Go to a state school

The Ivy League and other elite private colleges are losing esteem — and they deserve it.

These days, I use Twitter in two ways: first, to blatantly shill for this newsletter and other things I’m trying to promote. And second, as a sort of staging area for takes. Sometimes those takes are intentionally trollish, while others contain the seed of something more serious. Here is one recent example:

Wait, was I serious about this one? Yeah, more or less. If I were advising a friend’s son or daughter facing Decision Day, I’d tell them to pass on the Ivy League and go to a high-quality state school instead under some conditions. Let me articulate some exceptions:

• If the student’s identity were deeply tied up into being a Princeton Man or a Cornell Woman or whatever, then I’d think that was a little weird — but by all means I’d tell them to go, I’m not here to kink-shame.

• I’d also tell them to go with the elite private college if (i) they had a high degree of confidence in what they wanted to do with their degree and (ii) it was in a field like law that regards the credential as particularly valuable. 

• And I’d tell them to strongly consider going if they came from an economically disadvantaged background and had been offered a golden ticket to join the elite. I’m not super familiar with the literature on the selective college wage premium, but it’s among this group of disadvantaged students where the benefits seem to be concentrated. 

But if this student was just going to school to “find herself” — and she or her parents were footing most of the bill? Yeah, probably go with the top-flight state school — especially if she’s in a state with a very good in-state public school where the cost savings are much greater. Better that than to emerge with a mountain of debt and a degree from an institution that is likely to be viewed as highly polarizing. Public perceptions of higher education have declined rapidly, and I expect the problems to get worse.

Before we proceed further, one unavoidable question: am I being a hypocrite? Although I come from a Big Ten town — my dad was a professor at Michigan State University — I went to the University of Chicago. Chicago is now considered an elite private school but was much less of one when I first attended in 1996 with an admit rate of around 40 percent. Still, this is a little bit misleading — U of C’s student body was famously “self-selected” to the school “where fun comes to die”¹. And my tuition looks like a bargain as compared to today, it wasn’t cheap by late-90’s standards.

But Chicago has always been an outlier. In my era, at least, it tended to attract its share of weird nerds who were turned on precisely by the school’s reputation for weird nerdiness. Chicago has also always been a politically pluralistic school, with strong institutional commitments to free speech, an emphasis on the core curriculum, less grade inflation than comparable schools, and less of a boost for legacy admits. I’m undoubtedly biased, but I think that if other schools had been run like Chicago, elite higher ed would have fewer problems than it has today.

Even if I had gone to Harvard though — applied, didn’t get in², by the way — I don’t think that would make me a hypocrite because my argument is that this change has been relatively recent and that many of the downstream effects are still to come.

Perceptions of higher ed are cratering

Even in a period when nearly all American institutions are losing public trust, the decline in confidence for higher education stands out. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup polling. By summer 2023, that number had declined to just 36 percent. The decline has been especially bad among Republicans — although only 32 percent of independents have confidence in higher education, and the numbers have also declined among Democrats:

Granted, the Gallup poll didn’t mention elite private colleges specifically, although I’d expect them to trigger an even more polarized response. A 2022 poll for New America found that fewer Americans think private colleges (72 percent) than public colleges (78 percent) contribute positively to the workforce. They also said private colleges are considerably less likely to be worth the cost:

These polls, furthermore, preceded the December 2023 congressional hearings that eventually led to the ouster of Penn president Liz Magill and Harvard president Claudine Gay (though in Gay’s case, it was more because of credible allegations that she was a serial plagiarist). They also preceded the recent wave of protests on the campuses of Columbia and other elite schools, variously described as pro-Palestine or anti-Israel depending on the news outlet.³

There is some initial evidence that the Congressional hearings did matter to public opinion, at least when it came to Harvard — its net favorable ratings declined by 15 percent after the hearings according to Morning Consult polling, with the decrease concentrated among Republicans:

It’s harder to find concrete data on what elites think about higher education. By “elites” I mean people broadly with a lot of power, wealth and influence; I’m not just using the term as a synonym for “intellectuals”. In my forthcoming book, in fact, I explore the clash between two rival clans of elites — the analytical, risk-taking professions like finance and tech[4] that I call “the River” on the one hand, and a triad of more intellectual professions (academia, the media and government) that I call “the Village” on the other hand. In the book, I argue that these groups are natural rivals — and their clashes have become more explicit recently, like in Wall Street and Silicon Valley helping to lead the charge against the university presidents.

So to some extent, I’m asking you to trust my reporting from a book that isn’t public yet — and my general exposure to the discourse, because surely I qualify as an “elite” myself as I’ve defined it — in my prediction that tech and finance are going to become much less tolerant of what they see as bullshit coming out of academia. This week, for instance, Google — despite probably being the most progressive or Silicon Valley company, nevertheless fired dozens of employees involved in pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests that resemble those on university campuses.

Importantly, I expect the decline in perceptions of elite private colleges to extend to people tasked with making hiring decisions. I expect an increasing number of hiring managers to look at two resumes — say, one from a recent graduate of Columbia, and one from a recent graduate of the University of the North Carolina — and potentially see advantages for the UNC student. They’ll regard the Columbia grad as:

• More likely to be coddled;

• More likely to hold strong political opinions that will distract from their work;

• More likely to have benefited from grade inflation and perhaps dubious admissions policies.

Tech and finance aren’t the only professions, obviously. And you could decrease the premium associated with a Harvard or Yale or Columbia degree by 30 percent and it would still be highly valuable. Modern universities serve a lot of different functions and many of them won’t be affected. But I expect the decline in prestige to be enough to have material effects on the value of these degrees, enough they’re no longer “worth it” for some students on the margin.

Elite higher ed will have a hard time turning perceptions around

Once perceptions of an institution become politically polarized, it is very hard to undo that. But I expect elite higher ed to have an especially big problem.

That’s because academia is a slow-moving institution. Academic faculty — especially if they receive tenure — often serve out their entire careers at one or two institutions. Investments in new buildings or programs are expected to pay out over decades. There is an enormous amount of bureaucracy. Even a student, between the time they first apply to a college and when they graduate, is making nearly a five-year commitment, and that’s if they finish on time, which many students don’t.

So although there are some signs that schools recognize the scale of their problems —notably, in restoring standardized testing requirements — I think elite private colleges’ problems are likely to worsen in the medium term. Younger faculty, some of whom were hired under regimes that required diversity statements that are thinly-veiled political litmus tests, are much more more into wokeness (or what I call Social Justice Leftism) than older faculty — and less supportive of traditional liberal values like free speech. And these problems are likely to be self-reinforcing. If conservative students — or apolitical students who just want to take their classes and goof off with their friends — are increasingly turned off by the political environment at elite private colleges, they won’t attend, and that will in turn make these colleges even more of a bubble with fewer relatively well-adjusted normies.

And although so far I’ve mostly cited lines of criticism from the right, elite private colleges are also vulnerable to critique from the left. As legacy admissions make explicit, few institutions anywhere in society reinforce pre-existing hierarchies more than places like Harvard, Stanford or Yale do. They are also incredibly wealthy institutions, with endowments that serve as de facto hedge funds. And their admissions process is incredibly cynical, including sometimes recruiting students they know they don’t want to lower their admissions rates and increase their rankings.

This might not be the analogy you’re expecting, but in some ways the rapid shift in public perception against elite colleges reminds me of the rapid shift toward support for gay marriage in the 2010s. Gay marriage could be justified either on progressive grounds, since it created more rights for an historically marginalized group, or on conservative ones, since marriage is usually regarded as a stabilizing, conservative institution. Elite private colleges are both hotbeds of left-wing radicalism and are places of incredible wealth and privilege and have abandoned many of the rigorous academic standards and core principles like free speech that got them there in the first place. Leftists and liberals and conservatives all have reasons to regard them with suspicion, even as being a little cringe.

So fuck Harvard and fuck the rest of these schools⁴ — the correction in perceptions is long overdue. By all means go if it’s in your best interest to do so. But state colleges and institutions are much better institutions for society — one of the things that truly make America great — and often offer a more well-rounded experience and a comparable education at a lower price.

1. I had a lot of fun, thank you very much.

2. I wasn’t particularly interested in the Ivy League experience — instead, I applied to Chicago, plus some smaller colleges (Reed College and Williams College), plus the University of Michigan and Michigan State. But I figured Harvard was worth making an exception for, and I’d probably have gone if I’d gotten in.

3. I’m going to refrain (for now) from commenting on these protests further, in part because I’ve rarely felt so lost about a news story. There’s clearly some anti-Semitism. There are clearly also some students exercising their First Amendment rights that university administrators have clumsily tried to abridge. There are clearly some students with deep, well-grounded concerns. There are clearly also some students being dumb, spoiled college kids and trying to look cool in front of their friends. And there are clearly some interlopers from outside the universities intermingling with the students. I’ve found it very hard to get a sense for what the ratios of these different categories are or what the situation looks like on the ground.

4. Except Chicago!