We Need to End Our Obsession With Elite Private Universities

The Supreme Court’s recent ban on considering a student’s race in college admissions has rightly prompted a great deal of criticism. The notion that you can correct racial disparities without taking a person’s race into account is farcical, and really reflects the conservative justices’ belief and that of a majority of white Americans that racial disparities should not be addressed affirmatively at all.

I found it rather interesting, however, that almost all of the discussion about this case focused on elite private universities, when this policy applies to all institutions of higher learning. The American university system is vast and diverse, but we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the Ivy League, which serves a tiny minority of the student population. What’s worse, these discussions turn this unrepresentative sample into a metonym for higher education writ large.

Much of this, to be sure, stems from journalists at America’s prestige media outlets being graduates of these institutions, and those graduates seeing themselves as the Elect. I attended a debate tournament at Princeton while a student at my small Midwestern Jesuit university alma mater, and was struck by how important the Princeton students seemed to think they were. Not yet schooled in the ways of America’s bourgeois social class system, I found their sense of self-importance to be comical, especially considering this was the worst-run tournament I had ever been to. If these were the people who were supposed to go on to rule the world, no wonder it was in such an awful state.

Once I got out of my rural lower-middle class bubble, I soon discovered that America’s bourgeois parents expend ridiculous amounts of money and time trying to get their children into places like Princeton. Now that I live in a well-to-do New Jersey suburb and teach at a private school in New York City I see how getting your child into an Ivy League university is the ultimate bourgeois class status trump card. Those Instagrammable vacations abroad and renovated kitchens are nice, but can’t measure up to having offspring at Yale. That eventuality proves that you are the true winner of the game of Meritocracy.

It’s telling that the quality of education is rarely cited as the motivation. It’s all about power, status, and “connections.” Critics of the Supreme Court are rightly concerned that their decision will narrow the range of people who can get into these hallowed, ivied walls of power. While that is a concern, the far bigger problem is that these institutions have such prominence in our society in the first place.

It is frankly obscene that the elite of a democratic society is being manufactured by private institutions with no obligations to the public. Their favoritism towards “legacies” puts lie to their pretensions of “meritocracy.” It is also obscene that state university systems face cutbacks when Harvard has an endowment the size of a small country’s GDP. In a just world, these institutions would be expropriated out of existence.

While that’s not really an option, we can support and invest in the kinds of institutions where most people are educated: regional state universities and community colleges. I taught at two different local state universities where about half the students were first generation. These are the places where social mobility really happens, not the elite institutions. It is by attending such an institution that my parents were the first in their families to get four-year college degrees and a foothold in the middle class. The Ivies might boost a handful of exceptional people, but public higher ed is where masses of people get the chance for a better life.

At regional state universities I taught first-generation students, people changing careers, immigrants, military veterans, parents, and people having to care for their own parents. Some of these students were truly brilliant. I would put them up against anyone attending an elite private university, but the people obsessed with the bourgeois understanding of college status would scoff at their alma mater as not even the status of a “safety school.”

This understanding paints higher education as a caste system, with the elite privates at the top among the kings, and open enrollment public institutions at the bottom with the serfs. This understanding causes undue harm to young people by equating their self-worth with where they get accepted to go to school and thereby puts pressure on them to go into deeper debt at private institutions rather than to attend cheaper public ones. I have witnessed plenty of both problems first-hand in my time as an educator. Given the choice between a less “prestigious” school that’s a great fit and one with a better reputation, society says take the bigger name, and many do, to their detriment.

I don't really see the bourgeois obsession with elite universities going away, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us need to go along with it. Instead of debating yet again about Harvard’s admissions policies, let’s fund regional public universities and community colleges so that these factories of advancement can thrive. When your kids are going into the college process, de-emphasize the need to get into elite institutions and think about what they need and can afford. Instead of treating graduates of elite universities as the end-all-be-all, evaluate them the same way you would anyone else: by the fruits of their labors. As I like to say, George W Bush graduating from both Yale and Harvard ought to temper our tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to the Ivy League’s products. On a day-to-day basis, when someone tries to drop their elite alma mater into casual conversation to pump themselves up, roll your eyes or give them a golf clap.¹ It’s not just fun, it’s for the good of our society.

1. I know many lovely and brilliant graduates of these institutions, and the thing I’ve noticed is they NEVER bring up where they went to college. That’s for all the mediocrities who haven’t accomplished with their big degree much to do.