This is Work in Progress, a newsletter that investigates the mysteries of a complicated economy. Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.
|
|
For a long time, I believed that an Ivy League education was basically a scam. Harvard and Yale would constantly boast about the success of their graduates, but it seemed obvious that most of the kids who attended those schools were bound to be successful no matter where they went for college. The fact that a student could get into an Ivy in the first place was the real predictor of success, I figured, not the degree they earned. But a recent essay by my colleague Rose Horowitch completely changed my view. Her story centers on a 2023 study that examined the postgraduation prospects of people who had been wait-listed at Ivy Plus schools (a category that also includes prestigious non-Ivy institutions such as MIT and Stanford). These students were virtually indistinguishable from one another—the only difference being that some of them had the fortune of being taken off the waitlist, while others did not. So if my theory was correct, then you’d see no significant difference in their life outcomes. I was dead wrong. A decade after graduation, the students who got off the waitlist for Ivy Plus universities were, on average, earning $101,000 more every year than those who had attended a flagship public school instead. They were also twice as likely to go to an elite graduate school and three times as likely to work at top law or consulting firms. What could possibly explain these results? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because these schools are any better at educating students. |
|
| The graduates of America’s most elite universities dominate our economy and culture so disproportionately that the statistics can seem like a mathematical glitch. Students at Ivy League schools and the similarly selective University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT together comprise less than half a percent of America’s undergraduate population. Yet their alumni represent more than 12 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs, 32 percent of all New York Times journalists, and 13 percent of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the population. So the people who go to the fanciest colleges tend to have the most successful careers—this is not exactly news. The question of why this is the case, however, is surprisingly tricky to answer. Perhaps the super-achieving and super-privileged teens who get into Princeton would have thrived after college no matter where they went. Maybe (hear me out) they owe their success to the academic lessons imparted by world-class faculty. Or the answer could just be that employers are dazzled by the name of the school on the diploma. The Brown University economist John Friedman has studied this question as much as anyone, and he thinks all those theories are missing the point. Friedman, best known for his work on economic mobility with the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, has become convinced that the most important thing a student gets from an Ivy Plus education isn’t instruction or prestige or even connections. It’s the opportunity to learn how to succeed in an environment filled with the world’s most talented and ambitious people. |
|
|
|
|
The shocking speed of China’s scientific rise. America’s reign as the world’s leading scientific superpower may soon be coming to an end, my colleague Ross Andersen argues. How the housing market split in two. As the economist Jess Remington points out, the difference in housing costs paid by new and existing homeowners has soared since interest rates began rising in 2022, creating what she calls the “new homeowner penalty.” Trump’s immigration economics aren’t working. The Trump administration has a simple theory for how to improve the economy: Reduce the supply of labor by restricting immigration, and employers will be forced to pay the remaining native-born workers higher wages. But when the economist Mike Konczal dug into the labor-market data for the past year, he found the opposite: Immigrant-heavy industries did indeed experience a collapse in job growth because of the administration’s deportation push, but they also experienced some of the slowest wage growth. |
|
Most Popular on The Atlantic | |
|
|
|
