If your ultimate goal is a Ph.D. in a STEM field, you can do what I did: Go to a big state university as an undergrad and then choose an elite, possibly private, school for graduate studies. Some advantages:
- Your undergrad degree will be inexpensive.
- Due to sheer volume, a big state school will have a critical mass of nerds for you to hang out with, even if the average student is a partying frat boy.
- If you're smart, you will stand out and get lots of personal attention from your undergrad profs.
- You will probably get to do research as an undergrad (I even got my own office!).
- Even at expensive schools, grad school will be free: you will be paid via teaching and research assistantships.
1. In Yglesias' post on higher ed today, he shows a chart on grade inflation on Harvard. At the time when he/me/Nate Silver went to college, Harvard had an average GPA of 3.4. Now it has risen to 3.8. At the time 3.4 was considered inflated, but if you have a transcript with 30+ classes and students are earning grades from B- to A, it's possible to discriminate stronger and weaker students pretty clearly. You'll have students with 3.9s and students with 3.1s and these will correspond to real skill differences. 3.8 is a different story. At that point most grades are A's and it becomes genuinely hard to tell how smart people are. That weakens the degree.
2. As a professor, I am horrified by the Master's programs offered by many elite American universities. They are insanely expensive, of little career value, and unlike with the Ph.D. programs the profs/university don't care how well the students do because they are paying customers. See for example (https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-the-elite-masters-degrees-that-dont-pay-off-11625752773). As far as I'm concerned they are selling degrees to dupes. That can be lucrative but it weakens the value of all degrees from your institution and makes the university look like NFT salesmen.
3. The student loan forgiveness movement, which is much bigger than it used to be, hurts the reputation of universities because it showcases that the degrees sometimes aren't valuable enough to justify the cost. Many of the highest profile people griping about their students loans are victims of 2. above.
"Importantly, I expect the decline in perceptions of elite private colleges to extend to people tasked with making hiring decisions."
Why? This is the leap you actually have to explain here and this feels *very* hand waived. The hiring managers at fancy employers are elite university grads, they want their kids to go to elite universities, they're used to sending their recruiting teams to Harvard and Stanford (and Berkeley to be fair) every fall for a week of interviewing people. Are they going to dispatch those people to Rutgers and the University of Colorado instead because of what the median voter in Pennsylvania thinks?
I found Nate's article (and some of the responses to it) depressing, because he's reduced the whole business of going to university to a matter of prestige (or 'esteem', if you like). The word 'elite' is tossed around a lot these days, but it's a confusing idea, because it often conflates the idea of prestige and snobbery with the idea that someone or some institution is very good at something. Are 'elite' institutions elite because they attract the wealthy and produce the powerful, or because they're good at research and education? The piece implies that, in the case of 'private elite colleges', it's mostly the former. And I suspect that for many people who apply to those places, it's the prestige and all that comes with it - a fancier CV, status, connections, etc. - that they want, the education being a bonus. But it's possible for a place to be highly selective, sort of prestigious, and yet very good at giving people an education (I'll leave aside the research function).
I went to a small, selective liberal arts college and then two (excellent) state institutions for my MA and PhD. I had tenured posts in three different state universities in the UK and Canada, and taught as a visiting prof at an excellent American state university (Rutgers) and at a German one. I was very proud of the education we offered students at all the places I taught and I agree with Nate that great state education is one of the crowning achievements of a democratic society (not just America, though). But I'll be honest: of the eight universities/colleges I attended or taught at, the quality of education and the level of intellectual engagement was far and away the best at my liberal arts college. My courses were demanding, my teachers terrific, the other students interesting, and so on (and I know from reports of people who teach there today that it's still terrific). If someone were offered a place there - and could afford it - I'd tell them to take it in a second. I don't know what it added to my CV, but I learned an awful lot there (not just about subjects, but also about how to be a good teacher). Sometimes a place is 'elite' in both senses.
So I don't think that people's attitudes have changed because they've discovered the emperor has no clothes. Nor do I think it's because they're pissed off about political activism on campus. When I was a high school student Harvard, Columbia, and a host of other schools were occupied by anti-war protestors and there was plenty of talk about students being spoiled, out of touch, etc. (of course, soon after the protests, majority opinion swung heavily behind the students' point of view), yet there was no comparable decline in esteem. What has changed is a concerted effort to redefine the 'elite' in America in purely cultural terms: as people who go to Ivy League schools, drink lattes, watch NPR, and so forth. The Right has taken aim at universities and the professions, at the 'Coasts', as if the problem in America were snobs, not the wealthy and the powerful. And the campaign has worked a treat. People don't just value universities less - they value education as a whole less. I don't think this is a good thing (yes, yes, I have a lot of skin in this game, but I still think education is important for a well-functioning, happy society).
Final bit of snark: Nate is usually admirably honest about his own priors and background, but he is being very disingenuous about the University of Chicago. When I applied there in 1978 it was universally regarded as a selective, elite institution - it hasn't been anything but that since the Second World War. The fact that Nate carves out an exception for it is telling, because admitting he got a great education at an 'elite' institution would make the case he wants to make that much harder. Of course, people from the University of Chicago are always complaining that everywhere else is going to hell in a handbasket - remember Allen Bloom? - but that's just an inter-elite thing.
For some fields there is little advantage to going to the private schools over the flagship state universities - Engineering for example. If you are going to try for academic positions, the networking at the private universities can be a substantial boost, but for those headed into industry, the value proposition is much more tenuous. My youngest daughter and my son both went to the University of Washington where they did their BS and MS. My son did Running Start so that he only had to pay for approximately 2 years worth of his undergraduate education. They commuted to save housing costs. My daughter is a structural engineer and my son is a technical PM. My daughter has no student debt and my son will have his paid off in a year.
I think this advice needs more nuance for quality.
1. There's the creme de la creme of schools. People used to say HYPS. I have trouble believing it's ever going to be a bad idea to attend them, even if for peer effects alone. If you don't know what you want to do, you'll probably end up in the corporate world and you'll have peers that are going places and that can give you ideas about how to succeed.
2. There's the lower-ranked Ivies and top-tier of other private schools, like Chicago. It might be the case that they're converging more in quality towards state flagships. I can buy that. This is at least the category that's worth debating over.
3. Then you have all other private schools, other than certain schools with a well-defined and nonstandard mission (e.g. Christian, historically black, fine arts, etc.) Even when I was applying to colleges ~20 years ago, I categorized plain vanilla private colleges as "schools with no reason to exist." They have even less reason to exist now. They are a scam and you should not go to them unless you're getting a very large scholarship, and maybe not even then. Many of them will cease to exist with the enrollment cliff, and it always sucks having a degree from a school that no longer exists (as my father, who went through life with this problem, would tell you).
Unless you are in the narrow band of family income and cost of living such that going to an elite school requires you take out huge debt, this is poor advice. Going to the most prestigious school possible signals to employers that you are smart and hardworking (which is how you got into the prestigious school). Prestigious schools still have by far the best recruiting networks and the best reputations among hirers. If you have evidence to the contrary, which would be a massive massive deal, you should share it
I write this as somebody that went to community college and then won a couple of “golden tickets,” leveraged those tickets to a life beyond expectation, has had significant professional contact with elite graduates, generally thinks very poorly of many such graduates and their values/life choices/aesthetic taste, and had contempt for their godless Protestant culture and peculiar manners when in school, and has even more contempt now.
No. Go to those schools, just make sure to *generally* not adopt their culture and values. Treat it as a prolonged adventure among an Amazonian tribe which has had little contact with the outside world. Keep/develop your sense of self and integrity. And do not support them after you leave unless they align with *your* values.
There is a lot of value in being a normal, well adjusted person who also happens to have a credential from these schools. The credential is a very tasty chocolate covered cherry.
For what it's worth I think an ivy-caliber student who wants to go to law school is basically by FAR the most suited for an undergraduate state school.
This is because they will likely graduate with honors or even highest honors from state school if they are really an ivy-caliber student. And then they will also score extremely high on LSAT.
I think this is actually one of the highest +EV cases for state school undergraduate actually.. Anyone who is top 2-3% at a state school and then top 1% LSAT will get the chance to ivy signal with the law school sheepskin. And law school is basically a hard reset for employment so you wash the state school away when employers are considering you as a law student.
The Twitter account you linked to is going based on vibes and maybe anti-elite bias. Think the numbers would back up what I am saying 100%. Also if any such applicant is really concerned about disadvantaging themselves, just write SAT score on resume. Those with any kind of penetrating mind will understand the talent they are dealing with immediately and will disregard the state school aspect of identity.
As 2 Ivy parents whose two kids chose high quality in-state unis, we are here for all of this. Whereas I couldn’t sign my student loan papers quickly enough, our kids did not understand why they would take on debt to go to college if they didn’t have to. I realize that my parents’ desire for me to go to an Ivy was well intentioned, but it was also a bit of an ego trip. Your ideas would move things in a positive direction.
"University of Chicago... is now considered an elite private school but was much less of one when I first attended in 1996"
Not sure where that came from, first nuclear reactor at University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi. Mathematics dept under Marshall Stone placed US mathematics on the world map. Milton Friedman and Chicago School of Economics.
Postmodernism and gender identity and antiemetic lunacy and safe spaces are hardly the exclusive domain of "elite" schools. Most public universities are just as steeped in unreality as Harvard and Yale and Columbia. The University of California (where I live) is somewhat cheap (for residents) but the so-called education is abysmal. Most public universities will be that way as the US Dept of Education mandates many of their policies. Even private schools that take federal student loans must comply with the DOE commissars.
However, there are private schools that are rising to the occasion though. (Capitalism is so good at that.) Raising private capital for grants and loans. Providing lower cost options for a good education. U of Chicago is good. The new U of Austin is doing amazing stuff (where else can you take a course on classical Greek literature taught in the classical Greek language, in Greece?) Thomas Aquinas University. Ozarks (and they're free if you can get in.) Hillsdale College is rapidly becoming the homeschool-Harvard.
There are lots of good options to get a great classical education that isn't steeped on postmodernist, anticolonialist, racist propaganda. But public universities are usually not the right place to find it. If you're just looking for job skills, sure, go to a state school and be done with it. But if you want to become an educated person, you'll need to look harder.
I'm the CEO of a 250-person tech company in NYC who went to an top liberal arts college and Ivy League graduate school. All things being equal, when I am confronted with a hiring choice b/w an *entry-level candidate* who has a 4.0 from SUNY-Binghamton or CCNY vs a 4.0 from Penn or Brown, I choose the Binghamton/CCNY kid EVERY TIME.
There's a multitude of reasons for this - the three most prominent are:
(1) The grades reflect something. Getting a 4.0 at Binghamton/CCNY is HARDER than getting a 4.0 at Penn. It took me a long time to realize this but when I see resumes, I NEVER see a resume below 3.7ish from the Ivies (even in Engineering).
(2) The public school admission does not reflect athletic or legacy bias. One of the challenges in evaluating the Ivy League kid is that it's unclear how they got there.
(3) The public school admission (the campus at which they were admitted) means A LOT. There is a noticeable difference b/w SUNY-Binghamton students (for example) and SUNY-Oswego students.
The rest of Nate's argument, I'm not so sure about. In my experience, each category of employee is equally likely to be politically active and once someone is later in their career, their career achievements do a good job of filtering out.
While there is a huge difference in sticker price for in state public v private elite universities, that difference is much smaller for out of state elite public v elite private universities—compare Michigan to Harvard, especially adjusted for cost of living —which reflects amenities students value.
For non-rich students, it is cheaper to attend Harvard than Michigan, due to financial aid (Harvard like most very elite schools provide only grant aid, no loans).
If you’re right about employers, I would expect to see signaling devices develop at elite schools to alter the employer perceptions. If my Columbia resume has founder of “Students for Tolerance of Political Differences Club”, I can probably benefit from the positive aspects of Columbia’s reputation and avoid the negative.
It’s also worth noting that perhaps the most highly regarded public university (Berkeley) almost certainly fares worse on the “Wokeness” concern of employers than pretty much any Ivy.
None of this means you’re overall claim is wrong, but I think it comes down to the quality of the wage premium evidence v the individual cost difference (which can be negative for people with household incomes well above the median).
This is a comment on Nate"s two elites. Isn't he missing owners medium sized and largish firm like auto dealers, fast food franchise owners, construction firms etc who may be active in business groups, or Republican party politics. These folks would be part of a "capitalist elite" if you will, that is distinct from the credentialed elite that Nate holds us the entirety of the elite.
If your ultimate goal is a Ph.D. in a STEM field, you can do what I did: Go to a big state university as an undergrad and then choose an elite, possibly private, school for graduate studies. Some advantages:
- Your undergrad degree will be inexpensive.
- Due to sheer volume, a big state school will have a critical mass of nerds for you to hang out with, even if the average student is a partying frat boy.
- If you're smart, you will stand out and get lots of personal attention from your undergrad profs.
- You will probably get to do research as an undergrad (I even got my own office!).
- Even at expensive schools, grad school will be free: you will be paid via teaching and research assistantships.
Three thoughts on declining value of Ivy degrees:
1. In Yglesias' post on higher ed today, he shows a chart on grade inflation on Harvard. At the time when he/me/Nate Silver went to college, Harvard had an average GPA of 3.4. Now it has risen to 3.8. At the time 3.4 was considered inflated, but if you have a transcript with 30+ classes and students are earning grades from B- to A, it's possible to discriminate stronger and weaker students pretty clearly. You'll have students with 3.9s and students with 3.1s and these will correspond to real skill differences. 3.8 is a different story. At that point most grades are A's and it becomes genuinely hard to tell how smart people are. That weakens the degree.
2. As a professor, I am horrified by the Master's programs offered by many elite American universities. They are insanely expensive, of little career value, and unlike with the Ph.D. programs the profs/university don't care how well the students do because they are paying customers. See for example (https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-the-elite-masters-degrees-that-dont-pay-off-11625752773). As far as I'm concerned they are selling degrees to dupes. That can be lucrative but it weakens the value of all degrees from your institution and makes the university look like NFT salesmen.
3. The student loan forgiveness movement, which is much bigger than it used to be, hurts the reputation of universities because it showcases that the degrees sometimes aren't valuable enough to justify the cost. Many of the highest profile people griping about their students loans are victims of 2. above.
"Importantly, I expect the decline in perceptions of elite private colleges to extend to people tasked with making hiring decisions."
Why? This is the leap you actually have to explain here and this feels *very* hand waived. The hiring managers at fancy employers are elite university grads, they want their kids to go to elite universities, they're used to sending their recruiting teams to Harvard and Stanford (and Berkeley to be fair) every fall for a week of interviewing people. Are they going to dispatch those people to Rutgers and the University of Colorado instead because of what the median voter in Pennsylvania thinks?
I found Nate's article (and some of the responses to it) depressing, because he's reduced the whole business of going to university to a matter of prestige (or 'esteem', if you like). The word 'elite' is tossed around a lot these days, but it's a confusing idea, because it often conflates the idea of prestige and snobbery with the idea that someone or some institution is very good at something. Are 'elite' institutions elite because they attract the wealthy and produce the powerful, or because they're good at research and education? The piece implies that, in the case of 'private elite colleges', it's mostly the former. And I suspect that for many people who apply to those places, it's the prestige and all that comes with it - a fancier CV, status, connections, etc. - that they want, the education being a bonus. But it's possible for a place to be highly selective, sort of prestigious, and yet very good at giving people an education (I'll leave aside the research function).
I went to a small, selective liberal arts college and then two (excellent) state institutions for my MA and PhD. I had tenured posts in three different state universities in the UK and Canada, and taught as a visiting prof at an excellent American state university (Rutgers) and at a German one. I was very proud of the education we offered students at all the places I taught and I agree with Nate that great state education is one of the crowning achievements of a democratic society (not just America, though). But I'll be honest: of the eight universities/colleges I attended or taught at, the quality of education and the level of intellectual engagement was far and away the best at my liberal arts college. My courses were demanding, my teachers terrific, the other students interesting, and so on (and I know from reports of people who teach there today that it's still terrific). If someone were offered a place there - and could afford it - I'd tell them to take it in a second. I don't know what it added to my CV, but I learned an awful lot there (not just about subjects, but also about how to be a good teacher). Sometimes a place is 'elite' in both senses.
So I don't think that people's attitudes have changed because they've discovered the emperor has no clothes. Nor do I think it's because they're pissed off about political activism on campus. When I was a high school student Harvard, Columbia, and a host of other schools were occupied by anti-war protestors and there was plenty of talk about students being spoiled, out of touch, etc. (of course, soon after the protests, majority opinion swung heavily behind the students' point of view), yet there was no comparable decline in esteem. What has changed is a concerted effort to redefine the 'elite' in America in purely cultural terms: as people who go to Ivy League schools, drink lattes, watch NPR, and so forth. The Right has taken aim at universities and the professions, at the 'Coasts', as if the problem in America were snobs, not the wealthy and the powerful. And the campaign has worked a treat. People don't just value universities less - they value education as a whole less. I don't think this is a good thing (yes, yes, I have a lot of skin in this game, but I still think education is important for a well-functioning, happy society).
Final bit of snark: Nate is usually admirably honest about his own priors and background, but he is being very disingenuous about the University of Chicago. When I applied there in 1978 it was universally regarded as a selective, elite institution - it hasn't been anything but that since the Second World War. The fact that Nate carves out an exception for it is telling, because admitting he got a great education at an 'elite' institution would make the case he wants to make that much harder. Of course, people from the University of Chicago are always complaining that everywhere else is going to hell in a handbasket - remember Allen Bloom? - but that's just an inter-elite thing.
For some fields there is little advantage to going to the private schools over the flagship state universities - Engineering for example. If you are going to try for academic positions, the networking at the private universities can be a substantial boost, but for those headed into industry, the value proposition is much more tenuous. My youngest daughter and my son both went to the University of Washington where they did their BS and MS. My son did Running Start so that he only had to pay for approximately 2 years worth of his undergraduate education. They commuted to save housing costs. My daughter is a structural engineer and my son is a technical PM. My daughter has no student debt and my son will have his paid off in a year.
I think this advice needs more nuance for quality.
1. There's the creme de la creme of schools. People used to say HYPS. I have trouble believing it's ever going to be a bad idea to attend them, even if for peer effects alone. If you don't know what you want to do, you'll probably end up in the corporate world and you'll have peers that are going places and that can give you ideas about how to succeed.
2. There's the lower-ranked Ivies and top-tier of other private schools, like Chicago. It might be the case that they're converging more in quality towards state flagships. I can buy that. This is at least the category that's worth debating over.
3. Then you have all other private schools, other than certain schools with a well-defined and nonstandard mission (e.g. Christian, historically black, fine arts, etc.) Even when I was applying to colleges ~20 years ago, I categorized plain vanilla private colleges as "schools with no reason to exist." They have even less reason to exist now. They are a scam and you should not go to them unless you're getting a very large scholarship, and maybe not even then. Many of them will cease to exist with the enrollment cliff, and it always sucks having a degree from a school that no longer exists (as my father, who went through life with this problem, would tell you).
Unless you are in the narrow band of family income and cost of living such that going to an elite school requires you take out huge debt, this is poor advice. Going to the most prestigious school possible signals to employers that you are smart and hardworking (which is how you got into the prestigious school). Prestigious schools still have by far the best recruiting networks and the best reputations among hirers. If you have evidence to the contrary, which would be a massive massive deal, you should share it
I write this as somebody that went to community college and then won a couple of “golden tickets,” leveraged those tickets to a life beyond expectation, has had significant professional contact with elite graduates, generally thinks very poorly of many such graduates and their values/life choices/aesthetic taste, and had contempt for their godless Protestant culture and peculiar manners when in school, and has even more contempt now.
No. Go to those schools, just make sure to *generally* not adopt their culture and values. Treat it as a prolonged adventure among an Amazonian tribe which has had little contact with the outside world. Keep/develop your sense of self and integrity. And do not support them after you leave unless they align with *your* values.
There is a lot of value in being a normal, well adjusted person who also happens to have a credential from these schools. The credential is a very tasty chocolate covered cherry.
That's why we call them the Demoralize DIEvy League. "Elite" campuses are no different than Red Guard struggle sessions: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/struggle-session-parody-3bodyproblem-harvard
For what it's worth I think an ivy-caliber student who wants to go to law school is basically by FAR the most suited for an undergraduate state school.
This is because they will likely graduate with honors or even highest honors from state school if they are really an ivy-caliber student. And then they will also score extremely high on LSAT.
I think this is actually one of the highest +EV cases for state school undergraduate actually.. Anyone who is top 2-3% at a state school and then top 1% LSAT will get the chance to ivy signal with the law school sheepskin. And law school is basically a hard reset for employment so you wash the state school away when employers are considering you as a law student.
The Twitter account you linked to is going based on vibes and maybe anti-elite bias. Think the numbers would back up what I am saying 100%. Also if any such applicant is really concerned about disadvantaging themselves, just write SAT score on resume. Those with any kind of penetrating mind will understand the talent they are dealing with immediately and will disregard the state school aspect of identity.
As 2 Ivy parents whose two kids chose high quality in-state unis, we are here for all of this. Whereas I couldn’t sign my student loan papers quickly enough, our kids did not understand why they would take on debt to go to college if they didn’t have to. I realize that my parents’ desire for me to go to an Ivy was well intentioned, but it was also a bit of an ego trip. Your ideas would move things in a positive direction.
"University of Chicago... is now considered an elite private school but was much less of one when I first attended in 1996"
Not sure where that came from, first nuclear reactor at University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi. Mathematics dept under Marshall Stone placed US mathematics on the world map. Milton Friedman and Chicago School of Economics.
Postmodernism and gender identity and antiemetic lunacy and safe spaces are hardly the exclusive domain of "elite" schools. Most public universities are just as steeped in unreality as Harvard and Yale and Columbia. The University of California (where I live) is somewhat cheap (for residents) but the so-called education is abysmal. Most public universities will be that way as the US Dept of Education mandates many of their policies. Even private schools that take federal student loans must comply with the DOE commissars.
However, there are private schools that are rising to the occasion though. (Capitalism is so good at that.) Raising private capital for grants and loans. Providing lower cost options for a good education. U of Chicago is good. The new U of Austin is doing amazing stuff (where else can you take a course on classical Greek literature taught in the classical Greek language, in Greece?) Thomas Aquinas University. Ozarks (and they're free if you can get in.) Hillsdale College is rapidly becoming the homeschool-Harvard.
There are lots of good options to get a great classical education that isn't steeped on postmodernist, anticolonialist, racist propaganda. But public universities are usually not the right place to find it. If you're just looking for job skills, sure, go to a state school and be done with it. But if you want to become an educated person, you'll need to look harder.
I'm the CEO of a 250-person tech company in NYC who went to an top liberal arts college and Ivy League graduate school. All things being equal, when I am confronted with a hiring choice b/w an *entry-level candidate* who has a 4.0 from SUNY-Binghamton or CCNY vs a 4.0 from Penn or Brown, I choose the Binghamton/CCNY kid EVERY TIME.
There's a multitude of reasons for this - the three most prominent are:
(1) The grades reflect something. Getting a 4.0 at Binghamton/CCNY is HARDER than getting a 4.0 at Penn. It took me a long time to realize this but when I see resumes, I NEVER see a resume below 3.7ish from the Ivies (even in Engineering).
(2) The public school admission does not reflect athletic or legacy bias. One of the challenges in evaluating the Ivy League kid is that it's unclear how they got there.
(3) The public school admission (the campus at which they were admitted) means A LOT. There is a noticeable difference b/w SUNY-Binghamton students (for example) and SUNY-Oswego students.
The rest of Nate's argument, I'm not so sure about. In my experience, each category of employee is equally likely to be politically active and once someone is later in their career, their career achievements do a good job of filtering out.
While there is a huge difference in sticker price for in state public v private elite universities, that difference is much smaller for out of state elite public v elite private universities—compare Michigan to Harvard, especially adjusted for cost of living —which reflects amenities students value.
For non-rich students, it is cheaper to attend Harvard than Michigan, due to financial aid (Harvard like most very elite schools provide only grant aid, no loans).
If you’re right about employers, I would expect to see signaling devices develop at elite schools to alter the employer perceptions. If my Columbia resume has founder of “Students for Tolerance of Political Differences Club”, I can probably benefit from the positive aspects of Columbia’s reputation and avoid the negative.
It’s also worth noting that perhaps the most highly regarded public university (Berkeley) almost certainly fares worse on the “Wokeness” concern of employers than pretty much any Ivy.
None of this means you’re overall claim is wrong, but I think it comes down to the quality of the wage premium evidence v the individual cost difference (which can be negative for people with household incomes well above the median).
This is a comment on Nate"s two elites. Isn't he missing owners medium sized and largish firm like auto dealers, fast food franchise owners, construction firms etc who may be active in business groups, or Republican party politics. These folks would be part of a "capitalist elite" if you will, that is distinct from the credentialed elite that Nate holds us the entirety of the elite.