A Tepid Defense of Elite Education
An inherent but hopefully not irreconcilable tension
A lot of the topics consuming online #discourse at the moment are depressingly stupid, but a couple of recent tweets collided in my feed in a way that touches on a core issue with what I do for a living. In chronological order, these are Ben Phelps spinning off Matt Yglesias:
and Michael Tremmel on the Ivy League vs. other schools (because nobody clicks links, I’ll also include his follow-up tweet):
These get at a fundamental dilemma with regard to the high-prestige end of higher education, which is that it’s fundamentally elitist business. The entire game here is to identify “the best students” by some metric or another and gather them together in the same institution to collaborate in research and education. That’s necessarily exclusionary, in a way that no amount of lofty rhetoric can change. The best functioning DEIB program in the academic world will still just be tinkering around the margins, because the whole point of the enterprise is to exclude the vast majority of students.
On some level, this makes the whole enterprise kind of difficult to defend, if diversity and inclusivity are your top priorities. And there are a good number of educational activists out there who, to their credit, argue for shifting the focus away from the Ivy League and NESCAC and the famous state flagship universities and toward the lower-prestige end, the regional state systems and community colleges who do most of the work of true mass education. If the goal is to serve the broadest possible public, then it makes sense to turn aside from the “highly rejective” schools (a term I encountered via Matt “Dean Dad” Reed, though I’m blanking on who he got it from) and toward those with open admissions policies, who take all comers.
At the same time, though, even the most passionate advocates of broad and inclusive public education aren’t exactly practicing open admissions to their own research groups, or networks of collaborators. Pretty much everyone everywhere prefers to be selective when it comes to their own students and colleagues, and choose to only work with “the best” people. I don’t mean this as an accusation of hypocrisy, though— the situations aren’t really comparable. I’m just pointing out that there’s a very fundamental sense in which absolutely everyone is bought into the notion that there’s a benefit to bringing together an exclusive group of people selected through some process, and having only “the best” people working on some problem.
(Well, OK, I probably shouldn’t be too confident about that “absolutely everyone.” It’s a big Internet, and I’m sure there’s some fully committed anti-elitist out there somewhere who would argue that all college classes and research groups should be assembled by random draw, or some such. I think it’s safe to say that this is not a widely held view, though.)
Of course, in the context of higher education more generally, it’s damnably difficult to determine exactly what that benefit is in any kind of systematic and quantitative manner. There’s no end of research showing that once you control for initial conditions, the benefits of attending an elite school are pretty limited in absolute terms. On any number of metrics of long-term success, students who just missed the cut-off for an elite school, or who were admitted but chose not to attend, are basically indistinguishable from those who did go to more prestigious institutions. Which raises some very real questions about exactly what we’re charging astronomical tuition for. We all clearly believe there’s something to the idea of selectivity when it comes to choosing students and colleagues, though.
If I had to defend the core concept of elite higher education from this critique, which I guess I do because I brought this whole subject up, I’d have to point to something less concrete and more atmospheric. That is, there’s something about being in a select group that forces everyone to raise their game, as it were. It’s a kind of ambient effect, a collective attitude that changes the approach of the median student in ways that work to everyone’s benefit.
As an example of what I mean, I’ll fall back on something I tend to say when people ask about the difference between being a student at Williams (the absolute pinnacle of prestige in the small-liberal-arts-college world) and a faculty member at Union (which is still pretty elite, but well down the ladder from Williams). I would say that the very best students I’ve worked with at Union, working in their majors, are every bit as good as the students I worked with at Williams when I was an undergrad. The difference between the schools is more about the behavior of the median student.
When I got to Union, I was thrown off for a while, because the things I heard students in the intro classes say didn’t sound any different than the things my Williams classmates and I would say to each other. They talked about blowing off class work to party, and so did we.
The difference is that when I was a student talking about blowing work off, we were lying. Not completely— I certainly pushed deadlines and turned in sloppy first drafts for classes I didn’t care about— but the socially acceptable threshold of academic work was just higher than it tends to be at Union. I was on the rugby club, which was renowned as a collection of hard-drinking lunatics, but better than half of the club officers my senior year were doing honors theses at the same time as the lunacy and drinking. It was a party-hard, work-hard culture, even if we rhetorically downplayed the amount of work that was being done frantically, behind the scenes.
For another example, I’d refer to this bit from the (sadly defunct, it seems) Long Shot podcast where Duncan Robinson talks about the difference between the locker-room vibe when he played at Williams and the vibe when he played at Michigan:
(the relevant bit starts about 45 minutes in, if it doesn’t automatically jump there).
My experience with Union has been that this is less true— when the students in my intro courses say they aren’t doing any work, they actually mean it. The socially acceptable level of academic performance is a notch lower than it was when I was an undergrad, and that makes a difference. It doesn’t hold back the top performers— as I said, I’d happily put the best of the students I’ve worked with here against any of the students I worked with at Williams. But they’re swimming against the tide a bit more here, and the median student isn’t putting quite as much emphasis on their academic performance, particularly outside their major. That makes a difference in the general vibe of the school, which accounts for the difference in their reputations (Williams having an endowment the size of a small country’s GDP doesn’t hurt, either).
(Again, Union is an excellent school, better than the vast majority of colleges, and our students are great on the whole. In the spirit of the NCAA tournament season, we’re, like, a four seed to Williams’s overall number one seed.)
I suspect that vibe shift does result in some net benefit to the median student beyond just the name recognition effect when some future employer looks at their resume. They’re forced to be a little more serious about academics, and come out with incrementally more understanding of and respect for the subjects they studied as a result. And I would guess that can be extrapolated across much of higher ed— the median Ivy League student is somewhat better off by virtue of spending four years in that atmosphere than other students from their high school cohort who started with similar credentials but ended up at Directional State U. instead, and so on.
And to bring this back around to that first tweet a bit, this should not in any way be taken as an attempt to undermine DEIB efforts. On the contrary, this is a case for diversifying the pool of students who have access to this rarified atmosphere, by identifying and developing students who don’t necessarily look like past generations of elite college students, and inviting them in. There’s a bit of tension between the ideas of promoting diversity, writ large, and the fundamentally exclusionary nature of elite education, but I don’t think they’re irreconcilable. I think there’s a real value to what we do, and also to wanting a wider range of people to experience the benefits.
Why don’t these benefits show up clearly in quantitative measures, though? I suspect it’s just that the measures available to us are really coarse-grained— I’m not sure you can tease all that much out of lifetime earnings data and the like. Particularly when the effects in question are fundamentally about attitudes and approaches to work and life, which may enrich life experiences without literally enriching an individual.
But, man, that’s a thin reed to hang a sticker price of eighty grand a year on… Which, of course, is the core existential crisis of modern higher education.
I think I’ve hedged this enough that it won’t get me in big trouble, especially posing on a Friday afternoon. Wish I had a more uplifting conclusion, though… If you’d like to see whether I either get canceled or find a source of uplift, here’s a button:
And if you’re either outraged or want to suggest a positive spin, the comments will be open:
I absolutely agree that peer effects are really important, but I’d suggest that some of the vibe difference being observed here may come from the particular way that Union (and some similar colleges) builds its class. I’m currently at a slightly lower ranked liberal arts college with a significantly higher racial, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity than Union (having attended a similar school to Williams and taught at both HYP and top-tier public R1). We’ve got a lot of less-well prepared students from weak public high schools, but they are much hungrier for higher ed than my HYP students, and without the tendency to start partying on Thursday night that I saw at HYP or the propensity for trying to cheat their way through pre-med physics. The average HYP or top-tier SLAC student does better than our students after graduation, but on average they started half a lap ahead. I think that advantage would be reversed when corrected for family income, education, and first-gen status — and the reason is that our students are challenging each other, and not hanging out with wealthy goof-offs. Real DEI is a net benefit for the academic vibe — but it doesn’t work if you’re not willing to also give up chasing full pay students who didn’t get into HYP or Williams and trying to optimize test scores for US News, and instead commit to building a class out of people who really want the opportunity for education.
Teaching at Robberbaron Bloodmoney University (which is very elite in some fields like CS and statistics, and, weirdly, drama, but only middling in the conventional liberal arts), I see a benefit which isn't quite the same as just raising the median with the same content, but closer to what DinoNerd says about his (?) experience at Harvard. I can teach serious courses and expect the typical student to keep up. I teach a required course for juniors and seniors who in my department's major which covers stuff that at most schools is for MS students or first-year PhDs. We have class sizes of 100 and they _get it_, most of them. If I tried to do that at Big State Flagship where I did my Ph.D., I could probably find either 10 students a year who are as good as my current ones - or 100 who think they want the course but can't handle the material (yet, at that speed). For scale, my alma mater has six times as many undergrads as my current school. OTOH, my wife teaches in one of our humanities departments (after going through elite liberal arts schools) and that is very much not her experience of our students.
There is, I think, some real value for the most capable students of giving them an education matched to their capacities, like training athletes separately from gym classes for ordinary schlubs. There is even some social value to doing this, at least if you think the disciplines we're introducing our majors to are socially useful. It's probably not as much social value as the Directional States, but frankly we're a rich society and can afford both.
(Obscuring some identifying details to speak frankly about students.)