[Too much great stuff to blog about today. Not sure where to start. I also woke up in the middle of night thinking of an outline of a book. I predict a bad parenting day.]
I just LOVED Ross Douthat's op-ed in the NYT .
Douthat begins by talking about a Princeton alum who told current students to hurry up and find a man, because they'll never find such a huge group of smart guys again.
Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.
You know that assortive mating is one of the leading theories for the rise in autism rates. Just saying.
Douthat's article doesn't really go beyond a crack at Ivy League elites, but I'm going with that. That's enough for me.
Jezebel points to some of the assinine comments on the article.
Apt. 11d 
Loved Douthat’s piece. I think he nailed why Ms. Patton’s letter rubbed everyone the wrong way. Ms. Patton probably meant well, but she violated the unspoken WASP rules (rules which are enforceable for everyone in that strata whether or not they are actual WASPs, of course) by talking about it. According to the Preppy Handbook, this misstep qualifies her as NOK,D.
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I had to Google NOK,D.
Is that a Palm Beach thing? Because some of the articles with illustrations of usage seem to come from Florida.
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I’m skeptical about almost every claim here. First, the primary value of top colleges is not in making connections. It’s in credentialing. When it comes to getting a job at Goldman Sachs or Cravath (or even places a few notches down), it’s not who you met at Yale that matters, it’s grades and the fact that you attended Yale. When you start work at one of those places, the people you met at college are toiling in the bowels of other institutions. I will be at least a decade before any of your classmates can help you. In the meantime, the key to advancement is impressing your superiors, who were not your classmates.
I believe things may be a little different in academia, i.e., a professor who likes you may be helpful in getting you into a program or a fellowship or a position at another institution. But your econ professor–even at Yale–isn’t going to have the connections to open doors at Goldman Sachs or even Citigroup.
Finally, while there’s some assortative mating going on at the big banks and law firms, there isn’t much going at college, because people in that milieu don’t marry at that age. That was the point of the original article.
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I’m skeptical about almost every claim here. First, the primary value of top colleges is not in making connections. It’s in credentialing. When it comes to getting a job at Goldman Sachs or Cravath (or even places a few notches down), it’s not who you met at Yale that matters, it’s grades and the fact that you attended Yale. When you start work at one of those places, the people you met at college are toiling in the bowels of other institutions. I will be at least a decade before any of your classmates can help you. In the meantime, the key to advancement is impressing your superiors, who were not your classmates.
I believe things may be a little different in academia, i.e., a professor who likes you may be helpful in getting you into a program or a fellowship or a position at another institution. But your econ professor–even at Yale–isn’t going to have the connections to open doors at Goldman Sachs or even Citigroup.
Finally, while there’s some assortative mating going on at the big banks and law firms, there isn’t much going at college, because people in that milieu don’t marry at that age. That was the point of the original article.
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I’m skeptical about almost every claim here. First, the primary value of top colleges is not in making connections. It’s in credentialing. When it comes to getting a job at Goldman Sachs or Cravath (or even places a few notches down), it’s not who you met at Yale that matters, it’s grades and the fact that you attended Yale. When you start work at one of those places, the people you met at college are toiling in the bowels of other institutions. I will be at least a decade before any of your classmates can help you. In the meantime, the key to advancement is impressing your superiors, who were not your classmates.
I believe things may be a little different in academia, i.e., a professor who likes you may be helpful in getting you into a program or a fellowship or a position at another institution. But your econ professor–even at Yale–isn’t going to have the connections to open doors at Goldman Sachs or even Citigroup.
Finally, while there’s some assortative mating going on at the big banks and law firms, there isn’t much going at college, because people in that milieu don’t marry at that age. That was the point of the original article.
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it’s not who you met at Yale that matters, it’s grades and the fact that you attended Yale.
I think the last of those still counts as “making connections.”
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Some google search showed that Susan Paton is apparently “nouveau Princeton” which fits with Douthat (there’s an article talking about how are parents weren’t at all impressed with Princeton, and that she was proud to be able to proud of her own sons when they were admitted).
I do think that the “credentialing” is equivalent to Douthat’s making connections, though it isn’t, precisely, and not particularly related to who you personally meet. It’s that the designation opens doors for you.
I’m honestly not sure what to make of Patton’s article about the women, except to see it as a general disappointment that her son’s aren’t meeting the right girls by virtue of their Princeton credentials (i.e. even though they’ve been selected to be in Princeton’s club, the girls aren’t seeing them as sufficiently worthy of their attention.
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I saw it as a divorced woman’s regrets. Her disappointment in her own marriage was the strongest thread in her essay, to me.
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I saw it as a divorced woman’s regrets. Her disappointment in her own marriage was the strongest thread in her essay, to me.
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I don’t think analytic clarity is enhanced by defining “contacts” to include “credentialing.” Would you say that the value of having an article published in a scholarly journal is the “contacts” you gain? Or the value of winning a Morehead scholarship is the “contacts”? Or that the value of credentials like these is some kind of dirty little secret of the ruling class?
Just to be clear, I am not disputing the lifelong value of a degree from a fancy college. I am just trying to foster clarity about exactly what that value is. For your whole life, a fancy degree will move your resume to the top of the pile. But it will not guarantee that you don’t have to submit a resume, or ensure that you know the person making the hiring decision, or find out about the job through some secret back channel. I’ve gotten lots of jobs, and the degrees have been a help, but not one of the jobs came through someone I knew at Yale or Berkeley.
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I actually agree with y81 here. I don’t feel like I have “connections” from my Ivy league education. I have a credential, which impresses people. I graduated magna cum laude, which I like to mention even though my GPA was a 3.2 (don’t ask–I don’t know). But even though it’s been 25 years, I’ve gotten more networking out of random people I’ve met online than from my fellow alums.
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Well, meeting people and establishing connections is something almost all college students do, everywhere, and has long been acknowledged as an important perk of college. Growing up in the PNW, going to U of Oregon or OSU or L&C or Willamette Law school opens doors, because a significant number of alums are movers and shakers in the local scene. A Harvard Law degree makes one less hirable in Portland because there isn’t such a network. It’s not even the case that people purposely form a club, but people who feel fondly towards their alma mater often tend to feel fondly towards other graduates of that or like institutions. As a member of a religious/ethnic group with our own college system, you can absolutely bet being an alum of one of those schools plugs you into an incredibly tight nationwide network. Ditto with, say, Jesuit schools. If you’re a Georgetown grad and your interviewer is a De Paul grad, that probably gives you a very slight leg up, due in large part to the human recognition of likeness, which leads to an increase in trust. I once got an apartment sublet because my family is of the same nationality as the renter. Having to make a fairly arbitrary decision, he picked me because he thought I would be more likely to use and take care of his skis. People are attracted to other people for a variety of not-so-logical reasons, and feeling a shared connection is a big one. Where the issue lies, I think, is that different schools plug you in to different networks, some of which have more power and influence than others. Though, if one’s goal is not to work in big law, finance, a think-tank, or another NY-centric industry,* an Ivy League degree isn’t all that helpful except to broadcast that you are reasonably smart and ambitious.
*sometimes people forget this on the East Coast. What’s a big deal in NY or Philly or DC isn’t really all that important in the rest of the country.
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A Harvard Law degree makes one less hirable in Portland because there isn’t such a network.
Right. That’s part of the problem. People going to a very few schools get all the breaks.
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“Though, if one’s goal is not to work in big law, finance, a think-tank, or another NY-centric industry,* an Ivy League degree isn’t all that helpful except to broadcast that you are reasonably smart and ambitious.”
I even wonder whether (except for a few obvious fields like academia) Ivy League degrees don’t hurt you a bit outside the NE. Isn’t it only human to think, “If So-and-so is such a hot shot, why didn’t he stay in Boston or DC or NYC?”
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AmyP,
Yeah, I went to a top SLAC, and I’d say about 85% of people in Portland have never heard of it. Having a degree from there did zilch to get me a job in my hometown. In fact, a lot of people thought it was a community college. I *have* an Ivy League educated parent, and I thought UPenn was a state school until my junior or senior year in high school. HYP at least have name recognition, but I agree that could hurt as much as help. The biggest difference I found between East and West coast hanging out with relatively comparable elites was a sense that on the East coast it seemed people thought that once you were on a track, you were stuck there. If you didn’t go to the right preschool, maybe you wouldn’t get into the right private school, in which case you wouldn’t go to the right college, in which case you wouldn’t get the right job, in which case you were stuck toiling away for the rest of your life at a middling salary. The pressure people placed on themselves and their kids was enormous, and understandably, contagious. I felt like, growing up on the West coast, I felt there was always a sense if you fucked up now you could fix it later. Nothing was all that important, and there were a gazillion different ways you could achieve mainstream or non-mainstream success, so you shouldn’t sweat it too much if one way didn’t work out, or failure didn’t mean you wouldn’t succeed later. I had a friend who went to Brown and was in a moderately successful band, and his parents wanted him to drop out and pursue music full time. If it didn’t work out, he could always go back to school later, but getting a shot at being a musician is something best tried in your early 20s. That is just not the mindset of elite parents on the East coast.
The concentration of wealth and power among the top 1% is absolutely a problem that needs to be dealt with immediately and in substantive ways, but worrying about how equitable admissions at Harvard are seems a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
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“In fact, a lot of people thought it was a community college.”
“I thought UPenn was a state school until my junior or senior year in high school.”
Very funny!
I probably thought the same about UPenn until just a few years ago. There are so many misleadingly named colleges.
“…but worrying about how equitable admissions at Harvard are seems a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Not to mention that there are only about 1600 freshman slots at Harvard.
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Yup. I went to Wellesley and there are an awful lot of people in the DC suburbs who have apparently never heard of Wellesley but are very impressed if you went to Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech seems to have the network that will get you the jobs — largely because it’s such a HUGE school.
Also, there are an awful lot of people in the world who will not recognize a school that does not have a football team. DC suburban housewives also seemed rather partial to UNC- Chapel Hill, mostly because they have a basketball team or something. (Don’t really follow sports so I wouldn’t know).
I would agree with the sentiment that you can fix your life later if college admissions do not go as planned. I’m amazed at how many college professors I have met who went to no-name schools, farted around in high school and sometimes college too, and who later on developed some kind of abiding interest and passion and went on to write great dissertations, etc. (I teach courses in things like intell and national security and some people come to these fields through criminology, so you’ll occasionally meet someone who is like “I was a police officer, and I wondered about this problem that I kept seeing so eventually I went back to school and took these classes and then I investigated this problem . . ” Honestly, I’d rather have someone like that teaching my kids in college than some French guy covered with chalk on his tweed jacket who has never experienced the real world.)
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I posted a comment in defense of the Princeton mom’s column which was eaten and then graciously restored by Laura. Reading this thread has made me realize that my own perspective of ‘college is the best chance to meet smart, cultured mates’ is itself an artifact of class, and is probably not something that would occur to a person who grew up in an environment in which graduate degrees were the norm.
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Louisa,
Yeah, my boyfriend who is in my grad school program failed out of high school, and then spent several years failing CC before getting his life together. Another good friend of mine in my program failed out of a state school and joined the air force. I was a goody-two shoes self-enforcing “organization kid.” If you’d looked at the three of us at age 21, you’d assume we were all on radically different life paths, which would probably never meet.
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