Flagship graduates outnumber elite-school alums in many positions of power and achievement, especially in state government
Do the paths to leadership and influence in America run directly through the campuses of the most exclusive colleges? That’s a common perception and the clear implication of two recent academic studies, which report that graduates of a small cadre of elite universities disproportionately populate America’s leadership class and key institutions.
In a 2024 article in Nature, Jonathan Wai and colleagues show that a tiny number of prestigious schools produce a large percentage of America’s most influential and accomplished individuals, including U.S. presidents, U.S. senators, Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, Fortune 500 CEOs, and 25 other lofty categories. In a 2023 report by Opportunity Insights, a team of economists led by Harvard University’s Raj Chetty, found that attending one of the 12 “Ivy-plus” universities (the eight Ivy League schools plus Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford) causally increases students’ chances of landing in elite positions. These themes reached a broader audience in late 2024 with David Brooks’s much-discussed cover story in The Atlantic, which considered the generations-long outsized influence of Ivy universities on American leadership and culture.
My research, however, paints a different picture, showing that public universities, especially flagships, play a major role in the formation of American leaders. The same applies to a host of underappreciated private universities. Although my study, “Publics and Place: Leadership Development by State-Run and State-Based Universities,” does not directly contradict the other two, it yields different results, largely because I use a different definition of what constitutes American leadership positions and prestigious professional landing spots.
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Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here. This piece is based on a recent report.
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