Elite Schools - A Contrarian View

A recent court case concerning Harvard’s apparent attempt to limit the percentage of Asian Americans in their admission process has once again brought up the topic of how incredibly competitive elite colleges have become and how desperate parents and students are to gain admission into their exalted realm.  I think everyone is focusing on the wrong question here.

I am a product of the so-called elite colleges with degrees from Stanford, MIT and Georgia Tech.  I am well acquainted with the benefits of a degree from these institutions.  I make this disclaimer at the outset because I am going to take a contrarian view to the prevailing wisdom on this issue and I believe I am qualified to do so.

The usual argument from the media, educators and businesses when hearing anguish from students rejected from elite schools is that there are many excellent institutions of learning and that anyway, one’s career is not dictated by the school that one attends, but rather by the work that is done throughout one’s career.

There is of course some truth in these common sense platitudes.  A poor performer from Harvard will eventually be ejected from the fast track and a superstar from a good public university (or even a poor one) will over time rise to the top of his or her profession given a modicum of good timing and fortune.

But in my experience and in many years of observation, elite schools do offer an amazing advantage to their fortunate graduates.  The reasons are threefold – Brand, Cronyism and Connections.

As a Stanford graduate I have found that my resume is almost always given a second look because of the brand of the school.  People who meet me are visibly impressed when they learn that I went to Stanford or MIT.  Elite universities have spent much of their endowed billions (which, by the way, are donated in a rather incestuous cycle by their successful graduates for exactly this purpose) creating and polishing their brand so that the general public, and many potential employers, are simply in awe of them.  This is not to say that these institutions do not deserve some cachet, but I am quite certain that their brand is much more powerful than it really should be, for reasons I will point out later.

When graduates of elite universities head into the marketplace, they are able to take advantage of a uniquely American cronyism that is quite astonishing.  Consulting firms, financial firms, high tech firms, law schools, business schools and a plethora of other top opportunities are doled out by executives who are graduates of these elite schools and are typically inclined, like shadowy potentates in some secret society, to seek out their elite brethren and offer them the choicest entry points into the business world.  They justify this in the name of meritocracy, because who can argue against offering elite opportunities to elite graduates?

This cronyism is one type of networking, but the benefits of an elite pedigree do not stop there.  The multiplying effect of having both friends who have graduated with you and are now on the yellow brick road of good fortune, as well as a network of former and future graduates who have also been anointed in similar fashion, is quite stunning.  It creates an outsized impact on one’s career and perpetuates itself by giving one’s children and other loved ones similar advantages.  Who can blame you for hiring your college buddy’s daughter for that fast track position?

But it’s all ok, isn’t it?  These graduates of elite universities are the best and brightest, right?  They deserve to get the best jobs and careers.  They’ve earned it.

 

Ah, there’s the rub that makes this a calamity of such long life (if I may be forgiven a slight paraphrase)!  There are, give or take, 325 million people in the U.S.   The Ivy League schools and their equivalents throughout the country (Stanford, MIT, CalTech and a few others) can admit perhaps 20,000 students each year.  It has been noted on numerous occasions that the actual admission process for these schools is the equivalent of a lottery.  There are so many qualified applicants with amazing test scores, grades and activities that they could fill up ten times the number of so-called ‘elite’ schools and still not have enough spaces.  By perpetuating a myth of these elite schools having uniquely gifted students and offering a uniquely brilliant education we have created a system that is simply another form of hereditary privilege.

Of course this will never change.  It is our uniquely American form of oligarchy - an oligarchy that takes its form in both business and government.  Is it horribly evil?  No, not really.  But it is unfair.  However, we can all take comfort in the fact that life and happiness are not closely related to power, wealth or business success.  The Stanford grad who is hired by another Stanford grad at McKinsey and then fast-tracked to an all-expenses paid MBA at Harvard three years later and then becomes a partner with a whopping million dollar a year income may in the long run be just as miserable as any other person on this planet who focuses their life and energy on making money and cultivating power.

I have experienced much of this myself and have observed it at very close quarters all my life.  Did I unduly benefit in my career from my Stanford and MIT pedigree?  Well, I am actually the exception – I deserve everything I got!  😉