Opinion: There’s a lot to be said about the blockbuster paper released this week showing how egregiously the most elite colleges skew toward the children of the rich — and how much this matters.
. A quarter of the Senate attended an Ivy Plus school — about the same ratio you’ll find in the newsrooms of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
On the other hand, only one of America’s 10 biggest companies, Amazon, is helmed by an Ivy Plus graduate, which is roughly the same proportion you’ll find across the Fortune 500. This is disproportionate, but much less so than in the parts of the economy where prestige substitutes for reliable output measures. It seems telling — and damning — that an elite undergraduate degree is more valuable in politics, journalism, law or MacArthur “genius grant” competition than it is in running a successful business that provides valuable goods and services to customers.
I mean, please do yell about this, because it obviously should stop. Jonathan Meer, an economics professor at Texas A&M, recently told me an enraging story about watching an outstanding student with great board scores, a prestigious internship and sterling undergraduate research credentials get rejected from every PhD program the person applied to. When Meer made some quiet inquiries, he was told that the problem was not the student but the school: “We don’t know what a 4.
If you are not bright enough to figure out how to assess a bright student from an unfamiliar school, then you are obviously not bright enough to teach elite PhDs. But of course they could figure it out; they just don’t bother. This same process, writ large, deprives talented kids of opportunities they deserve — and deprives the rest of us of the fruits of their potential.But it’s not enough to complain about moral turpitude or call for Harvard to reform itself.
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