Many Americans are frustrated by elite private universities. We’ve seen their hostility to diversity of opinion and free speech, politically imbalanced faculty and administrators, galling instances of antisemitism, enormous costs, unfair admissions processes, and more. For such reasons, public approval of higher education had been low and falling for some time, particularly on America’s right. And that was before the campus unrest of 2024, which was concentrated at the most affluent private schools.
As a result, a growing number of hiring managers claim to be looking elsewhere. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on firms souring on Ivy grads, and 13 federal appeals court judges now won’t hire clerks from Columbia. However, according to two major new studies, it would take a whole lot more to make even a dent in the influence of America’s most prestigious private schools.
It’s no secret that a few American institutions are led by a disproportionate number of elite-college graduates. For example, all nine of today’s US Supreme Court justices went to private colleges; seven went to Ivies as undergraduates, and eight went to Ivies for law school. And since 1989, every president other than Joe Biden has had at least one Ivy degree. But that might be only the tip of the iceberg. A 2023 paper by a team of Ivy economists about “Ivy+” schools (the eight Ivies plus four other highly selective privates) argued that “leadership positions in the US are disproportionately held by graduates” of these colleges. Covering the study for The Atlantic, a Harvard-educated author wrote an essay titled, “You Have to Care About Harvard” with the subtitle, “It creates the super-elite. The super-elite create America.”
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Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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