Divinity School, many years ago. The Div School actually was a bit closer to the Special Forces model ("sink or swim"): they admitted a large number of very smart people to the Ph.D. program every year, but a pretty large percentage of students never completed the degree. One of our top competitors was Yale Divinity; Yale had much smaller incoming classes but a much higher percentage of them received their Ph.Ds. But nobody at Chicago was *advertising* their school as a "sink or swim" place: I certainly had no idea what I had gotten myself into when I somewhat randomly applied to Chicago but not to Yale. One wonders whether there are schools that accept all (or at least most) comers and put them through the meat grinder upon arrival -- and if not, why not.
This is a great piece from start to finish. I'll be thinking about it for a while.
What an excellent essay -- thank you for this. You are so right to point out that elite stratification is a constant in human society, and that this bizarre admissions gatekeeping is just the latest manifestation of it. That Harvard is making SATs optional but not getting rid of legacy admits tracks perfectly with what you are saying. And oh that 2% drop out rate . . . For Harvard to fail anyone would be for them to admit that they had made a mistake, that their badging system was imperfect. I think something like >75% graduate 'with honors'. Because, you know, the were *admitted*.
To me the biggest tragedy is that this conversation evades the far more important issue of city school systems producing students who cannot read. It is telling to me that those who most support affirmative action for elite badging overlap with those who also fight strongest to preserve the K-12 status quo. I would have more respect for the former if they disassociated with the latter.
And the flip side to that odd pairing is the Tiger Moms of the world who put their children in the crucible to ensure that they will not know the same instability that they did. [I had the Jewish refugee version of that in my father and -- yikes!] For the AA Admissions folks, that kind of thinking must be attributed a lower personality ranking. Hardly conducive to the *right kind* of elitism, what?
Your last point of not buying into the system is crucial. I wonder when the next Brandeis University will be founded? Or can the whole system be bypassed? I look at all the "uncredentialed" engineers and truckers and designers and welders who are working at Space X and hope that they might be considered among our elite.
This seems like a cope for why you didn’t get into Harvard. Colossally dumb article.
“For any with eyes to see, Harvard's graduation rate should be a mark not of pride but of shame: an elite so confident in its own ability to pick winners and losers that it requires them to prove nothing at all once present...”
This rang true to me. Just one man’s experience, but the only 2 Harvard undergrads I’ve ever hired (startups in the Boston area) both ended up being let go within 12 months because they couldn’t hack it.
Yikes!
As am Ivy League graduate (Penn) and current Cornell Law student (I am very good at standardized tests), I can tell confidently say that you are wrong. Leadership and worth are not based on raw IQ alone - culture matter, will matters, experience matters, EQ matters. Not to mention the confounding variable of time committed to the standardized tests. Most of the people I met at the Ivy League were quite frankly so autistic and nonfunctional I wouldn't trust them with my goldfish let maintaining any critical element of society. The ex president of Penn (Magill) is literally one of the dumbest people I ever met in my life (sitting on an article on the subject).
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all have graduation rates over 98%, and I think this is because they're all obsessed with clinging to the top spots on the US News & World Report "Best Colleges" ranking. These rankings began in, IIRC, 1982. The perverse thing about them is that not a single one of the many criteria they rate colleges on measures the effectiveness of the education. That isn't what USN&WR's readers care about. They rank the colleges primarily on how much money people can expect to make if they /get admitted/ to a college. The graduation rate is one of the biggest factors, and they score a college as better rather than worse when it has a higher graduation rate.
"I landed in the awkward spot of having parents too well-off for real financial aid, but not well enough off that they could or would subsidize my tuition to the tune of tens of thousands a year, so I didn't even bother looking beyond state schools for undergrad."
You should think about that fact more carefully. Why did every single Ivy League school eliminate all merit scholarships in the 1960s? The official answer was to make football competition more fair. (The Ivy League is officially a football league.) The real answer was probably to get rid of the Jews.
Why did they then (A) jack the prices into the sky between 1970 and 1990, and (B) institute a financial aid program that was generous to the poor, but gave nothing to anyone whose parents owned a house?
The answer that leaps to my mind is, To shut out the middle class. Remove the academic scholarships, jack up the prices, and give generous aid to the very poor. This creates a clear 2-tiered class system: the deserving poor, and the actual elite.
The upper crust doesn't hate and fear the poor; they hate and fear the middle class. The whole handouts-to-the-underprivileged program today may be a scheme to ally the poor with them against the middle class. Far better to let in the poor, who know damn well they'll be welcome at the banquet only as long as they do as they're told, than the uppity middle class, who might think they really belong.
I'd be curious to find out what happens to the poor and non-white students admitted to Harvard. Do they get into the "best" fraternities? Do they get hired by McKinsey and Palantir? I was a full-scholarship student myself, at a college I could never have afforded without that scholarship; and I usually couldn't participate in student life off-campus and after-hours because I couldn't afford it.
This is all part of a larger story, which is how the Ivy Leagues seized control of America after 1970. Before 1970, the Ivy Leagues were good schools, and attending them was certainly a good thing to have on your resume, but it wasn't an absolute requirement for attaining high positions as it is today, including the Presidency, the Supreme Court, the best academic positions, the most grant money, the highest-paying jobs at law firms and financial institutions, and becoming a new billionaire.
I lived in Boston for a few years, and hung out at MIT and Harvard a lot. I attended the meetings of the Harvard Entrepreneurship Club. They had many of the biggest investors in the US come in and speak to this group of at most a dozen students about their investments, and the first thing all of them mentioned about all of the firms they invested in was that the firm's founders were from Ivy League (or equivalent--MIT, Stanford) universities. Check the Forbes list of the wealthiest individuals in the US; you'll see that nearly everybody who's gotten on that list since 1990 in the US except the Waltons attended an elite university, whether in the US or elsewhere. I checked a similar Forbes lists from around 1920, and few people on the list had even attended college.
Before 1970, full-tuition scholarships at elite universities were abundant, and about half of America's most-prestigious physicists attended an Ivy-level school on a full-tuition scholarship, while the other half attended some obscure undergraduate college. About half of those who attended an elite university could not have afforded to without the scholarship--and tuition in the 1960s was under $2000 per year. Since 1970, almost all of them attended an elite university; none of them that I investigated attended an obscure college or had a full-tuition scholarship. I think a large part of America's current dysfunction is that, before 1970, we had an educational system that promoted capable people; since 1970, we've had an educational system that filters them out, by a combination of not providing merit scholarships to elite colleges, and requiring attendance at an elite college to have any hope of joining the elite.
The responsibility for this lies less with the colleges than with their graduates. It's the people already in power, or already wealthy, who enforce the rule that only graduates of elite universities may join them. That rule barely existed in America before 1970. What we're seeing is the deliberate creation of an American aristocracy.
This is total crapola. They are good at academics nothing else. Half of them pay their way in. There are 1000 more competent smart and successful people in this world for every 1 person that went to Harvard, you know like Hemingway, Edison and all of the other nobel laureates that never attended Ivy Leagues. What is more comical is that almost all of the famous names associated with ivy leagues that ever achieved anything never even attended their schools but just were employed there, such as Einstein
An aside, the SEALs are really the Yale of SOCOM. Army SF has a near equal physical test, not fully as they are screening for a different sort of person (and they recruit about five years older / mid career) but they also add "teaming" where at any time the cadre can simply vote you out purely on Harvard standard of holistics and likewise , at anytime your fellow classmates can vote to "team you out" as well, simple majority no need for a reason at all, to eliminate people who just don't fit culturally. SEALs are the Marines of SOCOM, great if you want young, dumb, door kicking, kill them all, bad if you want to do that while also running an insurgency.
I remember saving a lot of seals, usually over dumb stuff they got themselves into because they couldn't think ten minutes ahead or about thinks like extracts gone wrong. Also they have that marine problem where it's buddy first, mission second. End of the day, Green Berets will get the mission done even if they have to leave every buddy dead or dying behind on the way.
Please explain how blacks meet these secret "wholistic" standards so much better than Asians?
Blacks were in the country for a long time before they started getting priveledged in Harvard admissions, yet Harvard managed to achieve its elite status without them. So why does Harvard need blacks now? Has Harvard become more prestigious since giving admissions privileges to blacks? No. Do the blacks let it have as good life outcomes as their non-black peers? No.
You've done nothing but hand wave towards invisible things.
Better at what
Damn I know don’t gotta rub it in