Is Higher Education Really To Blame For The So-Called Diploma Divide?

David Brooks’s article “How The Ivy League Broke America” in The Atlantic Falls Short

In New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks’s piece “How The Ivy League Broke America” in the December issue of The Atlantic, he addresses several explanations for America’s socioeconomic divide as based on educational attainment. However, the title he allowed his lengthy article to run on was a poor choice: the Ivy League, which metonymically refers to prestigious institutions of higher education, has not “broken” our nation. 

Brooks argues that our society’s distribution of status seems overly predicated on whether or not one attends a top university. He presents some damning evidence: of a survey of leaders across various professions, over half had gone to the same 34 institutions of higher education. Given the same consulting project to work on, according to one study a Yale student would perform only 1.9% “more proficient” than a Cleveland State student. Brooks writes that in 8th grade, children of rich families perform at four grade levels higher than children of poor families. Income level correlates to SAT scores. Students from the top 1% are 77 times more likely to attend an “Ivy League-level school” than students whose families earn less than $30,000 a year. Brooks provides examples of how education level can also affect social success, such as the fact that people who graduate from college are more likely to marry. 

I have great respect for David Brooks: so much, in fact, that I read and enjoyed reading his thorough article. I agree with him in that these statistics denote societal shortcomings which require remedies. I disagree with him in that prestige higher education bears responsibility for the troubling socioeconomic gap between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans.

He asserts that colleges and families of college applicants involve themselves in a vortex of prestige-seeking. Then, once students graduate from college, this vortex extends to workplaces, where firms prioritize graduates of ‘core’ universities” over potentially more qualified graduates of less renowned institutions. Brooks himself seems to corroborate society’s deep bond with status. He cites a Northwestern sociologist, a Vanderbilt study, a Stanford study, a Penn psychologist, a Yale professor, a Harvard economist, a UCLA professor, a Harvard sociologist, a Harvard professor, another Harvard professor, another Harvard economist, and a Penn political scientist. Of course students want to attend these institutions: the schools are leaders in research and thought. Brooks pegs his argument on the idea that high schoolers apply to colleges for prestige first, with a design on clinching a lucrative job thereafter. He discredits the idea that students primarily apply based on how his or her particular interest connects with particular institutions. I may be naive, but Brooks seems to simplify this point, running with the idea that the attractiveness of well-regarded institutions is some harbinger of societal decay.

Likewise, Brooks simplifies the current prevailing method of pre-college education as a “gigantic system of extrinsic rewards,” comparing high school to a “series of hurdles.” I was no Chem10 enthusiast, but I would like to think that my struggle with chemistry was productive and not simply exhausting. Yet it helps Brooks’s argument to declare the modern method of schooling inadequate, because if high school is a random assortment of challenges from which colleges determine one’s intelligence, then socioeconomic stratification really is predicated on the prestige of one’s alma mater. In this case, the Ivy League has in fact broken America. 

Brooks advocates for alternative, project-based schooling as a remedy. These schools emphasize a student’s character over his numerical acumen. But many colleges already evaluate applicants holistically. The return of many prestigious institutions to requiring SAT scores reinforces the efficacy of quantitative data in determining what a college wants as part of its class. If the top 34 institutions unilaterally decided to put into effect the following methods Brooks recommends to determine a students’ admission: adding tests called the Grit Scale, the Moral Character Questionnaire, the High Potential Trait indicator; and incorporating application elements like a personal “portfolio” of achievements and more complex “Mastery Transcript,” would certainly throw off admission statistics. Drastically altering the application process would make it more challenging for officers of admission to settle on a candidate, make students less eager to submit applications given all these extra hoops, and exacerbate the paucity of lower-income students applying to college. 

The efficient market hypothesis posits that markets exist in their most efficient form. The awesome work of free market capitalism extends to secondary schools and higher education. If the University of Chicago was broadly denounced for perpetuating an American caste system, students would not apply. Despite the stress and uncertainty of working to get into a given selective college, students still try their luck. 

Brooks sees the durable popularity of Donald Trump, especially the socioeconomic dissatisfaction among the non-college-educated working class, as the offshoot of higher education’s faulty philosophy. Rather than reforming admissions, as Brooks details, perhaps colleges should seek to further their diversity of political thought in response to a Trumpified world. Growing an educated, non-incendiary conservative establishment opposed to the anti-institutional Trump movement would be a laudable goal. No institution is faultless, but America has higher education to thank in large part for its lasting success as a nation.

George Thornton