College Admissions and the Modern American Calvinist Elect

Or why affluent parents aren't up in arms over Trump gutting universities

I used to think all the talk of the Puritan influence on American society was just WASP nostalgia for a less diverse country, but now I am firmly convinced that a secular Calvinism still reigns among the educated strata. While the US is no longer in the grip of the WASPs, their ancestors’ values still permeate our society, just as much as Max Weber found that the Protestant work ethic still defined capitalism.

Calvinism, the root theological wellspring of the Puritans, holds that nothing we can do will assure us our salvation, that God had chosen his Elect before we were born. In olden times men with buckles on their hats may have fretted that they had not proven that they were among God’s elect. Amassing riches and living austerely despite their wealth proved that they were indeed blessed. In today’s day and age the modern Puritans of our upper middle class have determined something far different to be the mark of God’s grace: college admissions.

The American bourgeoisie has developed an obsession with college admissions to the point of mania. Parents make decisions about their children’s lives from birth to prime them to be accepted by elite institutions of higher learning. As those students grow older, they push them harder and harder in non-school activities and hire tutors to give their children an edge in their schoolwork and on standardized tests. If these children do not get the expected grades, the parents will lawyer up and go to the mattresses with their schools. In the college process itself parents will pay thousands of dollars for consultants and high application fees to a dozen different institutions. Once students achieve acceptance their parents are now footing the bill for Instagram photo shoots with the student’s entire room decked out in their new college’s gear.

The latter phenomenon, as ridiculous as it seems, is the natural outgrowth of the Calvinistic function of college admissions. Getting into the “right” school affirms that you are indeed the “right” kind of person. If your child achieves this it proves to all around you that you are indeed the right kind of parent, and those in your community who have failed to secure a place for their child at an elite university are less virtuous than you. Getting accepted means finding a high-paying job secured by connections at these schools and thus being able to replicate the bourgeois lifestyle of the parents at a time when opportunities for the rest of society are shrinking.

On the surface, recent events should be disrupting this dynamic. The Trump administration is threatening higher education, and specifically targeting the big guns like Harvard and Columbia. One would think that the legions of wealthy and powerful parents pouring 18 years of parenting into getting their children into these institutions would be up in arms. All of their work, money, and worry is about to be neutralized. Imagine achieving the ultimate validation of getting your child into Harvard, only to see it slash its budget and downsize due to the lack of federal funds and foreign student admissions.

Despite the Trump administration’s actions all I hear is crickets, even in the private school world where I’ve worked for over a decade, where the college admissions game dominates. Initially this silence stunned me. The kinds of parents who declare war over an A- have nothing to say about their child’s college getting nuked, how could this be? I soon realized that they are silent because the education itself is literally meaningless to the parents laboring to get their kids through the university gates. The learning is immaterial to them, only the name on the diploma matters.

It’s perhaps the most striking evidence for the nihilism pervading our society. No thing has any inherent value, all things, including an education, are a mere means to the end of money and status. As in other areas, the nihilism is dialectic. It paved the way for Trump, and he has catalyzed it further. So many of his actions reveal the hollowness and spiritual death of American society. Our university system is the envy of the world and we are watching it being destroyed while the people who are some of the most invested in it do nothing because it doesn’t actually mean anything to them. At least the Puritans actually believed in something.