Harvard Isn't a College

Elite research universities take up too much space in the education policy conversation

Memorial Chapel at Union College

We’re still a little ways out from the peak of college admissions decisions, which brings with it a vast number of College Admissions Thinkpieces like the heliacal rising of Sirius signalling the imminent flooding of the Nile. We’re getting a little early surge this year, though, thanks to the US Supreme Court announcing that it will hear arguments in a case challenging Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies. That’s led to a bunch of discussion of various admissions practices, in anticipation of the conservative majority on the court presumably ruling against the status quo. This ranges from offhand tweets:

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Banning legacy admissions seems like such a layup that it's kind of weird there's not more of a consensus against it.

to reader surveys like this by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, to a bit of a broadside by Jonathan Chait, to Matt Yglesias basically doing a literature review in his Substack. I’m mostly going to talk about that, so I’ll do the embed thing to make it extra prominent:

What to do after affirmative action

This is mostly pretty well-trodden ground at this point, with Yglesias running through the usual range of studies showing that the ugly hodge-podge of admissions preferences in use at elite schools mostly benefit white, Black, and Hispanic students at the expense of Asians, that the hypothetical mismatch resulting from affirmative action preferences isn’t much of a thing, and that the benefits of attending elite institutions aren’t really that big (in financial terms) for students. This last comes from a couple of classic studies that compare students who got into elite schools but went elsewhere to their demographic peers at the elite institutions.

That last one’s always the “too much fucking perspective” moment for me, given that I’ve spent most of my life in and around elite higher education. I find myself slightly questioning the utility of my whole career, which is mildly unpleasant. But, as Yglesias notes, it’s kind of tough to justify devoting huge resources to the really elite institutions, when a comparable amount of money would be better spent on improving the education for students at schools a ways down the prestige ladder. I end up in the weird position of arguing for squishy unquantifiable quality of life benefits that come from spending your college years in the company of students of a similar academic caliber.

I do think, though, that there’s a slight category mistake being made in a lot of discussions about the value of Harvard and other super-elite schools as if it comes mostly from educating undergraduates. In a lot of ways, it’s a mistake to think of Harvard as a college at all— I’ve joked before that it’s really better thought of as a $53 billion hedge fund getting a tax break by running a university as a side hustle.

But that’s maybe a little too cynical, missing the mark in the other direction. The actually important product of Harvard that justifies the concentration of elite talent and financial resources isn’t self-important bachelors of arts, but the research that the faculty and graduate students generate. That’s something that really does require pulling together a super-elite cadre of folks and throwing a lot of money at them. Which is why the Ivy League schools are somewhat famous for not actually devoting much faculty time to their undergrads.

(Ancient history time: Back when I was going through the college search process, we took a tour at Princeton, and one of the other people there was a professor at Stanford who was just killing time waiting to meet his daughter. My dad struck up a conversation with this guy, because that’s what my dad does, and asked him what he thought about the various schools I was looking at (I ended up applying to Princeton, MIT, Cornell, Swarthmore, and Williams). His response was “Honestly, the bigger schools don’t really care about the undergrads. Go to one of the small colleges; you’ll have a better experience, and you can always do the Ivy League for grad school.”)

Of course, this doesn’t actually solve my personal existential crisis, as that argument really only works for the elite tier of R1 institutions. It’s not so great for the elite small liberal arts colleges I’ve devoted so much time to— that’s not to say that research isn’t an important part of what we do, but it’s less clear that we generate enough new knowledge to count as a net win for society. So I keep falling back on the squishy unquantifiable quality-of-life stuff.

I do think, though, that there’s a sense in which this fits perfectly well with Yglesias’s larger theme (which of course is echoed by folks like Matt Reed and Freddie deBoer and numerous others) that we should worry less about the super-elite Ivy League plus tier of schools when considering the costs and benefits of higher education. We would be much better off, in terms of overall education, investing in shoring up and improving the vastly larger middle tier of public institutions that educate the majority of college-going Americans. I don’t know that I’d shift money away from the elite R1 sector, but they don’t really need any new money. They’ll be just fine with what they already have. Unlike their public counterparts.

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This, of course, doesn’t actually resolve anything, but it’s one of the things I always think when these topics come around, and now I’ve typed it out. Here are some buttons:

and if you want to argue with my definitions, the comments will be open.