It's college application time again. Ambitious 12th-graders are polishing their essays, wondering if mentioning their grandmother's claim to be part Cherokee is worth including this year. Are exotic pronouns a plus or a minus?
In a survey of first-year students at Harvard, half mentioned their racial identity in their college application and half did not, according to a Crimson survey.
You don't need an Ivy+ degree to succeed in life, writes Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. (The plus refers to Stanford, Duke, MIT and the University of Chicago.) Most public leaders were educated in state universities, especially flagship universities, and in-state colleges, his research shows.
"Only in a few places (like California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York) will you find a critical mass of Ivy+ grads in major positions," writes Smarick. But Ivy+ grads, afflicted with tunnel vision, seem to believe they dominate everywhere.
The go-Ivy-or-go-home attitude is bad for higher education and our egalitarian values, writes Smarick. It energizes populism. "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."
In his Atlantic cover story cover story on the evils of meritocracy, David Brooks assumes that average Americans consider admission to Harvard, Yale or Princeton" the nation's social ideal," and obsessively groom their children to compete for Ivy+ prestige. College-educated parents ferry "their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another," he writes, going "completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success."
Maybe in some social circles in some places, writes Smarick. "Most great parents of most great kids who will go on to do great things" are focused on the flagship state university, not whether Princeton has more status than Cornell, or Williams outpoints Colby.
“The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation," writes Brooks. "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.”
Ohio's governor, attorney general and five of seven supreme court justices went to public universities in the state, and six to in-state schools, writes Smarick. The board chair of the two largest employers in the state are public flagship graduates.
Before he went to Yale Law, J.D. Vance went from high school to the Marine Corps to Ohio State.
Of course, U.S. Supreme Court justices and New York Times' editorial board members are primarily Ivy+ graduates, writes Smarick. The Atlantic's "owner (Penn, Stanford), CEO (Stanford), and editor-in-chief (Penn) all went to Ivy+ schools."
But, as F.E. Smith, also known as Lord Birkenhead put it in 1923 at Glasgow University, "The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords."