Harvard graduates have a disproportionate impact on society

Who ends up in positions of influence in society matters because their preferences and personal characteristics can influence all the political issues that affect us. This has been documented by a long history of research by influential people such as The power elite, by C. Wright Mills. But who ultimately ends up in influential positions in society—among the people we can call the “elite”?

In his recent cover story for “How the Ivy League Broke America.” AtlanticDavid Brooks argues that meritocracy does not seem to work. In particular, Brooks argues that the elite education system has a lot to offer because it has contributed to much of the divide between political parties and red-blue America. Based on elite education in the US, Brooks talks about the top of the Ivy League – Harvard – but also the wider group of schools that make up the top of any university ranking system. Brooks repeats the book’s analysis in many ways Divorcing.

“When income is the main division of society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money,” Brooks notes. “When society becomes more divided on the basis of education, politics becomes a war of values ​​and culture.”

In their recent book Polarized by degreesMatt Grossman and David Hopkins explain that over the past several decades, “Democrats have become home to highly educated citizens with progressive social views who favor credentialed experts in making policy decisions, while Republicans have become populist champions of white voters without college degrees who distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations and even to businesses.” This is true even among members of Congress, where a paper with Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman shows that elite educated Republicans have rapidly declined in both the House and Senate from 1973 to today.

Brooks claims that when starting out as a journalist it didn’t really matter where you went to school (or even if you went to university), but that this has changed considerably over the years and points to a study published by Kaja Perina and Tein Expert journal shows that about half New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reporters and writers attended 34 elite schools (20% attended Ivy League schools).

The influence of elite schools in America

In a recently published article Nature Humanities and social sciences Communication along with colleagues Stephen Anderson, Kaja Perina, Frank C. Worrell, and Christopher Chabris, we studied a sample of more than 26,000 Americans drawn from 30 different groups of influential people, from four-star admirals and generals to presidents and vice presidents to Pulitzers. Award-winning, founders of billion-dollar startups, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and Harvard faculty. Among the same 34 elite schools, we found that a total of 54.2% of these individuals had attended one of these schools, ranging from 11.2% to 25.9% for generals, admirals, and members of the House of Representatives, and as high as 78.9%. 80.9% Forbes most influential men, Harvard faculty and members of the American Philosophical Society. Overall, 36.3% attended an Ivy League school and 16% attended Harvard.

We calculated that of all adults in the US population, approximately 32.5% have a bachelor’s degree or higher, 1.9% have a degree from one of 34 elite schools, 0.6% from an Ivy League school, and 0.2% from Harvard. . As we explain in the article, “These data show that the percentages of individuals in each group of American leaders and influencers are quite high relative to the population baseline. For example, when 54% of our sample of 26,198 individuals have attended one of 34 elite schools and the baseline rate is about 1.9%, this suggests to the fact that it is approximately 28 times compared to base interest rate expectations (calculated as 54/ 1.9).Of all groups, about 36% attended an Ivy League school, indicating about a 60-fold overrepresentation (36/0.6). 2).This overrepresentation factor is 75 times, even if Harvard faculty members are excluded (15/0.2) Below is an image that visually shows this overrepresentation in our paper.

The Harvard effect

Harvard’s influence alone is incredible in all 30 fields we studied. And notably, a full 44.5% of Harvard faculty members attended Harvard University, and about 80% of Harvard faculty attended one of the 34 elite schools.

These findings are confirmed by a 2010 study of 6,900 by Steven Brint and colleagues Sociology of educationshowing that 1.97% of US cultural elites attended Harvard and 6.3% of US government and business leaders attended Harvard. These findings are also confirmed more widely outside the United States. For example, a recent study by Ricardo Salas-Diaz and Kevin Young was published in Global networks showed that among approximately 6,000 global elites, the Harvard-educated proportion was 9.18% (in the US sample, the figure was 16.19%). Salas-Diaz and Young’s findings thus replicate our findings in the United States. These findings are also in line with previous studies looking at the global elite (a sample of about 4,000) and the global wealthy (a sample of about 18,000).

Salas-Diaz and Young also show in their paper that “Oxbridge” or the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge are both highly represented in the global elite, which is also confirmed by some of my previous observations. And recently in their book Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British EliteAaron Reeves and Sam Friedman examine elites as measured by inclusion in a historical database Who’s whoOf the 33,000 people in 2022, around 35% attended Oxbridge, compared to less than 1% of the British population.

This study documents the influence of elite schools, and particularly the Ivy League and Harvard University, among people who have great influence in our society. However, that does not mean that this is how things should or could be. In 1958, Michael Young wrote a fictional dystopian description of society that relates to Brooks’s arguments. Kurt Vonnegut’s older story and Lionel Shriver’s newer satire both deal with what can happen when society is deeply concerned with inequality. Michael Sandel presents some possible solutions to consider The tyranny of merit: What has become of the common good?and David Goodhart in Head, hand, heart: Why intelligence is over-rewarded, manual workers are important and nurses deserve more respect.