We talked about the basic findings of a paper released this summer on admissions at elite colleges (Chetty, Demin, and Friedman 2023). The paper amasses incredible data that seem to show that admissions to one of twelve elite schools makes a significant difference compared with attending a flagship state university in the odds of having a top 1% income and holding an elite position in business or government.
It’s a great paper. I look at it critically because that is what you should do with work that you respect.
The New York Times did a very nice write up of the paper. They include data about liberal arts colleges, so you can see where Pomona stacks up against Middlebury, CMC, Williams, Carleton, Swarthmore, and Wellesley. (Not too badly, assuming I am reading the graph correctly.)
I found Matt Yglesias’s review of the paper interesting.
There was a roundtable at the Brookings Institute titled “Who gets into college and why does it matter?” It looks fantastic, although I have not seen it myself.
The standard history of the SAT is Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test. Lemann wrote an article that, I assume, was the basis of one of the chapters of this book about the original developers of the SAT (Lemann 1995). I think it is worth reading to get a sense of where the SAT came from and what higher education was like in the early 20th century.
Among other things in that article, Lemann gives a quick sketch of Carl Brigham. I think that Brigham is who Liam had in mind in his comments today. In the 1920s, Brigham did indeed believe in the existence of a hierarchy among three European races, which he described as “Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean,” and he opined that the mixing of these races due to immigration from the Alpines and the Mediterraneans was leading to a decline in intelligence in the US. The past is truly a different country sometimes. In any event, he repudiated these views in the 1930s. Brigham developed the precursor of the SAT for Princeton in the 1920s but he was not enthusiastic about its general use since he did not think it had been adequately tested and he was worried that a universal test would distort teaching. He died in 1943 and development of the SAT, first for the military and then for universities, was taken over by others.
I also learned that another important figure in the development of testing, Ben Wood, was insulted the the University of Texas made him take introductory Spanish. He thought he should not have to do that because Spanish was his first language. He seems to have disliked Brigham. Fair enough!
One of the goals of the SAT for backers like James Conant, the President of Harvard, was to displace the “artificial aristocracy” of wealth and birth with a “natural aristocracy” based on merit or talent. Students of Phil 33 may recall this language from our discussion of John Rawls.
One thing that we did not touch on is the diversity of practices within the schools that were studied. MIT and Chicago do much better than the others, by the authors’ lights, with Dartmouth and Stanford doing the worst. If all twelve of these schools acted more like Chicago and MIT, they would be more fair in their admissions process. They do not have to go all the way to acting like the flagship state universities do.
I am not sure about an assumption that people who read this study make, namely, that the backgrounds of the people in the top 1% will make a difference in how they behave. Is that so? Or does everyone who gets in to the top 1% pretty much act like other people in the top 1%? It could be great for the individuals who get in and less great for those who get bounced out. But leaving the affected individuals to the side, I am curious about the social effects of shaking up membership in the top 1%. It is not obvious to me how it would go. Would the new members of the 1% retain their middle class values? If they did, what would they retain? Sometimes people who think they made it on their own talents think others can and should do the same. They may be harsher towards the 99% than the people they displace would be.
In fact, I am not even sure about whether changing access to the elite universities would change who occupies the so-called leadership positions, like Fortune 500 CEO or Supreme Court justice. They have documentation about incomes in the top 1% but since there are so few leadership positions, and their study stops when people are early in their careers, they cannot show an effect here. It is just conjecture: graduates of the Ivy+ schools occupy a large percentage of the leadership roles so admitting different students to those schools will, in turn, change the class background of people in those positions. But maybe there are other class markers that would be used to filter them out or maybe they would not think of pursuing those jobs in the first place. To give an anecdotal example, I think I was the kind of student they are studying: marginal ivy material who went to a state school. I find it hard to believe that if I had gone to Harvard I would have been any closer to being a CEO or a Supreme Court justice than I am now. And if my life had taken that kind of turn, I think it would be because I learned to behave and think like the other Fortune 500 CEOs and Supreme Court justices.
The Dale and Krueger paper’s conclusion is worth restating. They substantiate what Emily said.
we find a positive and significant effect of the return to college selectivity during a student’s prime working years in regression models that do not adjust for unobserved student quality for cohorts that entered college in 1976 and 1989 using administrative earnings data from the SSA’s Detailed Earnings Records. Based on these same regression specifications, we also find that the return to selectivity increases over the course of a student’s career. However, after we adjust for unobserved student characteristics, the return to college selectivity falls dramatically. For the 1976 cohort, the return to school-SAT score for the full sample is always indistinguishable from zero when we control for the average SAT score of the colleges that students applied to in order to control for omitted student variables. Similarly, the returns to other college characteristics (the Barron’s Index and net tuition) are substantial in the basic model that controls for commonly observed student characteristics but small and never statistically distinguishable from zero in the self-revelation model, which (partially) controls for unobserved student variables.
There were noteworthy exceptions for subgroups. First, for the 1989 cohort, the estimates indicate a positive return to attending a more selective school for black and Hispanic students, which is robust in the selection-adjusted model. Second, our results suggest that students from disadvantaged family backgrounds (in terms of educational attainment) experience a higher return to attending a selective college than those from more advantaged family backgrounds. For example, for the 1989 cohort, our estimates from the selection-adjusted model imply a positive return to attending a more selective college for students who had parents with an average of less than 16 years of schooling; however, the return to attending a more selective college was zero (or even negative) for students whose parents averaged 16 or more years of education. One possible explanation for this pattern is that while most students who apply to selective colleges may be able to rely on their families and friends to provide job-networking opportunities, networking opportunities that become available from attending a selective college may be particularly valuable for black and Hispanic students, and for students from less educated families. (Dale and Krueger 2011, 23–24, italics added)
Finally, there are just too few seats at elite universities to make a significant difference in equal opportunity on the social level. The reforms that Chetty, Deming, and Friedman propose would give more people outside the top of the income distribution a shot at attending one of the Ivy+ schools. I think they would make those schools better. They would also make society a little more fair. But only a little because it is still going to be a lottery with a tiny number of winners. It is not going to do anything for the people that Yasmine pointed to since they are not going to score high enough on the SAT to be competitive.
Basically, I care more about society than I do about Harvard.
If you care about equal opportunity, in my opinion, you should look at schools that serve a larger portion of the population and especially students who, for whatever reason, are not going to attend the Ivy+ schools.
If you care about equality, in my opinion, you should think about decoupling how well people do in life from things like intelligence, test scores, or educational achievement. Equality and equal opportunity are two different things, as I understand them. In some cases, they can pull in opposite directions. I think that I am in the same neighborhood as Aarushi on this point; at least, her remarks on the place of equal opportunity resonated with me. We will talk more about this when we read Bernard Williams’s essay on equality.
I’m sick and having weird nightmares. This is what it was last night. I work for a job network. The customers pay the company to be connected to people, usually former customers, who control access to the best jobs. But the customers have to wait four years to cash in. To keep them from getting bored, my job is to offer what the company calls “classes.” I am supposed to make them mildly informative and occasionally amusing, three hours a week for fourteen weeks. About once every three weeks, I read computer generated essays and put letters on them.
I am relived to wake up and get back to reality. But some of the nightmare was provoked by this essay. I am going to try to say what it is.
We are trying to quantify the difference that attending an elite college as opposed to a good public one makes to the rest of a student’s life. We know from Dale and Krueger that there is no difference in the average incomes of graduates with similar qualifications like SAT scores; Chetty et. al. confirm this. But Chetty, Deming and Friedman show that it does make a difference in the odds of having a top 1% income and they plausibly conjecture that it will increase the odds of entering what they call leadership positions, like Fortune 500 CEO or Supreme Court justice.
No one maintains that the difference is due to the quality of the education. Suppose you were on the wait list at Harvard, did not get in, and went to the University of Illinois instead. According to Chetty, et. al., your odds of joining the top 1% would go down. But that is not because the University of Illinois does not teach the special things that Harvard teaches. Rather, the case is based on social networks and signaling: if you get in to an elite school, you get the connections you need to get into the tippy top of society. Or, at least, you have a name on your resume that will be taken as a sign that you belong.
Does that bother me because it means my job is less important than I think it is? Maybe I just need to get over myself. Or perhaps I should just calm down. All good colleges provide a good education. That is important! And no one says otherwise. The elite schools offer something on top: the job network. That is important too, even if it has very little to do with me. But not everything has to be about me. It’s OK.
So I talked myself down; the nightmare is just a dream, I am here in reality which is pretty much the way I thought it was. I still wish we could separate the educational part from the networking part. Everyone would be a little clearer about what they are doing.