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Wednesday, January 12, 2005
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BEING BLAND
“Between 1980 and 2001, the percentage of top executives whose undergraduate degrees came from Ivy League schools fell by nearly a third from 14 percent to 10 percent,” writes Daniel Gross in today‘s Slate. “Others who paid through the nose for their sheepskins also lost ground. The percentage of top execs who attended private non-Ivy schools (Williams College, Notre Dame, Stanford, etc.) fell from 54 percent in 1980 to 42 percent in 2001. Meanwhile, the proportion of those who attended public universities soared from 32 percent to 48 percent. A similar dynamic was seen in graduate degrees as well: far fewer on a percentage basis from Ivy League schools and far more on a percentage basis from public universities.” In considering why “prestigious degrees aren't as valuable at America's largest corporations as they were a generation ago. If you want to run GE, you might be better off attending the University of Connecticut than Yale,” Gross suggests that “something has changed about the character of the student bodies at many Ivy League schools in recent decades. With the rising ability of the wealthy to smooth the path to admission by paying private-school tuition and hiring college advisers and SAT-prep tutors — and with college tuition far outpacing financial aid growth — rich kids are more likely to get in, and to attend, Ivy League schools than in the past. A widely quoted study from the Century Foundation found that 74 percent of the students at 146 selective colleges surveyed came from the top socioeconomic quartile, while only 10 percent come from the bottom half! Harvard President Larry Summers devoted his 2004 commencement speech to this phenomenon.” Because of deep-pile family wealth, Gross says, “on a percentage basis, fewer Ivy League graduates than public school graduates today need to find stable, high-paying jobs at big companies. More of them can afford to traipse around Asia for a year or pursue a career in film-making. It could be that the already rich and comfortable are simply less interested in pursuing careers in large corporations than their less-comfortable public-school peers for purely economic reasons.” A Harvard law blogger has a similar take: “At a school for the ruling class, e.g., Harvard or Yale, it really doesn't matter how effective the pedagogy is. If Biff doesn't learn calculus his daddy can still buy him a seat in Congress. What Biff really needs to do is meet other members of the ruling class even if they are from different majors … Similarly a school targeted to children of the ruling class need not worry about the parents' ability to support Muffy for 4 years. Much more important is that Muffy have plenty of time off to take the Grand Tour of Europe, hop the family fractional jet for the December trip to St. Barts, spend a summer interning in Cousin (Senator) Bob's office.“ Gregg Easterbrook and David Brooks disagree. They say it’s not that Ivy grads don’t want important jobs, but that many of these people are too boring and spiritless to get such jobs in the first place. “The college admissions process,” writes Easterbrook, “has become almost entirely a test of your ability to please adults — or specifically the sorts of adults who are college admissions officers. There's nothing wrong with pleasing such people. But once you get out into the world, where there are no rules and things are not structured and your own initiative is more important than your ability to please, then everything changes. I do think we've seen that the top schools increasingly are producing extremely conventional people. Not that there's anything wrong with producing conventional people, but you might think that graduates from Yale or Wellesley or Amherst would be the ones to go on to be really artistic and creative or become great engineers or inventors and make important discoveries. You're seeing instead that the important discoveries and the artistic creativity are coming from people out of places like Colby and Colorado College — because they haven't gone through this process of sacrificing their lives to conventionality.” If Brooks and Easterbrook are right, recent Ivy grads aren’t rejecting corporate life for film-making and Asia-treks. They're sitting around being bland. ********************************************************************* ADDENDUM, January 12, 2005: PATHETIC. |