You Don’t Need to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies

This post is a piece I wrote recently about an issue that’s been on my mind for a while. Here’s a link to the article, and here’s a link to the slide talk I gave on the subject.

The story is in the title.

You Don’t Need to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies:

Graduates of Major Public Universities Do Just as Well

David Labaree

            American students are killing themselves in pursuit of exclusive educational credentials that they don’t need in order to be highly successful in life.  The incentives built into our meritocratic educational system encourage ambitious students to settle for nothing less than the very highest grade, the most selective college and graduate school, and the most prestigious career option.  Being very good at school is not enough; you need to be the best.  But there are always others who are doing even better.

            In itself, a competitive educational structure can be a good thing for both the individuals who go through it and the society they enter on graduation.  It’s a system that rewards people who demonstrate individual merit by giving them commensurate opportunities in the pursuit of social position.  No one wants to go back to the premodern system of inheriting your position from your parents.  Even people already in high position don’t pine for the old way of doing things; they want meritocratic legitimacy for their children’s high future status, which can only come through the purifying medium of high scholarly achievement. 

            The problem arises when the pursuit of merit becomes a chase after the elusive and vanishingly small chance to attain a spot at the tippy-top of the system.  If this is the aim, then there is no possible academic edge that is too small for you to pursue.  Every point in your GPA matters, along with every position in the rank order of colleges and workplaces.  There is no such thing as collecting too many merit points, attaining too much exclusivity, or working too hard.  In the zero-sum game of academic competition, you’re potentially a loser if there’s still someone above you on the ladder of success.

            The signs of this pathology are everywhere. Consider the stress on getting your child into the gifted program and AP class in school.  Or the practice of giving enhanced grades to students taking advanced classes, so that your children can graduate with a grade point average above 4.0, certifying that they are greater than perfect.  And then, of course, is the frightening competition to get into one of a tiny group of colleges famous for rejecting the large majority of applicants. 

It’s all too easy to ridicule this status race.  Think of Groucho Marx’s line, “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would accept me as a member,” which could be the motto for US college admission counselors.  And the lunacy starts a lot earlier than the junior year of high school.  Check out the recurring articles in the Times about parents scheming to get their children into the most exclusive preschools.  Beyond parody.

            As the US surgeon general pointed out in his 2021 special health advisory, however, this competition is no laughing matter.  There is a mental health crisis in our schools, and much of it comes from the stresses of hypercompetition.  Between 2009 and 2019, the proportion of high school students who serious considered suicide rose 36%.  And according to a recent report by that American Psychological Association, mental health problems are particularly acute among college students.  One study showed that more than 60% of college students had a mental health problem, and a survey found that three-quarters reported psychological distress.

            A recent article in Atlantic by Rachel Shin shows how an absurd level of competition has infected even the most elite levels of the system.  She reports that Yale undergraduates have exacerbated stress by turning the application process for admission to what are supposed to be benign extracurricular activities into a cutthroat struggle in which most applicants find themselves judged by peers to be unworthy of membership.  Even winners of the meritocratic rat-race like Ivy League students find themselves stressed out by a competition that never abates.  The aim of these struggles is to gain invidious distinction over others through the pursuit of exclusivity for its own sake.  At some campuses, like Stanford, the approach is not to compete for access to a few organizations but to start your own.  Undergrads there have a choice of more than 600 organizations, which amounts to one club for every 13 students.  Why should I seek membership in your club when I can be president of my own?

            As I suggested at the beginning, however, there is a glimmer of hope in this story.  You don’t have to play the game of aiming for the very top and accepting nothing less.  As a recent study by Raj Chetty and colleagues has showed, getting into the very most exclusive colleges does give you an advantage.  But only if your aim is make it into the one percent.  They compared students who attended a public flagship university with those attending an Ivy-Plus university (including Duke, Chicago, and Stanford).  At the pinnacle of social distinction, the latter enjoyed a substantial advantage.  Ivy grads were 90 percent more likely to attend an elite graduate school and 222 percent more likely to work at an elite firm.  They were also 44 percent more likely to end up with an income in the top 1 percent. 

            When you look at average income, however, the advantage largely disappears.  Ivy Plus grads on average ended up in an income percentile that was only two percentage points higher than grads from the flagship publics (percentile 79.02 vs. 77.65).  This finding concurs with earlier studies that showed no significant effect on average income.  Flagship public universities are also relatively selective, but they’re accepting students in the double digits rather than the single digits.  And guess what, their grads do really well.  Maybe getting into a really good school is a great thing.  If you aren’t fixated on being number one, then why kill yourself trying?

            And the news gets even better.  An ongoing study by David Kang shows that most CEOs of top companies did not go to Ivies.  For the Fortune 100 CEOs in 2022, 12 percent went to an Ivy for a BA and 10 percent for an MBA.  Of the top 20, only Amazon’s Andy Jassy got an Ivy BA, while 14 CEOs attended public colleges.  Apple’s Tim Cook went to Auburn and Warren Buffet went to Nebraska. 

            One of the things these data suggest is that some parts of the occupational hierarchy are more accessible to nonelite degrees than others.  Companies tend to promote from within based on performance, so the glamor of your BA doesn’t matter as much.  Chetty’s data show that law firms and investment banks are much more likely to select based on academic brand name.  Academic hiring is also particularly afflicted with Ivy lust.  And if you want to get on the Supreme Court you had best attend an Ivy; eight out of nine of the current members did (half Harvard, half Yale). 

            But, as Frank Bruni recently reported, the same is not the case for political leaders.  Of the top two leaders in the current House and Senate, only Charles Schumer went to a private university (Harvard). Mitch McConnell went to Louisville, Mike Johnson to Louisiana State, and Hakeem Jeffries to Binghamton. Presidents from the first Bush through Trump attended Ivies; but the 40 years between Roosevelt and Bush, only Kennedy attended an Ivy.  Joe Biden went to Delaware and Kamala Harris attended Howard. 

            Keep in mind that the large majority of US colleges and universities are nonselective.  Of the 2,000 four-year institutions in the country, only about 50 have an acceptance rate below 30 percent.  And it’s the nonselective colleges that provide the most upward mobility for their graduates.  The reason is that the most selective schools are filled with students from families who are already at the top.  For example, another Chetty study shows that two-thirds of Stanford undergrads come from the top 20 percent in income, half from the top 10 percent, and one-sixth from the top one percent.  Meanwhile 22 percent of Cal State Los Angeles come from the bottom 20 percent in income and 10 percent came from the lowest quintile and ended up in the highest quintile.  Nearly half moved up two quintiles in income.  So rags to riches stories still happen in US education, but not in the Ivies.  Open access regional state universities and community colleges are where the greatest opportunities lie.

            Whether you are a working class high school student trying to move up in the world or an upper-middle class student trying to preserve your position by landing a good job, there is no reason for you to have to beat your head against the wall of the meritocracy.  You can do well for yourself by doing well in school, and this doesn’t require you to struggle mightily in the futile effort to be number one. 

Schools need to dial back the pressure on students by playing down the competitive element and playing up the value of personal accomplishment and substantive learning.  Parents need to resist the temptation to push their children to achieve at all cost and settle for nothing less than getting into Harvard.  And colleges need to spend less time promoting their exclusivity and more time promoting their programs of learning and the wide range of opportunities this learning can open up for their graduates.  We shouldn’t be willing to permit our system of education to continue driving our children crazy and pushing them into the depths of despair.