The eye of the needle

Quick reaction to the 5,000 number: admissions have gone up significantly. In my day (the year before BarryO graduated), admission to Columbia College itself was ca. 700-750 per year.

I suspect some of the schools–Pravda on the Chuck, for example–may benefit from their merger of two single-gender schools into one. (We tried to do that in the early 1980s, before realizing that the place across the street was very happy being, effectively, a high-rent commuter college.

Its about 24,000 undergrads for Oxbridge in the UK, which is about the same as the 100,000 in the US you talk about. As for France, Wikipedia says: “This is a total of 3,450 students entering the most prestigious Grandes Ecoles in 2009, roughly the same as 2008. 3,450 represents less than 1% (0.7%)of the number of people graduating from French high schools (500,000) each year.”, although I’m not sure where the line is drawn for ‘most prestigious’ here.

So, to the extent that a large range of high-prestige jobs (eg Supreme Court justice) are reserved for, or dominated by, graduates of the top colleges, around 99 per cent of the population have missed out by the age of 18.

It’s not as difficult to get into Ivies if you have the right cultural conditioning. The problem is, this is a chicken-or-egg question: would the people who would not miss out in a system with a less fine filter be, ahem, appropriate for the systematic upper-middle-class elite in any case? The people who are filtered out are generally the people who would not fit in to acculturate to the Northeastern upper-middle-class cultural norms anyways.

Basically, by applying such a fine filter they are filtering out people who might bring down the system, while preserving enough of a semblance of meritocracy, by recruiting just enough a proportion of the high-merit candidate to prevent a system breakdown.

It’s a fine line in the sand. Remember, a good number of the socializers and theorists of the post-war British Labour welfare state were Oxbridge-educated. In fact, it could be argued that without sympathetic Oxbridge men, Labourism would have remained inchoate and gone nowhere. It’s not a bug, but a feature, that the U.S. system is not making the same mistake.

I blogged about this late last year (http://signsofchaos.blogspot.com/2009/11/tuition-and-enrollment-at-elite-private.html#comments), on the occasion of a spate of stories about elinte institution costs breaking through the $50K per year barrier. The economist in me finds the failure of elite institutions to expand (by opening new campuses) somewhat odd.

I think the American university system is more open and diffuse than its European counterparts. My understanding is that a Frenchman who went to anything less than a Grandes Ecole has little chance of serving in the highest echelons of government; whereas it’s perfectly possible to go to Holy Cross College and serve on the Supreme Court, as Mr. Thomas has demonstrated. (Law is a ‘postgraduate degree’ in the US, after all, and plenty of students climb the academic rungs between undergraduate and Ph.D, MD, JD, etc.)

For undergradute eduction, you’re forgetting MIT, Williams, Berkeley, etc. etc. Even public schools in the Big Ten (Minnesota, Michigan, Penn State..) are decently regarded, and typically these schools will have some kind of honors program.

I think it is probably not true that a “large range of high-prestige jobs” in the US are reserved for, or dominated by, graduates of the ‘top’ colleges. People think this is true, but they have not looked at the evidence. I refer you for instance to this analysis of where US Senators went to school; it was done by the blogger T. Greer, following an exchange with me.

Following your link, LP, the numbers appear to cover graduate as well as undergraduate students

Oops! you’re right. My bad. Well, it was a minor point anyway.

I don’t want to debate this too much. But Missouri has only 32,000 students in total, which is comparable to Harvard. (And don’t you think most of those 11 Wisconsin CEOs went to one of the flagship campuses?) Or look at number 9 on the list, Indiana University, with 8 CEOs, right behind Princeton with 9. 32,000 undergrads. So yes, a Princeton has five times the chance of ending up as a Fortune 500 CEO as an IU grad does. But does that number seem high to you? To me, it seems notably low — especially when you consider the obsession with elite schools in our culture. I would be surprised if the proportion of elite university graduates in top business jobs is not much higher in France or the UK (tho not in Germany.)

Lemuel Pitkin, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has 29,000 undergraduate students. That’s much bigger than Harvard. (Harvard does have a very large graduate school, but that’s not JQ’s topic.)

JQ, besides Thomas there’s also Scalia, who got his BA from Georgetown. I don’t know whether you meant to include Georgetown among the Ivy-equivalents. I think among Washington-types it is (and NYU is indeed an Ivy-equivalent in elite New York circles).

FYI because I’m familiar with the numbers. Amherst, certainly high on the prestige list, had approximately 1200 students when I entered (1965), had had about 800 ca. 1946, and currently has about 1800. Increase since my time was part of the decision to admit women in the 70’s, which perhaps produced similar increases in number of students in similar colleges at the same time.

On the race vs. class based affirmative action question, Amherst claims a certain responsibility to search out and admit students from public schools in rural areas in New England where the educational opportunities are far less than in private schools or the better suburban schools. These students will be overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white.

@Myles SG ” I really don’t want to explain, because I sound tedious that way, and it is tedious.” That is an excellent excuse to avoid being forced to expound on a poorly thought out statement. It’s completely impenetrable, while simultaneously giving the reader the sense that the blame is somehow being shifted back onto them for just not getting it. I’ll have to remember to try that one next time. For maximal effect, if delivered verbally, draw out the “e” in “teeeeeedious”. “Oh, it’s just so teeeeeeedious.”

If I may argue from an anecdote… my class at Andover (n = ~250) produced a governor (Jeb Bush; possibly two if — shudder — Tom Foley wins) and a senator (Linc Chafee). In these cases, what mattered was the power, wealth, and political connections of the family, not the school. So even if an unusual number of leading U.S. politicians went to elite schools, I would hesitate before attributing their success to merit acquired through education.

Lemuel @30: I take your point. Elite schooling affects the probability of success in ways that are extraneous to education. I expect, though, that you also agree with me that in many ways elite schooling simply mediates prior advantages of family, wealth, and power.

I suspect we have different types of profession, and reliance on elite prestige varies considerably across them. I think we are primarily discussing high end leadership/management positions here. Other professions tend to be a bit more meritocratic. I was surprised by my son’s statement after a month at Berkeley, “everyone (students) is good at math”. I doubt that would be said about say the Harvard freshman class. What skills are filtered for probably varies considerably across institutions, and among large state universities, it certainly varies by the students selected major.

“JQ, besides Thomas there’s also Scalia, who got his BA from Georgetown. I don’t know whether you meant to include Georgetown among the Ivy-equivalents. ”

Shhhh, you’re making the Democrats look more elitist. ;)

I’m not sure that Senators (or Congresscritters in general) would be quite the group to look at. For there’s still quite a strong “local boy/gal” element to US politics.

Not all Senators are carpetbaggers in the way that Hillary Clinton was in NY for example.

So whether or not the Ivies are the filter into the top level of US society that JQ is indicating, I don’t think we’d see it in the politicians so much……well, less in the politicians than in other concentrations of power.

The significance of ‘elite’ universities obviously varies from one country to another. One difference I’ve noticed between the UK and Germany is that Germans seem to place a lot less emphasis on which university you went to, and a lot more on how far you got with your studies and your GPA. I think there is more of a tendency here to study at universities near to where you grew up, so there isn’t the same pooling of talent. The result seems to be that the ‘top’ German universities don’t stand out so much internationally, but German tertiary education as a whole is at a high standard. AFAIK Germany’s elite don’t have such a reputation for coming from specific universities. I have no idea if this significantly increases social mobility, though, as the gap in educational achievement emerges much earlier.

In the UK, the total ug figure for the Russell Group as a whole is somewhere just over 300,000. Most of those come in ahead of the bottom-ranked Ivy League institution (Dartmouth, afaics) in these meaningless league tables.

“Legacies might be another story, although very few legacies I know have ever dipped below a 3.0 GPA.”

I’m not terribly surprised. It’s my understanding that very few ivy students who aren’t seriously struggling in some way (substance abuse, class absence, failure to complete projects) have trouble maintaining a 3.0 or close, due to grade inflation being rampant in these places. It’s much harder to make a 3.0 at some of the second and third tier schools (prestige wise, education-wise many of these schools are every bit as good or better).

The difference between Yale or Harvard, and a school like the one I attended (U of Rochester), or in the top public universities is primarily in prestige of the school, and of faculty, and in the selection of the students. Nearly all the “top” upper middle class students at age 17 who might come to Rochester, or the above mentioned Michigan, also applied to some Ivies, and with very rare exceptions, they didn’t come to Rochester if they got accepted to Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, etc. So the ivies plus a very few equivalents take their pick, and other schools get the rest. There are plenty of top students among the rest, and plenty of very bright students among the set who had zero chance at a harvard admission, because of either a bit of slacking, or just not coming from private or high powered public schools, and not being among the infinitesimal fraction of poor and working class urban or rural public school-goers who are noticed and picked out for prestige-college grooming. And of course, it’s a pretty tiny sliver of potentially successful poor/working class kids who are even lucky enough to get into top state schools or non-ivy privates with enough scholarship to afford it.

And I have to disagree with those who say the range includes a lot more than Stanford, Chicago, MIT along with the Ivies, and so-called little ivies. Not when you are talking about who is considered qualified for the ruling classes in the US without finding a way to make a half a billion dollars. It’s possible to get there from the better state schools or a place like NYU, but it’s a *lot* harder.

For the purpose of getting into a typical upper middle class career track, sure Michigan or NYU and their equivalents are nearly as good as Yale or Harvard (and many of them better at providing education). But I don’t think that’s what John is talking about.

I think you need to do some more work here establishing what you mean by ‘elites’. For one thing, many of these 2nd tier schools are perfectly suitable for getting into a top tier law or medical school if you can perform well enough grade-wise and test-wise. I see very few professional limitations from failing to get into a top tier undergraduate school. Of course, we expect the percentage of students graduating from Michigan becoming CEO’s to be much lower just because most of those kids are decent students who would be happy to live an upper-middle class lifestyle. A larger percentage of the strivers who actually want to make the sacrifices to become a CEO have already been accepted to the Ivies.

Let’s at least try to enumerate the roles limited to Ivy graduates before we leap to conclusions here (and SCOTUS may be one of the very few exceptions).

And I have to disagree with those who say the range includes a lot more than Stanford, Chicago, MIT along with the Ivies, and so-called little ivies. Not when you are talking about who is considered qualified for the ruling classes in the US without finding a way to make a half a billion dollars.

Not all of the Little Ivies. Only top 5 or 6 liberal arts colleges. Even Pomona, which is not Little Ivy/NESCAC but top LAC, is sort of on the edge for this one.

From anecdotal experience, the academic expectations at Ivies/top LACs/etc. are indeed much higher than you would think, and not comparable to top state schools and the like. This is strictly a east-coast phenomenon (excepting Caltech and Claremonts), by the way, as Stanford is universally known to be a slacker school in the arts and humanities. A friend who went to Brown, which is supposed to be the slacker Ivy, had in his first semester five times the homework and readings (or thereabouts) as another who went to UC Berkeley.

And I think you sort of proved my point yourself. The top upper-middle-class candidates from competitive suburban publics or prep schools, who are frankly to college admissions what Kobe beef is to steak-eating, are usually snapped up by the Ivies and the like way before Rochester even lays its hands on them. Schools like Rochester can have, at best, the left-overs (and probably not even that; UVA/UNC/lower LACs/NYU get first dibs on the left-overs, and only then do the Rochesters of the world get to feed on the left-overs).

Another thing: the way the prestige-system is set up in the U.S., it is indeed fairly cruel. For example, investment banking, usually as good a barometer of prestige as any, recruits at Boston College for middle-office candidates as well as select front-office candidates, as opposed solely front-office candidates at Ivy League colleges and Williams-Amherst. And I mean, it’s not like Boston College is lacking in prestige, but even then the minute differentiations in prestige levels can have a huge impact (you aren’t going to have a career as a prestige merchant banker is you remain in the middle office).

Yet they don’t recruit for back office candidates at Boston College. That is for the Baruch Colleges and SUNYs and Paces of the world. And so on and on it goes.

Also, you’ll notice that at the very absolute peak of the prestige pyramid in the financial community (reputable private equity operators like Carlyle, partners at Goldman Sachs, etc.) there’s a thinning out of even the lower-tier Ivies, including absolutely the Wharton school at Penn, which is the most prestigious undergraduate business program in the U.S. and consequently the one best regarded by the financial community. Instead, such rarefied heights are dominated by Harvard-Yale-Princeton (mostly Harvard and Princeton, actually, due to personal career preferences of Yale alumni) rather than by vulgarians who majored in business at the undergraduate level.

I did some googling on whether test-scores underpredict college performance or overpredict. Lots of links indicate that scores underpredict female performance (and overpredict male performance). This paper brings in ethnicity, which I presume would be more class-linked:
http://education.ucsb.edu/rzwick/3185_02_Zwick.pdf
I didn’t read the whole thing, just quickview.

Because this is America, it was harder to find material on social class per se.

Several of the comments above (with the exception of Myles SG) are making a lot of sense. I think CJColucci@46 is largely right in what s/he says about the role of law schools e.g. (as opposed to undergrad).

Re Mapmaker@52: The most unfortunate impact of USNews rankings is not on individuals’ views of themselves but on the people who run colleges and universities and feel compelled to do all kinds of often counterproductive, harmful things (fancy buildings, higher tuition, multimillion-dollar ‘branding’ campaigns) in an effort to raise their ranking.

Myles SG does not have a clue of what he speaks … but it is fun to read!

Dude, just because I accidentally used Carlyle as an unfortunately inapposite example doesn’t mean you can rebut the whole point therefrom.

Take a look in the ranks of Lazard, Greenhill, Goldman Sachs, and the like.

In the American economy there is no higher plane than the managing directorship of Goldman Sach, or a spot as a leading banker at Lazard. Even most big CEO’s don’t quite rank as high (do most CEO’s get seats as trustees at Harvard?)

Very preliminary.

So for private enterprise the Ivy leaguers are over represented but not horriblely so and we would kind of except some over representation.

Big 10 public schools produce as many or more CEOs.

On the other hand after a quick look it looks like government appointed positions the Ivies are much more over represented.

Supreme Court as mentioned and since 1980 I got 7-11 for Treasury and 3-11 for Commerce.

Also, I think Cal needs to be included on the school list.

I think it is mistake to just focus on the top 1%. [A lot of that lately.]

How easily can a capable 28 38 year old stuck in a dead end path change his/her path?

What are the prospects for single parent child in the bottom 20%?

Do we filter out bad engineers or just signal that this guy is top x% percent.

The Supreme Court educations are one thing, but nobody has brought up that the traditionally most elite group of American society – WASPS, are actually now under-represented on the Supreme Court?

I agree with the general point here, but note for anyone doing back of the envelope calcuations that Harvard/Yale/Stanford Law constitute a much larger percentage of the law school population (about 2%) than the percentage of undergraduates represented by their corresponding undergraduate institutions. Likewise medical and business schools and other graduate schools.

“The result seems to be that the ‘top’ German universities don’t stand out so much internationally, but German tertiary education as a whole is at a high standard. AFAIK Germany’s elite don’t have such a reputation for coming from specific universities.”

The very idea of elite vs. non-elite universities has only emerged very recently. I don’t know how far it has now progressed with all the reforms aimed at americanizing the education system but it used to be the case that there was no distinction whatsoever from which university a person attended, and Germany has gotten along fine that way. Maybe there was a distinction between University and Fachhochschule (more like engineering colleges) but I don’t really think so. Also, all institutions of higher education are state institutions, with the exception of a catholic university and a tiny handful of private universities with very small enrollment and they haven’t traditionally had much of a reputation. It must seem an utterly exotic place to Americans. Could as well be in a parallel universe from what I am hearing.

Not only the abortion issue. There’s also the problematic phenomenon of WASP liberal drift, i.e. Justice Souter, who was supposed to be a conservative but gradually ended up very much a liberal.

With Catholics there tend to not be such a problem, as it’s fairly unlikely for the sort of dilution of both religious and political conservatism to occur, hand in hand, as has been observed in recent years among Northeastern Protestants like Souter.

It should be noted that the two high Catholic justices, Roberts and Alito, were both classicists.

People don’t go to elite universities and then become elite. People are stratified by birth/parents income/place of residence. Jobs are stratified by vastly different wages/salaries. Universities can be a bridge between the two worlds but they don’t create anything. If all the Ivy Leagues were eliminated, inequality would go on just fine. (the new norm might be to study abroad, for example)

>>The reason for this, of course, is that it is impossible to find a non-Catholic legal practitioner with the requisite level of skill and prestige who is anti-abortion.
No.

>>Among well-educated people in the US, individuals who oppose abortion do so almost entirely on religious grounds
and No.

There are at least 5,000 Americans who could do the job of the Supreme Court justice. It is really not that demanding a job. Examine a statute, analyze it in context of precedent, reference the written constitution…See, not so hard. Any competent practicing lawyer (or non-Lawyer. Why should the job be restricted to lawyers?) with a bit of life and legal experience can do it.

“The result seems to be that the ‘top’ German universities don’t stand out so much internationally, but German tertiary education as a whole is at a high standard. AFAIK Germany’s elite don’t have such a reputation for coming from specific universities.”

The very idea of elite vs. non-elite universities has only emerged very recently. I don’t know how far it has now progressed with all the reforms aimed at americanizing the education system but it used to be the case that there was no distinction whatsoever from which university a person attended, and Germany has gotten along fine that way. Maybe there was a distinction between University and Fachhochschule (more like engineering colleges) but I don’t really think so. Also, all institutions of higher education are state institutions, with the exception of a catholic university and a tiny handful of private universities with very small enrollment and they haven’t traditionally had much of a reputation. It must seem an utterly exotic place to Americans. Could as well be in a parallel universe from what I am hearing.

As implied in the comments its where you get your professional training (law, medicine etc) or research degree that matters much more than an undergraduate school. If one goes to a top state u or private equivalent its good enough to get one into one of the top professional schools. Once you have that degree it will be the one cited.

More Dogs – Thomas was raised and educated as a Catholic (he went to Holy Cross). He was estranged for a while but formally returned to the chuch a few years after he went on the Supreme Court bench.

Daniel, doing the job of a Supreme Justice well is genuinely difficult and any decent practitioner can tell who’s good and who’s bad. A Stevens opinion is a pleasure to read; a Breyer opinion is a tolerable performance; a Kennedy opinion makes you smack your forehead; an Alito opinion reeks of bad faith.

What you are really saying is that even a shitty justice can do the job of a Supreme Court justice, sort of like how a horse could be a Roman Senator. And that’s true, because when the Supreme Court writes shitty opinions the rest of us have to live with the mess they make (I don’t mean only wrong decisions, I mean stupidly reasoned decisions that muck up the development of the law – these are fairly common).

BUT – the number of people who can do the kinds of jobs that you have to have done in order to become a nominee for the Supreme Court is very small.

Thomas may be the exception who proves the rule. He was nominated for Thurgood Marshall’s seat, and Bush felt the nominee had to be black – Thomas was the only reliably conservative African American with remotely appropriate qualifications that Bush could find. Not surprisingly, he found a Catholic. If Thomas had been white he wouldn’t have been nominated. But even Thomas went to Yale.

I suspect we have different types of profession, and reliance on elite prestige varies considerably across them.

Engineering is an example of a field in which elite prestige matters very little. Holders of engineering degrees are in high demand regardless of the universities they may have attended. In part, this is because it requires very high intelligence (a minimum I.Q. score of 120 or even 125) to make it through an engineering program at any university.

In part, this is because it requires very high intelligence (a minimum I.Q. score of 120 or even 125) to make it through an engineering program at any university.

No, it doesn’t.

p.s. sorry for the empty-quote above.

John,

The data for the UC system probably lives here: http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/uwnews/stat/. It seems to only go back to 1992 though.

Myles @64 — you say Roberts and Alito were both classicists.

In fact, Roberts, I believe, wrote his senior honors thesis on late 19th c./early 20th c. British political history, and Alito (I recall from Jan Greenburg’s book Supreme Conflict) wrote his senior thesis on the Italian legal system. They may have studied some Greek and/or Latin along the way, but I don’t think you can call either one a classicist.

“The UC system has been based, since 1960, on a commitment to offer places to the top 12.5 per cent of state high school graduate.”

It should be noted that the official share of high school graduates enrolled in college is around 70%.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/college-enrollment-rate-at-record-high/
That number includes community colleges, which have grown faster than others, but still, compared to 12.5% or even 9% being offered places in the state university? Where are they all enrolled?

Myles is obsessed with which initial jobs are available to graduates from different schools because he is an undergraduate.

Ah OK, that’s helpful. He really does have the young fogey thing down, tho, doesn’t he? Somehow his comments just ooze brandy and cigars and complaints about the servants.

Still we’ve all known undersocialized right-wing undergrads. Some of them, once they’d gotten laid and/or gotten high, even ended up as decent human beings.

“That number includes community colleges, which have grown faster than others, but still, compared to 12.5% or even 9% being offered places in the state university? Where are they all enrolled?”

Piglet, most American states have at least two tiers of state universities. The flagship universities will generally be called “University of [name of state]”. The lower tier universities will generally be called “[name of state] state university”. Generally, the second-tier state university will not have as many graduate programs as the flagship (the flagship will always have a law school and doctoral programs, but the second-tiers only rarely do). The University of California is the upper tier of California’s system. The University of California also has multiple campuses, which range widely in reputation and social cache. In general, the most highly regarded campuses within the UC system (UC Berkeley and UCLA) are the ones who have expanded relatively little in recent decades.

Myles SG said:
“My personal experience, and this is purely anecdotal, is that the recruited athletes in the more middle-class sports (soccer, squash, tennis, rowing, lacrosse) are actually better academically than the median incoming student, at least in the most elite colleges, because they tend to have gone to more demanding preparatory schools (Exeter, Choate, Loomis, etc.) or extremely exclusive public schools (Brookline, Greenwich, etc.) to a far greater extent than the median student.”

As one who played squash and tennis at a little ivy/nescac, went to grad school at an ivy, and now teaches at a different little ivy/nescac, I couldn’t disagree with this more. My teammates on the squash team in particular were woefully underprepared, but it didn’t matter. They were there to play squash. Tennis a bit less so (this is due to the nature of how American/Intl. squash works). As for lacrosse (and hockey), these students are generally *by far* the weakest at where I teach, and were the same at where I went to grad and undergrad.

The only thing you can say about these students is that they came from wealth and privilege. They are, generally speaking, the dullard ‘bros whom I am never happy to have in my classes.

I believe that Princeton is going to significantly expand its undergraduate class (it might have already), by something like 20%-25%. Of course this is just the proverbial drop in the ocean.

Anecdote: I have a friend who is a Professor at Harvard, and his son, who is extremely smart, wanted to go to an Ivy League school. My friend told him to forget it; the chances of getting in to these places are infinitesimal. He ended up at Caltech.

John Quiggin, #89 and BurritoBoy, #91 – Brad DeLong vigorously disagrees with you on the facts. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/alma-mater-blog.html

By our modern, degraded standards, that makes him a classicist among vulgarians.

I don’t know if I should be amused or horrified at the fact that the arcane notion that being able to read Latin somehow elevates you above the barbarians persists into this day and age. I took several years of Latin and I would give a lot to have those years back to spend on a language that was actually useful.

“are the lower-tier institutions trying to offer the same product at a lower cost and quality, or are they offering a different product?”

That seems kind of metaphysical. Is an Impala the same product as a Mercedes, at a lower cost and quality, or is it a different product?

His goal is to trade derivatives and get conspicuously obnoxiously rich

I don’t know. Posting lots of comments on CT isn’t an obvious step, if that’s the plan.

is it fair to say that only about 10, perhaps at most 15% of young Americans are educated in what are regarded top-tier institutions, and perhaps 1% in Ivy Leagues?

An annual college-age cohort is currently 4.3 million people.

In 2007-08 (the last year available), American colleges and universities granted a bit over 1.5 million BAs, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. So that’s 36 percent of young Americans who get four-year degrees at all. 750,000 get associate degrees (some of whom will then go to four-year schools) and maybe another million leave without a degree. So that’s a third with some higher education but no BA, and a third or a bit less who don’t attend college at all.

Of those BAs, two-thirds are from public schools and one-third are from private. NCES doesn’t break down the schools any more finely than that. One very rough proxy for at least somewhat selective institutions would be degrees in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, which together account for about one-third of BAs. (The majority of BAs are in business, education, and other pre-professional fields.) For the Ivies and Ivy-likes, we can use John Q.’s 100,000 undergraduates, or 25,000 annual BAs.

From which I conclude that Piglet’s guesses are pretty good. About two-thirds of young Americans get some college education, about one-third get a BA, maybe 10% get a liberal-arts education, and about 0.5% get an Ivy education.

“One would want to distinguish between those that upgraded their normal schools and those that expanded the number of campuses of their flagship university (although both activities may have been beneficial).”

I believe that very few normal schools have ever been upgraded to full-tier universities though most have been turned into the second-tier of state university systems. California is actually unusual in opening a substantive number of campuses on it’s first-tier, and been unusually successful at making (some of) the new campuses well-respected institutions (especially UCSD but also UC Davis). Most states have not added new flagship campuses, and those that have, the new campuses are not even remotely in the same league as the founding flagship.

His goal is to trade derivatives and get conspicuously obnoxiously rich without ever interacting with the people who sweat for him. That way you can bleed the stupid peasants dry!

I have no intention of being Donald Trump.

burritoboy:The Ivy League distinction for undergraduates is the social networking aspects, which are truly incomparable. The academic aspects for undergraduates are considerably better at the liberal-arts colleges and a few places like the University of Chicago or CalTech.

This statement is much too sweeping. The Ivy with which I’m most familiar has in recent years increased the number of small classes and improved its undergrad advising (and others have probably done the same). If I had to do it over again, I would probably go to a small liberal-arts college, but a blanket statement that the academics are “considerably better” at small colleges than the Ivies is, I think, an exaggeration that does not comport with the available (and no doubt ambiguous) evidence.

Much would depend, I suspect, on what one intends to study; it may be, for example, that in the natural sciences some research opportunities for undergrads are available at the Ivies or other larger universities that aren’t available at smaller places b/c of budgets, lab space, or whatever. I’m not a scientist (to put it mildly), so I’m just speculating here. In any case, the statement in question is the kind of sweeping generalization that students applying to colleges should be wary of.

“Is an Impala the same product as a Mercedes, at a lower cost and quality, or is it a different product?”

It’s the same product category (Sedan passenger car). A truck, or a tractor, or a van would be different products.

“The Ivy with which I’m most familiar has in recent years increased the number of small classes and improved its undergrad advising (and others have probably done the same). ”

Liberal-arts colleges (well, the best ones anyway) don’t even have this as a problem, much less being an actual major difficulty that they have to make huge efforts to attempt to fix (and that attempt may not be successful). My two advisers were not just department chairs, but expended very substantial efforts on advising. One of them kept in touch with all his (hundred+) advisees over the course of his many decades at ye olde alma mater.

“Much would depend, I suspect, on what one intends to study; it may be, for example, that in the natural sciences some research opportunities for undergrads are available at the Ivies or other larger universities that aren’t available at smaller places b/c of budgets, lab space, or whatever.”

Actually, the better-funded liberal arts colleges have vastly more research opportunities for undergrads – there aren’t any grad students to staff the labs, so the undergrads work closely with the professors on the professors’ research projects. It was bog-standard common to co-write papers with professors, something most students at research institutions will only get to do at the graduate school level (if then). One of my classmates co-wrote a book with a professor while she was still an undergrad. The labs may be smaller and less well funded, but the undergrads get all of the benefits of the labs, rather than get some fraction of the benefits of larger and better funded labs.

There is a reason why SLAC’s produce substantially more science PhD’s among their alumni than do the Ivy Leagues.

John @117: access to top-tier (state flagship + high-end private) education has been more or less stable…

Possibly in California. Ohio State, and I believe the other Big 10 schools, has shifted from an essentially open access institution to one with significant selection. These ostensibly ‘public’ schools may also be transitioning toward a quasi-private status. My sense is that they are less dependent on taxpayer subsidies, and increasingly self-financed from tuition, endowments, and income derived from football teams and hospital systems.

I think one of the things that has been elided in the discussion above is the huge impact that regional cultural differences have in determining what is “elite” in any given US context. When you look at the ranks of state government, you’re almost always going to find a preponderance of graduates of that state’s flagship university and its law school. Some Ivies, and quasi-Ivies too no doubt, but there’s just not enough of them to staff every courtroom and senate office. In medicine, it’s a bit different, since doctors tend to be pulled in various directions by specialty. But your big hospital administrators are often also just graduates of the big university closest to the hospital they started out in.

What we’re really talking about with the Ivy-elite is the proportion of people who can parlay being a star running back from some small town in Indiana into a Yale scholarship, who then go to Harvard Law, who come back to Indiana and work their way up at the statehouse until they’re finally in a position to be noticed again by eastern elites. Chancers, in essence. Smarter than average, no doubt, but they’re hardly wasting a lot of time writing sonnets or going to Spain for graduate studies.

Most of the really intelligent people from small towns in Indiana are, of course, going to stay right there. Not because they’re so intelligent, but because there’s only so many spots for the elite of the elites to fill. A few of them will gain national recognition because they’re the biggest fish in their small ponds, but mostly they’re not going to be fighting for those spots, because they’ve got their plates full with the business of being a member of the regional elite. In fact, in certain regions, there’s a pretty strong disincentive to take a chance on becoming a member of the national elite. People don’t say “putting on airs” too much anymore, but they think it. It’s a rare Alabaman or North Dakotan who’s going to push to get into that lofty company. New Yorkers and Californians and Massachusettsers take it for granted that some of their own are going to get big.

The individual US states could increase subsidies to their universities, but it’s radically unclear if that would have any positive effects.

Newt Gingrich couldn’t have put it better.

Me, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if states increased subsidies to public universities, we would have better, more accessible public universities. Crazy I know.

“Me, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if states increased subsidies to public universities, we would have better, more accessible public universities. Crazy I know.”

The question is whether the increased subsidies to public universities would be directed into increased number of undergraduate slots at any sort of a reasonable price. I’m not certain that we need better public universities as much as we need more slots at them. (Of course, better is good too – but I’d rather see Michigan add a lot more undergraduate capacity rather than doing the things Michigan will likely see as making itself better).

Just giving universities more money does not mean they will add more slots. These are Veblen goods – the best public universities have incentives to reduce (or at least not increase) undergraduate slots as much as possible (the harder to get in, the more prestigious, the more prestigious the more the alumni and parents give, the more donations the more for the administrators to play with, etc).

The question is whether the increased subsidies to public universities would be directed into increased number of undergraduate slots at any sort of a reasonable price. I’m not certain that we need better public universities as much as we need more slots at them. (Of course, better is good too – but I’d rather see Michigan add a lot more undergraduate capacity rather than doing the things Michigan will likely see as making itself better).

Yes, this is all true.

Just giving universities more money does not mean they will add more slots.

But it does make it much, much more likely.

Especially today, when the actual-existing alternatives to public support for public universities are (a) tuition subsidies (i.e. vouchers) to individuals, to use at the institution of their choice (increasing its tuition costs more or less pro tanto) and (b) no support for higher ed at all, let the market do what it will — for someone on the left to suggest that direct support of public higher ed is the problem, is almost willfully perverse.

49 percent of those liberal/extremely liberal Catholics said a pregnant woman should be able to obtain an abortion if she wants it for any reason. 51 percent said no.

TGGP: Yes, indeed, many Catholics hold liberal positions on abortion. It’s not hard to find a Catholic lawyer or judge who supports Roe (presumably Sotomayor is one, and Kennedy hasn’t abandoned Roe although he doesn’t like it much).

But if you’re looking for a judge who can write intelligently about antitrust and securities law, who can be persuasive about tax and bankruptcy and criminal procedure, who has the patience and ability to parse RICO and ERISA and CERCLA and FOIA, and who is also dead set against abortion, you’re very likely to come up with a Catholic.

I suppose I’m harping on one of my usual themes on this blog: culture matters.

Just giving universities more money does not mean they will add more slots.

Maybe I’m being naive here, but couldn’t you just give universities more money on the condition that they add more slots?

“If you ask an American university how much they need to add more slots, they’ll present you with a ludicrous figure that’s actually 3-6 times what the cost structure should be.”

Well, American (public) universities are starving nowadays, even as pressure mounts to add more slots (and just as importantly, to provide services which ensure that incoming freshmen don’t drop out). Heck, in 2 of the 3 classrooms in which I teach, I have to provide my own chalk, erasers, and/or markers. On a graduate student’s salary, that’s not completely insignificant, and it’s a sign of just how desperate administrators are to save a nickel anywhere they can. Annual budget reductions, sometimes in the neighborhood of 5-7%, with expectations to maintain current enrollment, are the norm; and I hear “do more with less” all the time now. Small wonder that enrollment isn’t increasing!

In 1 of the 3 rooms, I have to provide my own laptop computer in order to project computer files (the other two don’t have computers but you can get a computer cart when you need one). I’m not allowed to distribute copies of anything that I think might be helpful for student learning unless it runs under 50 pages total (for 90 students), because we have so little money for copies. Our university-wide retention program is sorely understaffed and doesn’t respond to queries in nearly the amount of time we need them to to be at all effective. And this isn’t podunk U — I teach at the flagship university of my state, which is Top 300 among public institutions in the world according to the blah blah whatever whatever thing. Things are worse elsewhere.

Oh, and there’s the fact that many departments are looking to increase the number of graduate students they take in, because they’re cheaper than lecturers with Ph.D.s in hand, who are in turn cheaper than adjuncts, who are in turn cheaper than assistant professors. So, students at state schools are increasingly getting their course lectures taught by second-year and third-year graduate students rather than by professors.^1^

Either a fresh-minted second-year TA is just as good at teaching content as a professor (something I severely doubt just from looking at my own improvements from my first year to my third — and I’ve had prior teaching experience), or the undergraduate students who do make it through their state’s eye of the needle are getting increasingly screwed by that particular cost-cutting measure. And by others. Which means the value of a state-flagship education becomes more and more tilted toward status marking.

So I say bring on the inflated projection, that air could help us breathe a bit.

^1^Does not hold for all states. For example, I admire Wisconsin’s restraint in not following this deprofessionalization path. (I might also petulantly believe that this is at least partly because Wisconsin graduate students are unionized.) Full disclosure: I was the course lecturer for a 100-level course for one semester of my second year of grad school, and that’s fairly normal where I teach now.

burritoboy @ 124:

Apparently I failed to make my point clear. What I was attempting to argue is that, for the very topmost section of the elites — say the 3,000 people who are at the very centers of power — the question of the role of Ivy and near-Ivy credentialing is salient, and will remain so, regardless of region. But, I would argue, for a large chunk of what I would consider the elite, that credentialing is often irrelevant, especially in the hinterlands.

Take all of the state legislatures, the top bureaucrats in each state government, the biggest lobbyists and the partners of white-shoe law firms in each state capitol, add to that all the municipal leaders — elected and civil service — in the 50 or 100 largest cities, plus the unofficial power brokers such as wealthy philanthropists and big property developers in those cities, and you’re talking about another 100,000 people or more, easily. And for a lot of those people, say, the most important civil servant in St. Louis, or the biggest property developer in Denver, Ivy credentialing might be nice, but it’s certainly not make-or-break. That’s not to say Ivy grads won’t be over-represented in those venues, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that their over-representation was matched or even exceeded by graduates of local flagship universities (and especially the law and business programs of those universities.)

Concentrate power as you will, there’s just no way to make it so that the president of the Houston city council is going to live in Connecticut and commute in to Manhattan to work.

A better way to think of the word “elite” in the American context is to compare it to the concept of the “gentleman” in the British context.

A better way to think of the word “elite” in the American context is to compare it to the concept of the “gentleman” in the British context

The contemporary context?

The contemporary context?

Yes. E.g. a “gentleman” might work in the City as a merchant banker, but a “gentleman” will not work in retail banking or branch banking.

In America, “elite” lawyers have gone to T14 (top 14) law schools, which is a distinct group like the Ivy League is, and are somewhat unmixed with other lawyers. (Firms tend to be sharply segregated between those firms that hire mostly from T14 schools, and those who do not.)

The really elite lawyers have gone to T5 (top-5) law schools, but that’s more just for pure snobbery than much else in terms of counting prestige, although there is admittedly a marked difference in quality between the students of the T5 and the rest of the T14.

Piglet re: German universities:

You are correct that there is very little distinction between universities in Germany, which has been a deliberate policy in the post-war era. The most important thing about getting a doctorate for your future academic career is who your Doktorvater was. But there certainly is a distinction made between the University and Fachhochschule; getting a degree from the latter is fine for working at Siemens or whatever but if you went into the sciences it would be a big deal and you have to even legally make the disctinction in your title. Also, for science the distinctions are made at the level of whether you do your research for the Max Planck institute etc. and less at what university you teach. I do think the system works to increase mobility, but it does hamper a university’s ability to specialize in something, since it has very little control over who it accepts or doesn’t as long as certain criteria are met. This was a big problem when everyone graduated with a Magister, and is probably still a problem, but I am not up on exactly up on how the institution of bachelor degrees in Germany is affecting things.

Yes. E.g. a “gentleman” might work in the City as a merchant banker, but a “gentleman” will not work in retail banking or branch banking.

What in God’s name are you talking about? Are you mistaking contemporary Britain for Kind Hearts And Coronets?

@Piglet, 109
With regards to your question, it’s a bit of both. I think as others have pointed out, many institutions which are now four year universities were originally agricultural or normal schools, and many of these retain their focus on practical technical or pre-professional training, and often with professional credentialing built into the program. Thus, at many “directional” regional universities or small liberal arts schools, you can major in things like physical therapy, or elementary school education, whereas prestigious private universities generally only grant bachelor’s degrees in the liberal arts and sciences (natural & social sciences and the humanities). A few might offer engineering, and there are some prestigious pre-professional schools, where students might major in “pre-law” or “pre-med” (though these aren’t really considered “Ivy-tier”) but in general it is expected that a student at an elite university will get a degree in something broad like biology or philosophy and then gain specialized credentials in graduate school.
In this way, the system actually does mirror education in Germany though with much less transparency, as all these schools will be called “college” or “university.”

However, there are also many third tier liberal arts schools or comprehensive universities, where students do major in subjects like literature, or physics, etc. Often these schools have a religious affiliation, and sometimes these departments were added as part of the expansion of technical or agricultural schools. Generally speaking, it is students getting a liberal arts degree from a lower tier school are the ones who encounter trouble on the job market, as their degrees are neither immediately practical nor do they signal the elite status a liberal arts degree from a top tier university would.

A huge problem with higher education equality in the US is again a total lack of transparency (since all schools are either “universities” or “colleges,” and public/private distinction is not a clear indication of quality) and an unequal distribution of knowledge about the explicit and implicit hierarchies. In addition, tuition costs are only loosely correlated with quality, so it is not unheard of for students to shell out $100,000 + for a diploma from a third tier private school when they would have been far better off seeking out a much cheaper third tier public school. Beyond Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and maybe Stanford, most top schools (even other Ivies) are relatively unknown to those outside elite circles, and this as much as admissions requirements is a major obstacle to elite education outside of large cities or those from educated families.

Finally, an complete lack of understanding about how tuition works at top schools also serves to keep students out. While top tier private schools are $50,000+ a year, most of these schools have deep pockets and are generous with financial aid, meaning that a middle class student at Harvard will generally go for free, whereas at a state school or a lower tier private school they may be stuck paying tens of thousands a year. In general, if you are considered desirable by a top school, they will make sure you can go there. However, as most people not educated at top schools don’t realize this, many might think “I can’t afford $50,000 even if I did get in” and then don’t bother to apply.

And I don’t mean it in the “ha! look at those country bumpkins” sort of way, I am genuinely puzzled at how one could possibly be simultaneously elite and sustenance-concerned. That seems to me tautology.

“I am genuinely puzzled at how one could possibly be simultaneously elite and sustenance-concerned. That seems to me tautology.”

If “Elite” were just another word for “rich”, that would indeed be a contradiction (I think that’s what you meant to say instead of tautology). But then we wouldn’t need a special term to describe the elite, as opposed to the rich. In any case, all of this obviously depends on how you define elite.

“A huge problem with higher education equality in the US is again a total lack of transparency (since all schools are either “universities” or “colleges,” and public/private distinction is not a clear indication of quality) and an unequal distribution of knowledge about the explicit and implicit hierarchies.”

Yes. Thank God for US News and World Report, which is widely available and explains a good bit of this to those not otherwise “in the know.” Of course, educators hate it and would prefer to pretend that a BA in English from West Texas equals a BA in English from University of Minnesota-Duluth equals a BA in English from Princeton. (Only the last of these will get you a job at JP Morgan Chase in New York.)

(Only the last of these will get you a job at JP Morgan Chase in New York.)

But why would JP Morgan Chase hire someone with a BA in English? Their industry is not literature or language. It would make more sense to hire people educated in business or financial economics.

My last comment is stuck in moderation. I’m not certain why, since it was a clarification of my comparison and not otherwise inflammatory or irrelevant, but anyways, in response to y81, to even look at US News and World report requires a certain level of cultural or educational capital that is lacking or unavailable to a far larger portion of the US than most of us realize. My guess is a great majority of Americans are either unaware colleges are ranked or unable to interpret these rankings. Thus, a long list of colleges you a) have heard of and assume are out of your league (really only the top 4 or so on the list) or b) have never heard of (pretty much all the rest in the top two tiers) and have no way of distinguishing between is actually pretty meaningless. Indeed, unless you understand why universities are ranked and the implications behind these rankings, you might not see why a top tier school across the country that is more expensive might in the long run be better than your local third tier college.

There are indeed populations who know almost nothing about the finer points of the US higher education system except the domestic or international rankings (I’m thinking especially of East Asian immigrants) and who apply accordingly. I know Chinese parents who have their children apply to the top ten universities listed on the US News & World Report rankings. However, these people are generally well educated and successful in their home country, and can translate that knowledge, albeit imperfectly, into a US context.

My guess is a great majority of Americans are either unaware colleges are ranked or unable to interpret these rankings.

That really surprises me. I thought college rankings are among the things that almost all Americans are aware of.

“But why would JP Morgan Chase hire someone with a BA in English? Their industry is not literature or language. It would make more sense to hire people educated in business or financial economics.”

Again, extrapolations from a continental European perspective will end you up in wrong places in the US.

1. In a European context, people getting university educations are often coming out with graduate degrees. In the US business world, you will generally get your first job with only a bachelor’s degree.
2. The top-tier schools do not usually offer undergraduate majors in business. Only two of the Ivy Leagues have undergraduate business programs (Cornell and UPenn). Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago and Northwestern don’t have them either. Some of the best public universities have undergraduate business degrees, but others don’t (Cal Berkeley has them, but UCLA doesn’t, for instance). So, most of the top schools do not have undergraduate business majors. The small liberal arts colleges do not have them either. You can only obtain top-tier undergrad business majors from a very small list of places – Penn, MIT, Cornell, Cal Berkeley, Michigan, UVa and a few other places. Most undergraduate business programs at top-tier institutions are also intentionally quite small, so the output is limited.
3. Undergraduates in the US will not major in something called financial economics at a top-tier institution. They can get an economics degree, which is usually focused on high-end economic theory and it is only very marginally more applicable to business than anything else is.
4. Undergraduate business programs at mediocre US schools are not (broadly) viewed as particularly good places to learn any sort of high-end analytical skills.

The result is that there’s multiple bifurcated markets. When a corporation wants a junior accountant or junior tax analyst or junior HR person or a number of other functions, they will go to the nearest big mediocre university and hire a business major. They will not hire someone with a liberal arts degree. There is a set of professional services firms that primarily hires undergraduate students with a liberal arts degree, and generally pays only minimal attention to their course of study while doing so (the economics degree really doesn’t make a massive amount of difference and so they don’t privilege it much).

Liberal arts undergrads who do want to work in large corporations will get a job at a professional services firm and only later move to a corporation, generally getting jobs (or preferring jobs) that people with undergraduate business majors from mediocre schools will only rarely be considered for.

Liberal arts undergrads who do want to work in large corporations will get a job at a professional services firm and only later move to a corporation, generally getting jobs (or preferring jobs) that people with undergraduate business majors from mediocre schools will only rarely be considered for.

There’s also the fact the undergraduate business major is quite dangerous for the graduates at top schools themselves. A ready-made business major might translate into an immediate, permanent job track post-graduation, and if and when that job track turns out sour, it hurts the graduates.

Whereas if you only graduate with a generalist degree, you are more likely to be hired by the likes of McKinsey and get rotational training in all departments, and thus have a set of skills that are not vulnerable to economic shifts in the way normal people’s skills are.

For example, someone who was retarded enough to graduate with a focus in Industrial Processes Management or whatever twenty years ago would have been disadvantaged pretty heavily.

(I laughed no end when I found out that the general business curriculum at one fairly decent university still, in 2010, contained a unit on manufacturing processes, productivity, efficiencies, and assembly-line setups. Dead-end careers, anyone?)

Re Myles 143/144:

This is all really wrong. You have no absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Almost nobody got a 70-80k stipend. There were maybe 3 firms giving out that much. The usual firm paid for bar expenses + something like 15k. They were trying to balance out not having too much bad publicity and giving deferred associates incentives to find different jobs as they massively over hired. And even then a lot of offers were rescinded. Additionally a lot of junior first and second year associates were fired, and laying off first and second year associates used to be considered something you weren’t supposed to do…and yet you had hundreds upon hundreds of young lawyers let go.

If you think the fear of bad publicity is related to impressing career services offices at law schools, you clearly don’t know anything about how any of this works. What do you think; law students are going to refuse a 160k job because a firm isn’t genteel enough? Why don’t you look at how well Latham recruited this year after completely massacring a whole generation of lawyers…? Rescinding offers/no offering summer associates is a sign of a firm’s economic health; firms care because a struggling firm will be a target for predatory firms that try to pick off partners with robust books of business, and a struggling firm will have a difficult time poaching these kinds of partners from other firms. Firms grow by poaching partners and buying out smaller firms. If you think they are acting to protect some kind of genteel image, you are hopelessly out of touch.

And you have no idea what makes a “really elite” lawyer. Professionally, what makes a “really elite lawyer” is that lawyers book of business, which is made in part by winning cases/dominating negotiations, and in part by sucking up to the kind of “grubby” business types you despise. The preference for t14 law schools or t5 law schools has very little to do with a quality of student. If you want to talk about differentiation then Yale has by far the “smartest” law students, and yet they have a reputation for being mediocre lawyers in regards to biglaw practice (they dominate the judiciary and especially academia). The difference between a Harvard Law student and a University of Minnesota Law student is like 6 questions on the LSAT. The real value of getting a t14 kid is that it’s just easier to bill them out at the insane rates firms charge. Easier to justify to the “grubby” businessmen who pay the bills because they hold the same simple minded social climbing views on “prestige” as you do…that’s actually the most amusing thing about you; your strident awareness and the importance you place on these things marks you as an outsider to the very class of people you want to join. You are just like a businessman who looks at the young lawyers Cornell law degree with a mixture of satisfaction and reassurance as the senior partner in charge of the case snickers to himself at the idiot buying this b.s.

In any event, real management consultants come from business school. 98% of undergrad consultants get rotated out to graduate school within 3-5 years of starting. As was mentioned earlier, Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford business schools’ students are only somewhat skewed towards “elite” colleges.

The impression I get is that people who do management consultancy as a career post-business school are at least a tier/rung down from people who do it as a sort of post-undergraduate training internship before heading to business school and then heading into banking, management, whatever. The reason McKinsey is so prestigious for undergrads is because it is the best feeder for Harvard MBA there is, and once you get to Harvard MBA you can go for Wall Street. To do McKinsey post-MBA is basically catching the second wave, and your earning potential is already lower by that point.

A note on the networking connections at college:

y81 at #114: The useful people are, first, the partners or managing directors at your own job, and, second, the firm’s clients or customers, all of whom are much older than you.

It’s true that when you are starting out, your classmates – in themselves – are not a whole lot of use to you. (“… your recent classmates are of no use whatsoever.” Agreed.)

But it’s the fathers (…and, rarely, the mothers…) of your classmates who are “…the partners or managing directors at your own job, and, second, the firm’s clients or customers…”.

Your frat brother’s father might be the guy who knows just who to call to get you a foot in the door. Your roommate’s family comes to visit and take you out to dinner, too. You start dating your roommate’s kid sister, and start going home with your roommate at Thanksgiving. Suddenly The Old Man mentions your need for a job at his next board meeting.

Lo-and-behold, this sort of networking is much more valuable at the Ivies than it is at State U.