Sometimes a nation's most cherished idea about itself can act like a slow poison. That happened in Britain after the Second World War with the idea that Britain remained a great power. This produced the debacle of Anglo-French Suez intervention in 1956. It prevented Britain from becoming a founding member of the European Union (thereby shaping it in a more liberal direction) and distracted it from the labor of rebuilding the economy.
The equivalent across the Atlantic is the idea that America is the world's greatest meritocracy, a rebuke to the closed aristocratic societies of the Old World. This assumption was reasonable in the 19th century when millions of immigrants fled class-bound Europe in search of wealth and opportunity. It was a reasonable assumption for much of the 20th century--particularly after the Second World War--when an expanding economy created the world's biggest middle class.
But over the past 20 years it has ceased to be true as inequality increased and mass education deteriorated. The U.S. has lower levels of social mobility than most European countries. It is also generating a ruling class that is beginning to resemble the hereditary elite of old Europe rather than the open elite of Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America."
America's conviction that it is a meritocracy has blinded it to this development and led it to tolerate practices that would be beyond the pale in supposedly class-bound societies such as Great Britain. Old Europe is astonished by the practice of American ambassadors buying their political appointments with lavish donations to party funds, thereby leap-frogging over professional diplomats with sometimes embarrassing consequences. This is something that European powers abandoned a century ago.
Old Europe is even more astonished by the preferences that America's elite universities give to the children of alumni ("legacies") or to people who donate mounds of cash to the institutions. Only a country that is convinced it is a meritocracy can tolerate such flagrant abuses of the meritocratic principle.
Is America waking up to the reality that it's not as meritocratic as it thinks it is? The recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action for minorities had the unexpected effect of igniting debate about affirmative action for the rich. The majority's opinion included several swipes at legacy admissions in order to undermine the tone of moral superiority adopted by the defendants of the status quo.
And the mainstream press devoted almost as much space to debating the merits of legacies as it did to lamenting the death of race-based admissions. Six conservative judges have done more to stir up debate about the flagrant abuse that is legacy admissions than an army of social justice warriors.
A new study by Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard University and John N. Friedman of Brown University is perfectly timed to give this debate analytical rigor and empirical heft. The three economists establish two vital points by poring over a combination of anonymized admissions data to Ivy-Plus Colleges (the "plus" being Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago) and income tax returns.
The first is that elite colleges make a big difference when it comes to admission to the very summit of American society, what might be loosely called "the establishment." Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, yet these 12 institutions account for more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. senators, half of all Rhodes Scholars, three-fourths of Supreme Court justices, and 13 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners. The staffs of America's leading newspapers, particularly The New York Times, are thick with Ivy graduates.
By comparing two groups of wait-listed students--those who are admitted to Ivy-Plus universities and those who are rejected--they note that the successful are much more likely to reach the top 1 percent of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school, and work for a prestigious firm.
The second is that, for all their vaunted commitment to diversity and social justice, Ivy-Plus colleges are machines for perpetuating or perhaps amplifying class privilege. One in six students at Ivy League schools has parents in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. This is not just because the children of the rich are more likely to apply to elite colleges.
Nor is it because the children of the rich have higher academic scores than middle class applicants: Children from the top 1 percent of the income distribution (more than $611,000) are 55 percent more likely to secure admission than a typical middle-class applicant with the same SAT or ACT scores, and children from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in.
It is because elite colleges deliberately discriminate in favor of the rich.
The economists point to three mechanisms that perpetuate such discrimination: the preferences given to the children of alumni, to private schools that specialize in producing strong non-academic credentials, and to athletes. Legacy students from families in the top 1 percent are five times as likely to be admitted as the average applicant with similar test scores.
This adds to other damning data on the subject: Evidence submitted by the plaintiffs in the affirmative action case reveals that 34 percent of legacy applicants were admitted to Harvard compared with 6 percent of non-legacies, while an Associated Press review of the practice revealed that prominent universities such as Cornell, Dartmouth, Notre Dame and the University of Southern California have more legacy students than Black students.
Applicants from private schools (such as Phillips Academy and Choate Rosemary Hall) are more than twice as likely to be admitted as those who attend public high schools with the same test results. This is largely because such private schools are good at burnishing CVs with extra-curricular activities, flowery letters of recommendation, and judicious phone calls.
The most flagrant abuse is with athletes, who are admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same test scores. Forget about the idea that athletes are likely to be minority children from inner cities. They are almost always rich whites who specialize in sports--particularly elite sports such as fencing or golf--from an early age.
One in eight students from the top 1 percent was an athlete. The comparable figure for the bottom 60 percent is one in 50.
In the days when Britain had a pipeline from the playing fields of the great public schools to Oxbridge colleges, such athletes were referred to as "flannelled fools and muddied oafs." Today that dubious tradition is stronger in America than Britain.
Just as affirmative action for minorities gives them a moral boost, affirmative action for the rich provides them with a material boost. College sports teams solidify alumni loyalty (and donations) while reinforcing the college spirit. A 2022 study of admission data for an anonymous elite northeastern college found that legacies are much more likely to give money and time to their alma mater and massively more likely to give big donations, with 42 percent of legacy graduates flagged as potential top givers compared with 6 percent of non-legacy graduates. Big gifts help to keep America's universities at the forefront of academic research, the argument goes; they also give them the wherewithal to fund poorer students.
But such arguments are hardly dispositive: What do fancy gyms or generous research grants count for if you pollute the academic ethic by selling places to the highest bidder? With an endowment of $53.2 billion as of June 2021, Harvard could survive on its interest for an age without sending out any more begging letters to alumni. Princeton has an even higher endowment per capita than Harvard.
The case against positive discrimination for the rich is gathering momentum. Wesleyan University recently announced that it will end legacy admissions, adding its name to an honor roll that now boasts Johns Hopkins, Amherst, and Carnegie Mellon and has long included Harvard's meritocratic neighbor MIT. Several advocacy groups are suing Harvard over the legacy admissions, citing the high proportion of legacy students who are white as well as rich.
An opinion poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center found that 75 percent of Americans were against legacy admissions, up from 68 percent in 2019, and higher than the proportion of Americans who are against affirmative action for minorities.
The Chetty et al research demonstrates that Ivy-Plus colleges could easily diversify the pipeline into America's elite, long their claimed intention, by the simple expedient of getting rid of "hooks" that benefit the already privileged. Doing so would increase the share of students from the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution by 8.7 percentage points, adding 144 students from families earning less than $240,000 to the typical Ivy-Plus college.
Such an increase in poorer students is comparable to the reduction in the number of Black and Hispanic students that would follow from the elimination of race-based affirmative action. And it would increase social diversity without compromising economic outcomes.
Removing unjustified privileges for the rich should only be the beginning, given how skewed the admission to elite institutions is to the plutocracy, and given the price that America is paying for this in terms of social tension and lost ability. Several elite colleges now make attendance free for families who earn below a certain income--$100,000 at Stanford and Princeton and $85,000 at Harvard--though so far this has had surprisingly little impact on the class-composition of the universities.
Chetty et al make the case for "need affirmative" admissions policies in which low-income students with high academic ratings are given an admission preference. Others point to the virtues of the Texas model in which students in the top 10 percent of graduating classes in all the state's schools, in poor districts as well as rich, are guaranteed places in the University of Texas system.
The renewed debate is a sign that the U.S. status quo--plutocracy diluted by affirmative action for favored minorities--is breaking apart. Two arguments I have made:
1. Planting elite academic schools in poorer areas. This strategy worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when America was facing similar problems with social calcification, and progressive educationalists founded schools such as San Francisco's Lowell High School (1856) and New York City's Stuyvesant High School (1904) that proved extraordinarily successful in getting the children of poor immigrants into elite universities.
2. Preserving standardized tests in the face of calls for holistic assessment. There is evidence that such tests favor richer children who can afford expensive test prep. But they are much less class-biased than holistic assessments that give you points for doing community service in Guatemala or excelling at fencing.
Highly selective public colleges such as the University of California, Berkeley that follow more standardized processes in evaluating applications exhibit smaller disparities in admission rates by parental income than private colleges that make more use of holistic evaluations.
In Ivy-Plus universities, standardized tests are also "substantially better" predictors of success after college than the non-academic factors (polish or academic ability); according to Chetty et al, such non-academic factors may "negatively predict" later success.
Let us start by abolishing obvious abuses such as legacies and athletic boosts. It is unusual for an economic research paper to point to such a clear-cut solution to a big social problem. But let us go further and use time-honored tools such as standardized tests and selective high schools to make a reality once again of one of America's most cherished ideas about itself:that it is a country where ability can be matched with opportunity and where success in life is distributed according to the logic of merit rather than the lottery of parental income.