The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

• Politics
• Economics
• The Media
• Culture

• Home
• About
• Archive
• Search

Leave a Reply

1. You’re use of “becoming” implies that there was a point in the past when the U.S. wasn’t a “status society.” But this isn’t true to history: graduates of the Ivy League have run this country since well before WWII. Just look at Harvard Law’s historical alumni list if you want an idea of how deep those roots go.

   Which brings me to my second point, the qualification cited about Obama was that he was the first black president of the HLR. The point wasn’t that he “was” harvard, it was that he had the chops to be the first black to reach the pinnacle of an institution that has historically provided so many of this countries power elite. In other words, its a claim that only makes sense in the context of a “status society” that existed long before obama came around. There’s no “becoming” about it.

   There are plenty of good criticisms that can be made of the hyper-meritocracy surrounding the Ivy League and its equivalents, but its not productive to run them all together into some general declinist narrative about the state of American society.

   — salacious · Feb 15, 11:08 PM · #

2. Why does that make you have a lot of faith in for-profit universities? Shouldn’t that adverse selection mechanism drive the opposite conclusion?

   According to the numbers high school graduates have over twice the unemployment than college graduates and above right now – and that’s not pivoted on top bachelor degrees whose numbers I imagine are even lower; I imagine your second scenario will play out, and we’ll see the crisis hit hardest at the lowest levels of education up through the second tiers colleges.

   Lahde’s comment was an f-u letter to his boss (a disturbing one at that), not exactly a comment on the actual labor markets. The real question is to what extent top employers will bypass the top schools as a result of this crisis and go one layer down. My suspicion is not much.

   I agree with salacious though; this isn’t exactly new.

   — rortybomb · Feb 15, 11:14 PM · #

3. I think one place where it’s natural for things like Ivy-league degrees to matter more is for things like grad school; I mean, you can’t blame the people who distribute the credentials for credentialism.

   — Freddie · Feb 15, 11:45 PM · #

4. PEG, you write:

   A vital strength of American society is its greater mobility and pragmatism, the fact that people tend to be more valued for who they are and what they do than where they went to school.

   In the job market, I’m with Mike Spence that high-falutin’ degrees operate on the issue of information asymmetry between candidate and employer. So I agree with you that Ivy degrees tend to increase in value when the market cools and the cost of employee underperformance goes up.

   ‘Course, here in the South degrees matter a lot less than affability when it comes time to socialize (drink).

   — JA · Feb 16, 01:22 AM · #

5. Anyone remember David Brooks’ (I think) Atlantic article, “The Organization Kid?” That was a pretty good piece of pop sociology right there.

   I think one useful project would be to aggregate accounts of lived experience on campus divided into two piles: one for the sort of late boomers/gen X’ers, and one for the echo generation: like the people in school now, up through people my age/Douthat’s/Yglesias’s and cut it off several years north of McArdle.

   Why? Hypothesis: something genuinely shifted in the culture there. If you were in school, at a relatively ‘elite’ campus during the late dot-com, 2001, and post millenial decade, there was some seriously weird shit going on. (Not to put too fine a point on it.) I’m Canadian, went to school at a big city campus full of smart ambitious young people, and the climate was crazy. Pascal is onto something: ENArchy in the USA. And Canada too.

   But what I don’t know is, maybe I’m wrong and that crazy climate (it’s kinda late, and I don’t feel up to trying to portray that ambitious zeitgeist in words right now) has always been there. That’s why I want to know: if you were on campus in the 80s, early 90s, what was it like? Was everyone like “ZOMG law school grad skool finance med school” non-stop? There were days when it was hard to have a conversation that wasn’t about the next step on the Stuff White People Like (Masters of the Universe Edition) to-do list.

   As you might have guessed, I had an interesting time at school.

   — Tim Ross · Feb 16, 05:28 AM · #

6. salacious: You’re right about the past importance of the Ivy League, and I say this in the post. But the fact that the situation is (much) better than 60 years ago doesn’t mean it’s not worse than, say, 10 or 20 years ago.

   About being the first black president of the HLR, that’s a good point, but I still think he earned way too much credit from that. Does anyone really think that earning the suffrage of law review editors is the same as earning the suffrage of Iowa caucus-goers?

   rortybomb: A for-profit university (for-profit anything, really) grows with demand. When you’re a non-profit uni, the more demand there is, the more incentive you have not to grow, because it makes you more selective. The fact that Harvard College only admits 2,100 per year is, frankly, kind of an insult to 18-year olds everywhere. Do we really think that’s the amount of applicants who are qualified? Do we really think that, with the huge pile of money they are/were sitting on, they couldn’t afford to expand to meet demand while maintaining standards? (Disclaimer: I never applied to anything at Harvard, so this isn’t a case of bitter-I-wasn’t-admitted).

   Freddie: Yes, absolutely.

   JA: I absolutely agree. Fun story: when my fiancée was an undergrad, in her first economics class, the professor taught them that the only thing that matters with a degree is signalling theory, not what you get taught. He went on to become dean of undergrad studies at her (top-ranked) university.

   Tim: Yes, that’s a very good point. As far as I know, here, the late nineties were heady times. I mean, I’d rather have people be like “ZOMG, my startup!” rather than “ZOMG, Goldman Sachs!”

   — PEG · Feb 16, 08:51 AM · #

7. The two guys who played bass and drums in my high school pop-punk trio went on to Yale and then Harvard law. At the time it was a remarkable achievement, and folks were suitably and rightly impressed.

   But I think you’ll find, as my old bandmates have, that these sorts of things matter less the older you get. 10 or 20 years down the line what people have actually done (good or bad) ends up being much more important than what school they went to. I anticpate a 2018 tome from Ross giving us 256 pages on why a Harvard degree just isn’t what it used to be, which is to say he’ll still be living in his parent’s basement.

   — Tony Comstock · Feb 16, 02:16 PM · #

8. I was on campus (my name indicates exactly when and where) in the late 70s. I would say that, in reflection of the diminished economic prospects of the time, students displayed very little career ambition. Which meant that some of them get really interested in certain intellectual topics, and pursued them energetically, but most of them just focused on sex and substance abuse. Then some of them drifted off to law school, some to Citibank, and a handful to Morgan Stanley. (Only the last required really good grades.)

   We didn’t know that we were on the brink of an immense economic boom. Five years later, all those aimless 20 year olds were yuppies wearing yellow ties or John Molloy-approved skirted suits. The first year law associates and bankers were making three times what their predecessors had made five years earlier.

   — y81 · Feb 16, 04:30 PM · #

9. FWIW, this sensibility seems to be more of an East Coast thing. In the BosWash corridor, it has always seemed to be more about where you went to school, what you studied while you were there, who your professors were, and what grades you got.

   I live in Silicon Valley, and honestly, those considerations are secondary here. Here, it’s all about experience. You can go to an D-List college with a degree that’s not even related to your field, but if you can demonstrate that you have a head for and experience with the appropriate technology, or coding or administration or analysis, you’re immediately in higher demand than someone who has never “done it” before. In some isolated circles, there may be a small Stanford or Cal bump, but it’s much less pronounced here. Call it a “West Coast bias”, but I kind of prefer this more meritocratic reckoning.

   — John Bejarano · Feb 16, 04:33 PM · #

10. Yeah, I agree with John Bejarano. I grew up in the BosWash corridor and attended a high-falutin’ New England School. No question it counts for something there. I live in Chicago now no one really gives a hoot where you went to school (although I was a little bummed to have lost a credential). And top high school students more typically attend midwestern schools, rather than aspire to go east. Your work counts for more than your pedigree out here, and the folks with the elite jobs are far more likely to have attended Michigan State or Northwestern than Harvard or Yale.

    — Douglas · Feb 16, 05:12 PM · #

11. Tony, seriously, what was that comment about? I didn’t appreciate that.

    — Tim Ross · Feb 16, 07:58 PM · #

12. I have a lot of quibbles here. I also have a lot of quibbles with Privilege but it’s a separate topic: Comstock more or less hit it, which is, a great book by somebody who completely missed it because he’s (1) kind of stayed in academia, and (2) had very little experience as yet with how this stuff plays out with which to judge why it works the way it does in undergrad: in 1993 I might’ve written something like Ross did (had I the talent). Now I wouldn’t. Harvard in particular is an odd milieu where as Douthat observes things get much easier after you get in, and there’s not a lot of supervision. But I think that that enables a certain type of nontraditional student to thrive there, and Harvard seeks out those students. I was one — I couldn’t, with my pre-college background, have gotten into Berkeley or MIT or Tufts: at Harvard I took as many as eight full classes a semester, was satisfied with how things went and felt really involved in stuff.

    Firstly let’s separate the social status issue from the jobs/academia one (because in the latter case you’ll see a lot of elite schools, in the former you probably have to consider Harvard separately from everything else).

    As far as I can tell that Harvard background is as often as not a minus, not a plus. You work a lot of shop-type jobs, as I did, and it’s something you conceal. I live in the South now and work among people who mostly didn’t go to college and, contra JA — it matters. Big time. Once or twice a month for a long time I was called into an office by a superior and lectured on how my Harvard background made me unable to do my job and destined for failure (and I bit back the obvious, “then why have you hired me here, dumbass?”) Since that elite school stereotype is dumber than the “elite school equals success” one, it doesn’t pan out, so if you are moderately successful in your job and win over some people, defeating the expectation of failure means you’re now seen as some kind of Ivy League wonder-worker, and the next Harvard guy after you (granted in my case that’ll be in about 200 years) will get the kind of inflated awe PEG discusses.

    Grad schools and professional environments are different and I think the commenters have it right. But there’s still an Ivy edge, and you’d expect there to be. I’ve been associated now with Harvard, Tufts, MIT, UC Berkeley (where I did my grad work), and some Southern community colleges. I’ve had to hire people and, yeah — if they’re Harvard or Berkeley guys, then I usually know someone I can call and ask questions, and I do, and that probably helps. Nothing wrong with that. (MIT people seem even more tribal this way — Manzi?)

    But the idea that Freddie puts out that grad schools deal in credentialism so support it is obviously goofy. No, grad schools deal in academic research and achievement. Your Ivy types are preselected for excellence in that and have just trained that much more at it, so damn right the school will be biased towards them — and guess what? They generally do better in grad school, pull down nice fellowships, write great grants, publish more, etc. Not always! My grad mentor was a U Mich guy and a legend in his field, and another was a UVA guy who’s brilliant, and I worked with brilliant fellows from Oklahoma and a thousand other places. I’m just saying that stats go that way: grad schools are biased towards elite school grads because you have a reasonable expectation that they will perform better in grad school. That’s not “credentialism” unless you think looking at high school transcripts is credentialism. You can argue whether it’s relevant to anything outside academia; it may not be.

    I’m also not sure it’s that damaging. I moved to an area with a lot of traditionally underrepresented students. Harvard, unsought, reached out to me for that reason, and now I’m involved with admission. I advocate for a lot of underrepresented students against white-bread alum fundraising types who’ve been doing this for years — and still the University seems inclined to let me punch way above my weight in those discussions, because of the student population I represent. I respect that — this isn’t the ENA culture, it’s status being deliberately manipulated for social gain. I don’t claim that’s how it always works, or even often works — but there’s an effort and it’s real.

    Holding UC Berkeley up as a standard is unwise. In the ’60’s and ’70’s UC found students other universities were bypassing and gained a reputation for excellence. Good for them; it was fine policy. It’s changed. Now, take this with a grain of salt because I suppose grad students always bitch about the undergrads they see — but this was a topic much discussed and I wouldn’t send my kids to UC; it’s a cattle drive with half the students not getting out for six years plus. Look, there’s hell of dumb folk everywhere — Harvard included — and geniuses everywhere. I worked like hell to find talented undergrads, got my advisor to hire them, and I’m proud to’ve worked with them. But the quality of UC undergrads is scattershot as hell (qualification; the engineering school ones seem to be better than the rest). And the coursework isn’t on par: I’ve TAd equivalent courses at Harvard and Berkeley, and — looking now at the textbooks — the Harvard ones typically cover about double the material. No surprise. Worst of all the very public university model fucks up Berkeley ten ways; I got plenty frustrated trying to help undergrads get into courses were they needed a prereq, which wasn’t offered that year, or next year…. damn. At Harvard you just do the damn reading and go sign up.

    I can’t come up with any intelligent way to interpret PEG’s ideas about 2100 per year being an “insult.” What exactly would the right number be? Over the past twenty years, Harvard has very substantially increased the number of its students — in graduate and professional schools. That’s because Harvard’s foremost a graduate and professional school. I’d be the first to admit that most Harvard students really ought to consider places like Williams more highly. Ideally your skilled Harvard undergrad is engaged in courses with a high number of grad students in them from his second or third year and what you’re trying to do is get more of that — it gives undergrads more of the research/publishing opportunities that make them in their time successful grad students if they go that route, and Harvard really is in many ways designed to help them go that route — so, again, grad schools reasonably favor their output.

    All of that’s slightly tangential to the question of how society is developing with respect to status-consciousness, but I think salacious and others nail it: it’s nothing new, the question is, is this a bad system and is something like the (current) UC model worse?

    — Sanjay · Feb 16, 11:29 PM · #

13. The 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power lawsuit, codified in the 1991 Civil Rights Act, made it hard for employers to use IQ-like tests. However, colleges remain completely free to use the IQ-like SAT and ACT tests to select their students. So, getting into a fancy college (which is tantamount to graduating from a fancy college) is a legally-endorsed marker of high IQ, so more people try to squeeze their kids into fancy colleges. So, if you want to lower the incentives to send your kid to an exclusive college, repeal Griggs.

    — Steve Sailer · Feb 17, 02:21 AM · #

14. Y81: Good point. But the thing is, we spent so many years when people thought a Yale or equivalent degree opens the gates to riches in finance, so if I had to guess the dearth of these jobs will just bring more stress to get what few jobs remain rather than a laid-back atmosphere.

    John Bejarano, Douglas: Yes, I agree, and this is a good thing to keep in mind. But a lot of the US elites are northeastern, in particular media and political elites, so the prestige of Ivy League degrees there does have a big impact nationally.

    Steve Sailer: Excellent point. I absolutely agree.

    Sanjay: Let me digest your comment for a little while and I’ll have a response.

    — PEG · Feb 17, 08:22 AM · #

15. Mr Sailer’s concept of “elite” school admissions as a proxy for IQ testing is absolutely off target, PEG, and it’s silly to agree with it so casually.

    For one thing, the equivalence between the SATs and an IQ test is poor at best. Certainly the SAT math portion is testing not some abstract concept like IQ, but actually whether or not you can do basic math: “aptitude” is a misnomer there. Similarly the revamped SAT actually requires you to write something.

    But inasmuch as “elite” schools are concerned Sailer’s point becomes further off-target. A state school needs to account for SAT scores; it’s accountable to legistaltures for admissions decisions in ways private schools are not and so needs to appeal to “dumb” metrics wherever it can (NB reliance on SATs is good and bad: when I talked above about how excellent Berkeley used to be, it’s worth noting that it used to use things like standardized tests to find talent the “elite” schools were missing.) Ivies don’t. If you apply to an Ivy, or MIT, or another “elite” school, you’ll get an interviewer/advocate, even if you’re pulling B’s and C’s and have 450ish SATs (and I know this, because I’ve served as such an interviewer/advocate for a student in that situation). So there’s provision to work around the standardized test score. For example, I had a recent Chinese immigrant applicant who was clearly brilliant and English-fluent conversationally, but who hadn’t done so well, eight months prior and six months after coming to America, on her English SAT. I was able to summarize her situation and tell the admissions committee, blow off the SAT Engish score. All the “elite” schools can do that; the mainstreams don’t have the infrastructure or resources. So, no: Ivy admission doesn’t proxy for an IQ test (at least by virtue of SAT performance), anywhere near as much as UC or UNC or UMass admission might. Mind you, the SAT II (what we old-timers called the Achievement Tests) and the APs matter rather more in admission for Ivies than the SAT anyway — but again, those are tests of actual knowledge, not IQ.

    The situation becomes still more striated for grad schools, by the way. I remember worrying about the GREs because I took them after I’d been out of school for a decade — then taking ‘em and realizing, damn, there’s nothing on these which I hadn’t seen by my second year of undergrad anyway. As it turns out “elite” grad institutions are less focused on GRE scores for more or less that reason: the material is basic, not advanced, so the test may slightly favor middling undergrads (for whom the material is fresh) over high performers (who will be a bit rusty).

    — Sanjay · Feb 17, 02:51 PM · #

16. Sanjay: I wasn’t agreeing with the concept that standardized tests are akin to IQ tests (most IQ tests aren’t IQ tests either), but rather with the idea that, if corporations are barred from using some means independently assessing job candidates’ intelligence and skills, this will give a premium to holders of prestigious degrees, whose admissions departments do select for things big corporations look for, including intelligence, but also the capacity for regular hard work and also, in my view, docility.

    Now, as to your earlier comment.

    I gladly take your point that an elite degree can be a minus when doing “shop-style” work, but then again I don’t think many Harvard graduates pursue these kinds of jobs. That’s very unfortunate in my view (I’m a shop class as soulcraft kinda guy) but that’s neither here nor there.

    My point, perhaps badly stated, was that elite degrees give too much of a boost, relative to other elements, to people who want to access the US elite, especially its technocratic and media elite, and that this is bad for the society more broadly. Now obviously being a great chef and great carpenter takes as much, probably more, than being a great lawyer, but great chefs are not considered elite in a conventional sense. (Again, this is perhaps unfortunate, but that’s besides the point of our discussion here).

    I’ve also very much shared your experience that a high-falutin’ degree makes some people look down on you, and seem to think it makes you a proxy for everyone who went to your school, and that it sucks. But that same high-falutin’ degree also allows me to look up CEOs on the online alumni website and send them personal emails so I think it more than evens out.

    I don’t hold up UC Berkeley as a standard, I hold up the entire University of California system. UCLA, even UCSD and UCSB today are great schools, even though the latter two weren’t considered so even recently. I think that’s a model worth admiring, if not imitating. I don’t believe in one model over all others. I don’t want all schools to be like UC or UC Berkeley. But I believe that some models sometimes need to be changed and that these models ought to draw some inspiration from other models that have had good results in the past.

    As far as having a small school with a small-school atmosphere, the liberal arts college ideal, I think that’s a FANTASTIC goal. But as Ross points out and as the evidence in contemporary American society shows, Harvard is not a school whose mission is for students dedicate themselves to a selfless pursuit of knowledge (although I don’t doubt that some do), but a finishing school for the American meritocracy. That’s fine too. But given the role Harvard plays in contemporary society, and its considerable means, I think it should at least EXPLORE a vigorous expansion that would help make American society less tiered.

    I also agree that a prestigious degree should give you some edge, after all it does take skills to get into a prestigious school and study there. What I’m saying is that the edge is disproportionate, and I think that’s true.

    — PEG · Feb 17, 04:11 PM · #

17. Sanjay, you’ve obviously got a lot more first-hand, high-level experience with academia than I do (not a strong statement,) so saying “I agree” is virtually meaningless, even if your experiences wandering the corridors of the highest ivory towers jibe with my experiences in less rarefied environs.

    What I do notice that might be useful is that there is an “elite education fairy tale” (although I think we’re using the word “narrative” in place of fair tale these days,) that more or less tracks with the other fairy tales that mistake notoriety for power, influence, or even modest financial success.

    See also: “It Should Happen to You”

    — Tony Comstock · Feb 17, 04:43 PM · #

18. The empirical question that Pacal-Emmanuel introduced of whether the U.S. is becoming more or less of status society where pedigree matters aside, I strongly recommend that if you know any undergraduates in your life, get a copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring into their hands.

    It may not change anything about the vector of status-obsession in American society at large, but it’s a good part of an inoculation program for individuals against whatever status-obsession viruses are lurking out there.

    — Tim Ross · Feb 17, 05:48 PM · #

19. PEG, that is an excellent point about the geographic clustering of elites in the Northeast. Indeed, I would be willing to bet that the difference between the Northeast (emphasis on prestigious education credentials) vs. other places (emphasis on experience) contributes to some of the tension that the “nation at large” has with the elite core of the Northeast.

    I don’t mean this in an elitist vs. populist way (though that may be part of it). Even the elites of the West Coast and upper Midwest (think high-tech moguls, media, and other captains of industry), roll their eyes a bit at stories from Richie McSnootypants Prep and the fabulous ivy-covered academic career that commenced thence.

    Instead of elitist vs. populist, it’s more of a practical vs. theoretical divide. There may yet be a vestigial cultural background noise from frontier days that continues to permeate communities outside of the Northeast. In frontier days, practical matters nearly always overrode sitting down with cigars and brandy and philosophizing about this or that fine detail or abstract construction.

    Thankfully, we now do have the time and luxury to scratch our beards and navel-gaze thusly, but when it comes to hiring and running a business, that old-fashioned sense of practicality still seems to shine through. …IMHO. </navel-gazing>

    — John Bejarano · Feb 17, 07:58 PM · #

20. Sanjay,

    If you had stopped and thought about it for a moment, you’d have seen that your own anecdote about how you got the super-high IQ Chinese immigrant girl with a low Verbal SAT score that didn’t reflect her true IQ into an Ivy League college undermines your position and validates mine. What you are saying is that the Ivies care so much about IQ that they will take pains to find the highest IQ applicants in the rare cases, such as people who only recently learned English, when even the SAT scores are unreliable proxies for IQ.

    — Steve Sailer · Feb 18, 02:59 AM · #

21. No, Mr. Sailer, you’re going further off. You’re making IQ mean something it does not. That isn’t a “super-high IQ Chinese girl.” I’m telling them, blow off the SAT result because it does not reflect acquired ability. Not IQ. There is presumably a relation but in a job interview (for example) there are lots of other, better ways to get at acquired ability, no? In fact the two processes are similar!

    You are deliberately fudging what IQ is.

    — Sanjay · Feb 18, 04:00 AM · #

22. Dear Sanjay:

    Here’s what you wrote:

    “For example, I had a recent Chinese immigrant applicant who was clearly brilliant and English-fluent conversationally, but who hadn’t done so well, eight months prior and six months after coming to America, on her English SAT. I was able to summarize her situation and tell the admissions committee, blow off the SAT Engish score. All the “elite” schools can do that; the mainstreams don’t have the infrastructure or resources.”

    She’s “clearly brilliant” but it doesn’t show up on an English language SAT that she took only six months after arriving in America. So, you told the Ivy League college that her SAT score doesn’t reflect her true clear brilliance and they believed you.

    As I said, your anecdote about an exceptional case where the English language SAT obviously would not at its most valid just reinforces my point.

    — Steve Sailer · Feb 18, 04:59 AM · #

23. Pascal, I don’t mean to be rude here, but I’m not sure you’re really in much of a position to knowledgably discuss how American elites work. While the Ivy League journalism/policy crowd has a big footprint in low-level DC staff work and in filling the ranks of magazines that few people read, that group really doesn’t dominate American society. I suggest you take a look at the bios of the people who run major law firms or corporations, own vast fortunes, create noteworthy art and literature, or win political campaigns in this country (to list a few types of elites). I think you’ll find that the amount of people in those groups who would think that Ross Douthat’s “Privilege” (a book that said more about Douthat’s social awkwardness than it did about American society, or Harvard for that matter) is a very important book is fairly small, and not that influential. Even among people who went to Ivy League schools (and I fall in that category), the importance of where one went to school in terms of social influence or power tends to diminish as one finds oneself drifting further away from graduation day. I realize it may be hard to see that if you are a twentysomething foreigner who is looking at America from a distance, and who apparently has his prime connections to this society via the DC wonk crowd, so I’d suggest that you travel around a bit, and perhaps spend a little time working in the US private sector, before commenting about how America really works or where it seems to be headed.

    — Mark in Houston · Feb 18, 06:24 AM · #

24. Mark— Thanks for your input. I’m not sure how “prime” my connections are to the “DC wonk crowd.” You’re certainly right that I haven’t spent a lot of time in the US and that my experience of American society is mostly through the media, books, etc. Of course the same could be said about anyone living today and the Roman Empire, and yet we still discuss it and draw teachings from their history.

    David Brooks certainly seems to think the importance of these kinds of elites is growing in American society, as evidenced by this (in my view, hilarious, and also dead-on) column, and he’s certainly spent a while in US society, although maybe he’s also part of a “wonk crowd” that disqualifies him from making such judgements.

    Apparently, the people at Bear Stearns defined themselves against what they viewed as the Ivy League domination of the other big Wall Street investment banks, so they certainly thought there was something going on there, and they were plugged into the private sector and American society and American business elites.

    Seriously though, I very much agree with your point that educational credentials matter less in the private sector, and matter less as you grow older. That’s absolutely true. But that doesn’t mean that credentials don’t matter more than they should in many areas and for many people, or that they won’t matter more than they used to at some point in the past, which is my point.

    — PEG · Feb 18, 08:50 AM · #

25. Pascal: With regard to the David Brooks “Ward 3” article, while it was well-written, it really was just an updating and dressing-up of a very old conservative trope, namely that a bunch of overeducated liberal bureaucrats are going to run the country and tell the businesspeople what to do. The only difference between his column and most others that have made that point for about sixty years is that he seems to have made his peace with that idea, at least to some degree.

    With regard to your point about academic credentialism, I’d agree that in some places it makes a big difference with regard to hiring, credibility, etc. What I would dispute is that most of the groups where elite school credentials are most important (such as law school faculty, the editorial staff at The New Republic) function as a true national elite. My barb about the DC wonk crowd was related to that. (And my comment about your ties to them is simply derived from the fact that you are posting at this blog, which seems to be run by a few people from that set.) Let’s put it this way, while the DC policy analysis crowd, to use a nicer term, is influential, it isn’t some sort of power elite whose influence makes people around the country tremble in fear or admire as the very definition of success. If one is going to talk about what constitutes an elite group in a given society, it’s important to see whether the group being talked about is actually a real elite (as judged by their power, wealth, respect from others in their society), or just an self-perpetuating clique.

    Further, don’t confuse cause with effect. In many ways, an elite school education is as much the product of being born into the educated professional class in this country as it is an entry point into that class. And membership in that professional class, while certainly wonderful, often means what you are doing is working with and for the folks who have real money, and whose wealth entitles them to go to any school they want, without having to worry about their future prospects. Paul Fussell’s classic book Class discusses that phenomenon a bit.

    And regarding Bear Stearns, Wall Street, etc., while yes, there is some degree of an Ivy League set in much of the investment banking scene (cause or effect?), if there’s one place where you’ll find that the universe of people who think books like Douthat’s “Privilege” is important is pretty small, that part of the business world is such a place. Including (perhaps especially) among those who have elite university backgrounds.

    — Mark in Houston · Feb 18, 03:16 PM · #

26. “Further, don’t confuse cause with effect.”

    Zactly. Folks used to think (and I suppose some still do) that an elite education was a requisite for working in the publishing industry. In fact, only children of the wealthy could afford to take the very low paying entry level jobs that publishing offered and still be able to live in Manhattan with some degree of grace; and these children tended to have degrees from elite institutions. The same was true for advertising before the “ethnics” (jews and italians) slept 6 to a room and ate the wasps lunch back in the sixties.

    The larger point is that the aspirational set will tend to focus on the one thing they can possibly attain and thing that one thing is the key to success, happiness, power, influence, whatever. It might be a Harvard education or it might be a house with grecian columns on either side of the main entry. Epaulets become fashionable because they were associate with valor, but no one today thinks “Oh, that guy in the trench coat, if things get tough, I want him at my side.)

    Now granted, it’s a little easier to buy a coat with the proper rigging to keep your saber in place than it is to get a Harvard degree, but there’s a similar principle at work.

    — Tony Comstock · Feb 18, 03:33 PM · #

27. Two more points before I go to the office. First, in talking about elites, I didn’t mention cultural elites very much, other than a short reference to those who create art and literature. Cultural elites, while they may not be power elites in the C. Wright Mills sense, should also be considered in this analysis. And let’s put it this way, you don’t need a Harvard degree to get an exhibit at The Armory Show.

    Also, while this should go without saying, there’s a big difference between studying ancient and dead civilizations and drawing historical conclusions (Pascal’s Roman Empire example) and looking at contemporary civilizations and making claims about their current and future social structures. Plus, one place where there’s been no shortage of rather superficial cultural analysis employed for contemporary purposes (for about the last 500 years, at least), is references to and study of the Roman Republic and Empire, so I’m not sure I’d want to cite that as a counterexample.

    — Mark in Houston · Feb 18, 03:49 PM · #

28. The other thing I’d add, and it’s sort of tangential and a pet peeve, so apologies ahead of time, is that Bos/Wash “elite education” conservatives have, for the last 25 years at least, been fantastically out of touch with “real america”, even as the GOP welded itself to (what my wife calls) the trucks and ducks vote.

    The accusation was, of course, that liberals/democrats were “out of touch with Real America ™, but in fact it was the GOP, most especially the Harvard/Ross/Sulivan & Co GOP. If they had been paying any kind of attention at all to Real America ™ they would have seen Sarah Palin coming from about 15 years out, and taken some sort of counter-measures. Instead they were caught completely by surprise, and the GOP/conservatism is in complete disarray.

    Again, apologies for the excursion, but point of tangency (if there is one) is that the folks being held up as “elite” (if I’m managed to read PEG’s subtext correctly) are relatively well-known (within certain circle), relatively powerless, and (often times) relatively clueless.

    — Tony Comstock · Feb 18, 03:52 PM · #

29. Mr. Sailer,

    I believe you’re digging your hole much deeper.

    You argued that Griggs is relevant because it denies business the right to use an IQ test to screen applicants, analogized the IQ to SATs (wrongly) and then said because elite universities use SATs the university proxies the SAT.

    I gave a pass to a student because she had accomplishments — she was clearly fluent in English and had good English grades. So the English SAT score — which is not an IQ score — was discardable. Note that there’s no information that’s relevant to an IQ test here: she could’ve scored super-bitchen on an IQ test but still not attained a command of English (and therefore be unable to perform well at Harvard), and I’d not have passed over the test result.

    What I do to get that information is an interview. Business can do the same (and does). Therefore the admission process in no way compensates for a lack of information in business.

    That’s why PEG is goofy to argue that in agreeing with you he is supporting “the idea that, if corporations are barred from using some means independently assessing job candidates’ intelligence and skills, this will give a premium to holders of prestigious degrees, whose admissions departments do select for things big corporations look for.” BS. Business has many ways to independently assess intelligence and skills: they can get your work history, your recommendations, your CV, your interview, writing samples, test results, certifications — there was even that faddish “intellectual puzzles” thing in white collar jobs for a while (and I submit the rapidity with which that was rejected, itself undermines the idea that IQ tests are of any use at all in hiring). When you argue that Griggs is relevant to the preference for university elites, you are arguing that the business is hampered because it can’t administer an IQ test. That’s foolish. A business can do almost everything a college does reviewing its applicants and if you want to argue that relying on, say, my interview is a proxy for the IQ test, then you’re arguing that damn near everything we measure, everywhere in business, we measure as a proxy for IQ, which is profoundly dumb because, hell, IQ isn’t even what we want to know, it just correlates with things we might want to know and can measure more directly.

    Either you are being deliberately obtuse as to what it is you want business to be able to screen, or I am profoundly misunderstanding you. Therefore let me review the fourfold burial of your idea as I understand it:

    1) College admissions are not used by business as a proxy for IQ (presuming anyone would even want such a thing) because the SAT is not an IQ test. There’s probably a correlation but IQ correlates as well to lots of things which employers can measure.

    2) If the SAT were relevant (and it isn’t, see (1)), it is occasionally discarded, more so at elite universities. Employers wishing to use univerisyt graduation to proxy for university admission to proxy for SATs to proxy for IQ to predict job performance (see how dumb this is?) are worse off at an elite school.

    3) When those SAT results are bypassed they are done on the basis of concrete observation of ability and achievement: not what an IQ test measures, so your pushing the relevance of Griggs is still more suspect.

    4) Employers are as capable of gathering the data necessary to evaluate the relevance of an IQ test as are universities (in fact probably more so just because of applicant numbers). So using the university as a proxy is unwise at the very least.

    I feel very confident that that buries your argument.

    — Sanjay · Feb 18, 04:48 PM · #

30. That’s going to leave a mark.

    — Tony Comstock · Feb 18, 06:19 PM · #

31. Mark, Tony, Sanjay, I’m not sure I want to interrupt your discussion. ;)

    Mark, look, you make excellent points, and I would actually agree with most of them. I think what we’re differing on is a matter of degree, not nature. You say you and I don’t have the same definition of “elite” because the DC wonk crowd (I’m fine with that term) doesn’t make “anyone tremble with fear” but in a functioning democracy no elite makes people tremble with fear. Of course I know you know that, but what I’m getting at is that there isn’t one elite in any complex and big society, but several elites, that compete for power and attention, that intermingle, have different values, standards, etc. Business elites, media elites, technocratic elites, intellectual elites, you name it.

    At some point some elites grow in influence while others wane. I think that was Brooks’s point: because of Obama’s election and the financial crisis, a certain technocratic elite has vastly grown in influence, while the finance/business elite is waning. This will have consequences for the society, as the dominant, or at least more influent elite’s values are reflected across the broader society, either through legislation or simply through example/influence/etc. And among the values held by elites that are on the rise there is, in my view, too much credence given (either implicitly or explicitly) to certain academic credentials.

    I don’t think that’s a crazy or ill-informed point to make, and I think I can make it while agreeing with most of what you’re saying.

    Sanjay: I don’t want to get hit with collateral damage, but I wasn’t saying corporations should use IQ tests for recruitment or that it’s a good idea. As a future CEO I would never use one for recruiting and as one who was subjected to way too many I hate IQ tests. All I was saying was that if corporations do want to use those tests that should be their prerogative and they shouldn’t be barred by courts from doing so. And I’m fine with being goofy. ;)

    Tony: I’m not sure you’re talking to me anymore, at this point.

    — PEG · Feb 18, 11:20 PM · #

32. Sanjay:

    Your emotional opinions are much stronger than your knowledge of the subject. You are getting completely tangled up in the trees and missing the forest.

    The SAT correlates to a high degree with major IQ tests. It’s been studied and shown to be true. Google it. ETS refuses to study the question — I asked them — because they know what the answer will be.

    Griggs is why companies like Microsoft and Google famously use oral tests of IQ:

    “During that trip, I must have heard Mr. Gates mention ‘IQ’ a hundred times. The obsession with smarts is embedded deep in Mr. Gates’ thinking and long ago was institutionalized at Microsoft. Apply for a job and you’ll face an oral grilling that probes for IQ. It is oral and informal because of Griggs v. Duke Power, the 1971 Supreme Court ruling that banished written IQ tests and ‘tests of an abstract nature’ from job applications. But Microsoft knows what it wants. It wants IQ.” [Microsoft’s IQ Dividend, By Rich Karlgaard July 28, 2004, (Pay Archive)]

    When I was at Dun & Bradstreet and needed to hire a programmer, I asked the HR office for their written programmer’s test. They said they had no such thing because they’d be sued for discrimination if they didn’t expensively validate it, but I was free to ask any oral questions I liked because they didn’t leave a paper trail.

    Of course, oral IQ tests are much less accurate and much more time-consuming for interviewers than written ones.

    — Steve Sailer · Feb 18, 11:42 PM · #

33. PEG, I’m not familiar with the Brooks piece, but going by your description and the opinion I’ve developed of Brooks over the years, I’m going with MiH’s interpretation; Brooks is worried about this elite’s attachment to credentialism because he’s worried (in his own milktoast sort of way) about this elite, not about credentialism.

    Out running errands today I was mulling the shifting sands aspect of academic credentials and the thought that I had was than in my own area of expertise (such as it is) there are perennials – institutions that it’s never going to hurt you to call your alma mater.

    But the perennial aren’t where the action is. Trends, movement, personalities pop up, and a place gets “hot”, producing a disproportionate share of worthwhile ideas and talent. Once people start to notice the same U of Whereever keeps coming up, they line up to get into these hot spots, thinking there’s some sort of magic on the campus.

    Of course by the time anywhere gets a reputation for being hot, it’s usually over. Whatever confluence of faculty, students and whatever else gave rise to the burst of creativity has moved on. The perennials are, of course, more steady producers. In their post educational life, both of my former bandmates continue to be markedly above average in their level of achievement; just like they were in high school. Last I heard, they were both working at not for profit institutions.

    — Tony Comstock · Feb 19, 12:38 AM · #

34. Pascal: Okay, fair enough. We may actually be closer to one another’s views than I thought previously. However, I have to echo Tony’s point. I think Brooks is more concerned about the Obama technocratic elite because it is Obama’s technocratic elite (and presumably a liberal one) than because of concerns on his part about credentialism. While Brooks may not be a Palinite Populist, his comments seem to me to dovetail pretty closely with an old conservative talking point, namely that a bunch of pointy-headed liberal Ivy League elitists in DC are going to go around telling tell regular Americans what to do. As such, his piece doesn’t strike me as covering new ground.

    With regard to the argument that “in a functioning democracy no elite makes people tremble with fear”, while that may be the ideal, one wonders given some of the rhetoric surrounding elites of various types whether such fear is in fact felt by some people in this country about some elites in this country. Or, we could get all Chomskyite and say that you are correct, but the problem is we aren’t in a functioning democracy, but while that would be an interesting discussion, that’s not how I roll…

    — Mark in Houston · Feb 19, 02:28 AM · #

35. “I think Brooks is more concerned about the Obama technocratic elite because it is Obama’s technocratic elite (and presumably a liberal one) than because of concerns on his part about credentialism.”

    Well ok, but that doesn’t mean he can’t make good points in the process. Besides, my post isn’t about his column, it is about credentialism.

    And about the conservative “Ivy League eggheads ain’t gonna tell me how to live” trope, well, first of all, that’s not what I was trying to say with the post. I think France is a case study in what goes wrong when you put over-credentialed technocrats in charge, but that’s another fight for another day. I was trying to make a much subtler (if I may say so myself) argument about the broader society, and the way degrees are viewed by people across the board (while recognizing that the US is a very big and complex society and that making general pronouncements is very difficult).

    — PEG · Feb 19, 08:20 AM · #

36. If your point is that the US is a less status conscious, credential conscious society than many (most?) other industrialized nations, then I will tend to agree. My very lovely films have had terrible troubles abroad (commonwealth countries in particular) and when look at what sort of cinematic treatments of sexuality are permitted, the obvious difference is credentials. (Then again, that’s half the point of my films. Live by insurgency, die by insurgency.)

    If your point is that too much concern over status and/or credentials is stultifying, I’ll agree there too.

    But if your point is that this is on the rise in the US, I’m afraid my answer is, “Um, okay. If you say so. That’s not how it looks from where I’m sitting.”

    Of course a big part of the difference in where we stand is age. I’m fairly sure I remember that when I was young I thought the game was stilted. A couple of mortgages and a couple of kids later, the playing field looks a little more level.

    I’m also fairly certain I remember having my opinions dismissed as being the product of my age. That’s receded as a feature of my life, but likely to make a resurgence. Every day I wake up to a little more grey hair.

    — Tony Comstock · Feb 19, 02:42 PM · #

37. Don’t bitch, Tony, every day I wake up with a little less grey hair.

    Mr. Sailer, as it happens I came across one last shovel of dirt to bury this thing. A buddy who works at a hedge fund was following this discussion and called to tell me that when he interviewed they asked him to provide SAT scores, and the fund did that for a while. So there’s the uber-kill: employers do NOT use elite schools to proxy for SATs to proxy for IQ because you can cut the school out and get the SAT.

    I don’t argue that SATs correlate to IQ. I rather suspect, as I said above, that they do. But the kind of “intelligence test” you discuss was very big for a while in the late 80’s-early 90’s (and note that Gates interview was in 1993) and petered out fast in most work environments and is widely mocked now in the business lit — because studying something that correlates with a good resume and a solid interview is kind of stupid when you can look at a good resume and a solid interview.

    I agree with PEG in general that employers shouldn’t have the ability to do goofy things taken away — but you know, and I know, why Duke Energy started using IQ tests and why that case said, you damn well better be able to justify why your screen is relevant. I suspect PEG would agree that Duke Energy should have had that test taken away. I’m staying away from this because it has been too easy and too obvious a trope when you post. But what’s going on here is, you don’t like the Griggs result, and youre trying to link it to a possibly bad form of status discrimination. And, as pointed out above and here, there is no linkage.

    — Sanjay · Feb 19, 05:23 PM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.

↑ The Pessimist Blogs

↓ Dwarves and Titans

All contents copyright The American Scene unless otherwise noted. Colophon. Archive.