Abolish the Ivy League - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

Subtitles section Play video

The hallowed halls of the Ivy Leagues are seen as a place where the American Dream
comes to fruition, where great minds from all walks of life can come and be molded into the
leaders of tomorrow. The reality, it turns out, is much different. From inconsistent
actual financial and professional outcomes for graduates, to elitist college campuses built for
the wealthiest students to succeed, to admissions processes that do very little to actually improve
diversity of identity or thought, to the very unsavory products of Ivy League schools that
lead you to question whether we should just throw the whole system out with the wash (see,
for example, Donald Trump, the Unabomber, Steve Bannon, Ted Cruz, and Charles Davenport,
the most influential eugenicist in the United States, to name a few), the reality of the Ivy
League and the damage that our obsession with elite colleges does to our students and our
society is incredibly bleak. This is why we should abolish the Ivy League. Roll the intro.
Thank you to my partner on today’s video, Beam! I was recently diagnosed with ADHD and one side
effect I find particularly challenging is the fact that I cannot turn my brain off at night
when I’m trying to go to sleep. That constant rumination keeps me awake too late or wakes me
up in the middle of the night and keeps me from sleeping. And when I don’t get enough sleep,
boy howdy I’m a nightmare!! I can’t function, I’m more emotional, I eat a ton of sugar and caffeine
to try to compensate for how tired I am, which just ends up making me feel worse. I hate it. So
sleep is a HUGE priority for me, so I can wake up feeling my best and continue to deliver you
this excellent content. That’s why I love Beam’s Dream Powder. Dream is a cup of healthy hot cocoa,
formulated with things like reishi, magnesium, L-Theanine, and Melatonin,
that help you get your best night’s sleep. I love the original cinnamon cocoa flavor and the
chocolate peanut butter is also a fun treat. And with no added sugar and only 15 calories,
I can drink it right before bed without it spiking my glucose levels and keeping me up. But it’s also
delicious, and I love a lil sweet treat before bed. I genuinely fall asleep faster with Beam,
which helps so much with getting the rest I need to wake up feeling refreshed, and not groggy. With
more sleep, I notice more balance in my mood and I’m generally happier and less stressed, which is
amazing. In a clinical study, 93% of participants reported Dream helped them get better sleep. Click
my link below or scan the QR code to shop Beam’s BIGGEST sale of the year, just in time for the
holiday season. Get up to 50% off. Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer! The discount is
auto-applied, no code necessary. Thanks again to Beam for partnering with me on today’s video!
Today I’m gonna discuss my own experience with education and prestige having gone to
law school and also a prestigious undergraduate school. Then we’ll get into where the Ivy League
even comes from and how even its origins are problematic, plus why there’s so much hype
about them in the first place. And then we’ll get into the actual societal harms that come
from concentrating so much power in the hands of a few schools, and what needs to change.
My experience with the Ivy League is that I didn’t go to there. And it might be easy
to then try to write me off as either not knowing what I’m talking about or I’m just jealous because
I didn’t get into my dream school or something. That’s not the case. Not exactly, anyway. I went
to Vassar College in undergrad, one of the Seven Sisters, formerly all female schools that were
created to provide women with the education they were denied by sexist policies in the Ivy Leagues,
and it’s part of a group of small colleges called the “Little Ivies” which is frankly
patronizing no thank you. It’s a prestigious school but it’s not an Ivy League. I toured
Brown but the guy who gave the tour was wearing an argyle sweater vest and not in an ironic way,
so I knew it was too square for me. But I felt at home with the queers at Vassar.
Law school was another story. If the disease of prestige obsession hasn’t bitten you yet,
it will when you think about applying for law school. Some of my peers at Vassar got into Ivy
League law schools and there was a period of time when I thought that the only option was for me to
get into an Ivy League law school, and if I didn’t then like what was I even doing this for? It would
mean that I wasn’t destined for greatness and that just wasn’t an option. It’s a disease. I
cried when I got my LSAT score back. I scored in the 90th percentile. And I cried. Because I
knew it wasn’t good enough for the Ivy League, which typically only accepts scores in the 95th
percentile and above, unless of course you have a backdoor in, which we’ll get into. It’s a disease.
Once I got over that and realized that I could do a lot of good in the world without an Ivy League
education, my practical brain turned back on and I decided to go to a school where my LSAT score
would get me a full ride scholarship, because I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do with my
law degree, so saddling myself with six figures of law school debt seemed like a bad idea.
And THEREIN lies one of the many issues with Ivy League schools–had I gotten a score good enough
to get into an ivy league school but not good enough to get a full ride to said ivy league,
which you only get generally if you get a perfect score on the LSAT or damn near it, then would I
have been drawn in by the prestige and decided fuck it give me 150k of debt I want Columbia
on my resume? Honestly probably. And then I would have gotten a prestigious big law job (which I did
anyway) but instead of deciding 10 months in that it was hell on earth and quitting, like I did,
I would have been absolutely trapped under $2000 per month student loan payments. The freedom that
NOT going to an ivy league gave me to forge my own path and find a job that is unconventional and my
absolute dream (YouTube) is absolutely priceless. And the death grip that ivy league prestige has on
people, especially millennials, leads many people into situations that, had they listened to their
gut and stayed true to themselves, they would have never gone for. If given the opportunity,
would you have attended an Ivy League school?[a] Debt and all? [pause]
To help you answer that question, let’s get into some facts n figures, shall we?
The Ivy League is seen internationally as the gold standard for higher education in America
and for intellectualism at large. That’s been established over a very long history, one that
is foundational to American colonialism and white supremacy, and which benefited from the labor of
minorities who were barred from attendance. There are eight schools in the Ivy League: Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania.
All of them except Cornell were created before the formation of the United States.
Harvard was created in 1636, that’s before the Salem witch trials, when the Massachusetts Bay
Colony voted to create a college. It was the first institution of higher education
in the United States. The rest were founded before the Revolutionary War in the 1700s,
except for Cornell, which wasn’t founded until 1865. In the early years of the Ivy Leagues,
schools were mainly attended by sons of wealthy colonists where they studied rhetoric, math,
and Latin, and often prepared for careers in the church or in law. Students were almost
exclusively white, wealthy, and male, for literal centuries. The elite nature of the
Ivy Leagues was baked in from the very beginning. At Harvard’s first commencement ceremony in 1642,
graduates walked across the stage in order of their family’s standing in society. That process
of ranking students by social status continued for more than a century. Before the revolution,
colleges were seen as instruments of Christian expansion, part of the English strategy to
maintain authority over colonies and assert cultural superiority over indigenous and
enslaved people. Early university trustees who grew these schools into the institutions they
are today were almost all engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. Additionally, public universities
benefited financially from the taxes collected on the import and sale of enslaved Africans.
Many of these universities benefited directly from slave labor. Enslaved people maintained fire
for heat, hauled water, prepared food, cleaned, mended clothes, built and repaired the buildings,
maintained the grounds, cultivated the land, and kept the animals on rural campuses. While doing
so, the very institutions that could run because of the labor of enslaved people were developing
the theories that justified white domination of native lands and exploitation of slave labor,
including eugenics and polygenesis, theories that posit that white people are biologically
superior to other races. These theories were legitimized because they came from the most
prestigious colleges in the land. They got the ol Harvard stamp of approval. All the while
receiving endowments from slave traders for their medical schools and science facilities.
Recent graduates of the schools would use their school connections to apprentice and
work for alumni who had made their fortunes in the Atlantic slave trade. The wealth of cotton
planters was given to schools to expand their infrastructure. These schools became hostile
to abolitionist activity and rhetoric, instead favoring the American Colonization Society’s
plan to send free blacks back to Africa. A literal slave auction was held on Princeton’s
campus in 1766. Members of the University of Pennsylvania faculty and alumni pushed for slavery
to be enshrined in the US Constitution. According to the book Ebony and Ivy, “There were arguably as
many enslaved Black people at Dartmouth as there were students in the college course.” Yale’s first
set of scholarships were funded by the profits of a slave plantation that was donated to the
school. Its dining room, for centuries, featured a stained glass window that showed Black people
picking cotton. It was shattered by a Black school employee in 2016. Icon. The residential
colleges at Yale were headed by “masters,” one even had the same layout as a Southern
plantation and the housing in the back of it was originally named the “slave quarters.” Until 2007,
the Yale board of trustees would hold their meetings under a massive painting depicting
founder Elihu Yale with a couple other white dudes being served by a young enslaved girl. YIKES.
As to the origin of the term “ivy league”, around the mid-1800s, students at Harvard began
an ivy planting ceremony every year that included “the ivy oration” or a speech given by a fellow
classmate. That connection between ivy and elite northeastern colleges continued until the 1950s,
when a new athletics conference was created between 8 elite northeastern colleges and
was called The Ivy League. By the start of World War II,
around 125 black students total had earned a degree at an Ivy League school. Most schools
did not admit women until the 60s and 70s. And those efforts to admit women were met with strong
push back from alumni and donors. One Princeton alum declared, "If Princeton goes coeducational,
my alma mater will have been taken away from me, and PRINCETON IS DEAD." A Yale alum wrote a letter
to the school’s alumni magazine, saying "Gentlemen — let's face it — charming as women are — they get
to be a drag if you are forced to associate with them each and every day. Think of the poor student
who has a steady date — he wants to concentrate on the basic principles of thermodynamics,
but she keeps trying to gossip about the idiotic trivia all women try to impose on men." In a
letter written to the Dartmouth board of trustees in 1970, one alum lamented "For God's sake,
for Dartmouth's sake, and for everyone's sake, keep the damned women out."
And despite years of affirmative action, and showy lip service to increasing campus diversity,
Ivy League schools continue to reflect their exclusionary history. And that is a feature,
not a design flaw. Most Ivy League schools enroll more students from the top 1% than
they do from the entire bottom 60%. Children whose parents are in the top 1% are 77 times
more likely to attend an Ivy League than those in the bottom fifth. 15% of graduating seniors
nationwide are black, while only 8% of students at Ivy League schools are black. Legacy preference in
the admissions process means that if your daddy went to Harvard, you have a one in three chance
of getting in, compared to a 6% chance for all other applicants, perpetuating a lineage of white,
wealthy attendees that goes back upwards of 16 generations, while black applicants, who
were barred until very recently, have about one generation of legacy to pull from.
And I say that’s a feature, not a flaw, because it serves the Ivy League well to maintain their
elitist, exclusionary history. If you are born in the bottom fifth of income distribution in
America, your odds of reaching the top 20% of earners sit at just 7.5%. It’s a lot easier to
maintain wealth than to grow it from nothing. So favoring wealthy students means producing
wealthy alums who will donate money into the multi-billion dollar endowment funds that each
Ivy League school has. Funds that grew massively during the pandemic to support institutions that
also receive federal tax payer dollars and insane tax exemptions, all while providing education
to .4% of the college students in America. The eight Ivy League colleges enroll around 68,000
undergraduates out of 17 million total undergraduates in the country, or .4%.
And that exclusivity is part of the design. Each of the Ivy Leagues have the funds to expand
and provide education to more students, but as anyone who knows a thing or two about economics
knows, exclusivity breeds demand. And boy is there demand. Harvard University accepted just 3.2% of
applicants for the 2026 undergraduate class. And with that level of supply and demand you
can charge pretty much anything you want. And they do. And this fuels a frenzy, mostly by parents,
who are desperate for their children to have the best of the best. And parents are spoon fed
stories by the media that lead them to believe that an Ivy League education is required for
wealth and success. For example, a 2015 Washington Post article was titled “This chart shows how much
more Ivy League grads make than you.” The article went on to show that 10 years after graduating,
the median annual earnings for an Ivy League graduate is 70,000 per year,
while those who were in the top 10% of their Ivy League class are closer to 200,000 dollars,
compared to the median for graduates of all other schools, which sat at $34,000. However,
a paper published in 2011 showed that when you take student “quality” into account, there is
virtually no earnings advantage to graduating from an elite college. So for example, students
who applied to elite schools, got in, but then didn’t go to them, had similar earnings outcomes
as if they had attended the elite schools. And even more interestingly, the study found that
students who applied for Ivy League schools and were rejected from them went on to earn similar
amounts of money as if they had actually attended those Ivy League schools, indicating that outcomes
had more to do with the audacity of the student than the quality of education or connections that
an Ivy League education purportedly provides. Of course there are so many caveats to a
study like this, especially regarding minority, poor, and first-generation students. But it also
elucidates another important point regarding the hype of these Ivy League schools:
They don’t actually offer a remarkably better education than non-Ivy schools, especially
when you take into account the incredibly toxic world of academia where many of the professors
have outsized egos and are required to care more about getting published than about being
good at teaching in order to secure their tenured position at an Ivy League institution. And many
famous thinkers and leaders have come from the hallowed halls of the Ivy League, including every
president since Ronald Reagan, including Donald Trump which should tell you all you need to know
about nepotism and the quality of an Ivy League education because I’m not convinced that man can
read words. But while it can be easy for parents to point to all the important famous people who
went to an Ivy League school and think that that’s the only option for their precious bundle of joy
to ever achieve wealth and success, if that’s all you want for your kid, which is sad, but ok,
it can be easy to think that the Ivy League is the only way. But the stats don’t really back
that up. When analyzing 2300 government officials, CEOs, and other of society’s perceived “leaders”,
researchers found that just 16% held an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League or “Ivy
Plus” school, which includes schools like Stanford and MIT which aren’t in the Ivy League but might
as well be. So 84% of the people you look to as leaders whether that's in politics or business or
elsewhere, didn’t go to an Ivy League school for undergrad and have still achieved success. Much of
the veneer that makes it seem like Ivy Leagues are required to achieve success comes from the
exclusivity of the schools and the fact that rich alums can go on to work for other rich alums,
making it seem like it's the schools, and not straight up nepotism, that can take credit for
the success of their alums. And that is further reinforced by things like a recent survey which
found that nearly 1 in 3 hiring managers prefer to only hire candidates who attended an elite
university. And assuming that someone who went to an Ivy League will be a better worker is
absolutely idiotic if you’ve ever met anyone who went to any Ivy League. Or anyone at all,
for that matter. There are many traits that make a good worker. Going to an elite institution isn’t
necessary to have those traits and can in fact imbue its students with the very traits that
boomer hiring managers love to hate: entitlement and huge egos. But that’s not the only or the
worst harm that comes from these institutions and the level of prestige we grant them.
My first internship during law school was in the fall of 2018 at the United States Attorney’s
Office in Boston, doing work for the securities and financial fraud division. Three very topical
things happened during that fall. First, the division where I worked was actively investigating
what would eventually become the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal. It was very thrilling
to get a behind the scenes look, and to watch when it broke on national news. That’s all I
can say because I definitely signed some NDAs with the federal government. Second, Brett Kavanaugh’s
confirmation hearings were all anyone could talk about. It was incredibly retraumatizing to watch
a woman recount on national television the sexual assault she had experienced, be questioned and
disbelieved, receive death threats about it, and then watch a whiny lil white man throw a
tantrum about it and then get his way. A man who is the product of not only the Ivy League but also
the feeder prep school system that supplies the Ivy League with its future wealthy donor
class of alums. It vividly depicted the outcome of the old boys club–-fumbling your way into the
United States Supreme Court, despite credible assault accusations. And that’s not the first
time we’ve watched someone who was the product of the Ivy League make it into the Supreme Court
despite credible assault allegations. And then third, during that fall of 2018,
at the federal courthouse in Boston where I was working, I got to watch live the opening
arguments for the trial that would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court in Students
for Fair Education vs. Harvard, which the Supreme Court decided THIS YEAR and ruled that affirmative
action was unconstitutional. It was a wild couple months.
The Varsity Blues case in particular was a vivid example of the lengths parents
are willing to go in order to get their kids into prestigious schools, no matter what. Even though,
as we’ve talked about, the fact of going to an Ivy League doesn’t necessarily mean much,
and your kid’s tenacity and wealth they were born into have much more correlation
with long term wealth and success, if your definition of success is being a CEO.
To review, if you don’t remember, back in 2019 it broke that an independent college advisor
named Rick Singer used bribery, money laundering, and document fabrication to get students admitted
to elite colleges, including Yale. The scheme involved bribing college athletic coaches to
recruit a student for their sport despite the fact that the student had no experience or skill in the
sport. This was often done for teams that received less scrutiny, like water polo and rowing, where
apparently schools paid very little oversight and coaches were able to pocket tens of thousands of
dollars in exchange for saying yeah we need this kid he’s really good at water polo. Singer made
a reported $25 million on this scheme, which also involved photoshopping students' faces onto photos
of someone doing the sport they’re alleged to be good at, and bribing proctors at a couple testing
facilities to correct student answers after they took the SAT or ACT. Singer would arrange for the
student to fly with their family to one of the few locations where he found bribable proctors,
and the parents would lie and say they were there for a wedding or something, so the kid
had to take the test then. None of the kids or the schools were charged. Parents, like Felicity
Huffman and Lori Loughlin did prison time, and Rick Singer was just sentenced earlier this year
to 3 ½ years in prison for the scheme. And this whole scheme just underscores
how absolutely cutthroat and absurd the competition for Ivy League placement is,
especially among wealthy parents. Because when you come from a poor or modest background,
getting into any elite college will impress your family and friends. But when you’re rich and,
therefore, the chances of you getting into an Ivy League are 77 times higher, it becomes less about
whether your kid gets into an elite school and instead a matter of which one. It’s a way for the
uber wealthy to create class structures within the upper echelon of the socioeconomic divide. Which
is so out of touch with reality that when the rest of us learned that one family was willing to
pay Rick Singer 1.2 MILLION DOLLARS to get their daughter into Yale on false soccer credentials,
it’s hard to imagine what world you’d have to live in where that would make any sense. The
answer to that is the world of the 1%, where they spend whatever money they have to to get
their kids into the right schools. Because the irony in all of this is that,
not only do Ivy League schools not guarantee success, but these parents already had all the
money they needed to legally give their children every possible opportunity for success that the
rest of us could never dream of having. Private feeder prep schools filled with wealthy alum with
Ivy League connections, private tutors for every class and tutors for the ACT and SAT,
impressive expensive extracurriculars like “service trips” and water polo. Advisors that
help craft perfect personal essays and resumes. Money to donate to the school, which often bumps
the kid ahead in line. And yet they still felt the need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars,
for some of them, to get their kid into elite schools. Instead of accepting their kid for who
they are, which maybe is just someone who isn’t interested in achieving the highest possible
academic milestones imaginable in order to impress all their parents’ friends.
And all of this money the parents do spend on legitimate things that they know colleges
view favorably, like private schools and tutors, means that those few of us who muscled our way out
of lower income households and public school and into more elite colleges, got there and realized
we were in way over our heads. I started Vassar having never written a research paper before. When
I was assigned one my first semester, I looked around and everyone seemed to know what to do.
At my first ever class in college, my freshman writing seminar, a girl from Manhattan was
literally wearing furs. Meryl Streep's daughter was the year above me. Like I was encountering
wealth that it hadn’t even occurred to me even existed in the world. My mom cleaned houses for
30 years. When I was 13 she cried in a JcPenneys because her credit card was rejected while she
was trying to buy me a winter coat. To say I felt out of place would be an understatement. And I’m
white. Despite all the lip service that colleges give to diversity and inclusion and to providing
financial aid for low income students, the reality is that elite colleges, in their obsession with
growing ever bigger endowments and fostering a community of incredibly wealthy alumni, will
always favor the children of rich people. And that furthers the already toxic culture in
Ivy League schools, where perfection is demanded and 70% of graduating seniors apply for investment
firms to go on and hoard as much wealth as they possibly can. The quality of the education isn’t
higher than other schools, but the message is what counts. Students at Ivy Leagues are told
they are special. They’re destined for greatness. They are the best and the brightest. And for
most of those kids, they’ve been told that their whole life. This further perpetuates an elitist,
capitalist society where there must be losers in order for there to be winners, where the
fact that if you’re in the bottom 5th percentage of income you have a .5% chance of ending up in an
Ivy League means that the odds of you ever being deemed the best or the brightest are slim to none.
And the stats make it clear that getting into an Ivy League is not a meritocracy, it absolutely
depends on who you know and the money your parents were able to throw at your education.
This out of touch narrative that the Ivy League is built on meritocracy is best illustrated by
a quote from Brett Kavanaugh who said “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the number one law school
in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.” His
grandfather literally went to Yale Law school. And Brett himself went to a feeder prep school
so prestigious that he’s not even the first Supreme Court Justice to have gone there.
But elite schools present their admissions processes as though it is a meritocracy,
like they only pick the best and the brightest, need blind, everyone gets a fair shot. Which then
further legitimizes the elitism that graduates of those schools go on to reinforce in our society,
even though most of them are in there because of nothing other than the dumb
luck of the circumstances of their birth. It’s what Evan Mandery, author of the book Poison Ivy:
How Elite Colleges Divide Us, calls “the illusion of opportunity.” He goes on to say “I really
think it's important that people understand that the concept of merit doesn't exist;
it doesn't come from God. It doesn't exist in the ether. People construct it, and the elite have
constructed it to serve their interests. Who says that SAT scores are really a measure of whether
you deserve to be in college? They don't predict anything. They're actually a terrible predictor
of college performance. High school rank is a better predictor, but then it would legitimize
the candidacy of every valedictorian in the United States. And they don't want to do that.”
God forbid the top achiever in the graduating class from the worst high school in South Chicago
thought they had an equal footing with a mediocre graduate from a feeder school like Georgetown Prep
like, oh say, a Brett Kavanaugh. God forbid. And the arrogance that this message sends to
graduates of Ivy Leagues is palpable in the Donald Trumps of the world, in Elon Musk who is incapable
of admitting when he’s wrong, men who think they’re the smartest guys in the room. Mandery,
author of Poison Ivy, points out the harm this creates: “I think what we've created in America
is a likelihood for a certain type of affluent kid, that they never encounter any disadvantage
or cognitive dissonance in their life, they just feel completely confident about their status in
the world. And their value systems are skewed. American taxpayers give elite colleges about
$20 billion a year in tax breaks. I'd feel a little differently about it if they made
a bunch of rich white kids into teachers and do-gooders. They don't do any of that.”
An article from the Atlantic clearly lays out the disconnect between Ivy League admissions
committees and the reality of the students they’re accepting and rejecting. “From the
perspective of prep schoolers who have no grasp of the challenges presented by economic scarcity,
the Collegiate Honor Roll Lacrosse captain easily surpasses the Benjamin Banneker High B+ student
who lives in a shelter and works at Target after school to help out her single mother and younger
siblings. The fantasy that all young people are running the same race blinds many university
trustees, administrators, and admissions committees to the reality that they undervalue
students who always have to run uphill.” The article goes on to say “Elite universities
should not be asking, “Why do we have so few low-income students?” but “How do we have so
many wealthy ones?” There is no relationship between being intelligent and inheriting wealth.
Therefore, the only logical explanation for the disproportionate abundance of wealthy people in
elite colleges and universities is that these private institutions consistently overvalue the
performance and qualifications of youth from higher income brackets.” And this problem is
getting worse, not better. In 1985, 46% of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective
colleges in America came from the top quarter of income distribution. By 2000, it was at 55%.
The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is likely to be.
And this reality hasn’t been improved by programs like affirmative action, which tried to level
the playing field a bit by allowing race to be a consideration in college admissions. Affirmative
action was ruled unconstitutional, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause,
in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, decided by the Supreme Court earlier this
year. The court held affirmative action, that is considering race in admissions processes,
up to the highest level of scrutiny, as all laws that treat races differently are held,
and found that there wasn’t a strong enough reason to justify racial preferences. This was a blow to
the many people who saw affirmative action as a way to right the wrongs of the past and provide
historically marginalized students with a leg up, acknowledging many of the things we’ve already
talked about–that students of color tend not to have the resources that white students have,
and have had to overcome more adversity, and that should be taken into consideration. That’s gone,
and under this court, it’s not coming back. No federal statute can bring it back without being
struck down as equally unconstitutional. That being said, however, affirmative action wasn’t
particularly impactful to begin with. It certainly was for the students it opened doors for. But
leading sociologists in education estimate that about 10-15 thousand students graduate annually
from selective universities who might not have been accepted without race-conscious admissions.
That’s only about 2 percent of the total number of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students
in four-year colleges in the US. Review: There are a number of changes that
could happen to make this whole system less fucked, but before we get into that,
let’s review. What have we learned?: * Most of the Ivy League schools were
founded before the US was even a country. * They were exclusively for elite, white,
male students for hundreds of years, and often benefited from slave labor,
either directly or indirectly. * That elitism has been baked
into the fabric of Ivy League schools such that, to this day, if you are in the top 1%,
you are 77 times more likely to go to an Ivy League school than those
in the entire bottom 60% of the population. * This elitism is then reinforced by Ivy League
graduates who are given outsized roles in society because of the prestige these colleges have,
prestige that the colleges themselves fabricated through extreme selectivity
and wealthy alumni networks. * Only 16% of those who we consider
“leaders” – politicians, CEOs, etc. – have an Ivy League degree, disproving the idea that you
need to go to an Ivy League school to succeed. * Those few lower income students who do make it
in are often alienated and ill-equipped to engage with the campus community because it is inherently
built for the children of wealthy people. * Affirmative action did little to counteract
this reality, and is gone for good. The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the Varsity
Blues college admissions scandal, and most recently the overturning of affirmative action,
have all contributed to the growth of important conversations about the role wealth, prestige, and
status plays on our country’s most elite college campuses. And it has led to a growing push to end
legacy admissions and preferential treatment for the children of major donors. As I said,
you have a 1 in 3 shot of getting into Harvard as a legacy applicant, compared to 6% for everyone
else. This further reinforces economic inequality by giving preferential treatment to kids who are
likely already wealthy and privileged, at the expense of more qualified students who would have
gotten in but for the spaces taken by legacy kids. Historians have actually traced legacy preferences
back to the 1920s, used by elite colleges as a means of limiting the number of Jewish students
they admitted. Public opinion is firmly against legacy admissions. A 2022 Pew poll found that 75%
of Americans oppose legacy preferences. Even on Harvard’s campus, a recent poll found that
60% of students were against the practice. A bipartisan bill has been introduced that would
prohibit colleges receiving federal money from giving preferential treatment to legacy students
or donors. It was introduced in 2022 and died in committee, but in light of the overturning of
affirmative action, it was again introduced this summer and it is currently in committee. This law,
which doesn’t rely on the race of students, is less likely to face constitutional challenges.
It is also not very likely to pass out of the committee stage. Some colleges have ended legacy
admissions of their own accord, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. Colorado
became the first state to ban legacy admissions at public colleges, a promising start to a movement
that wouldn’t depend on a federal bill. Despite these changes, according to the ACLU only 27 of
the top 100 schools in the nation have done away with the practice of legacy admissions. My alma
mater, Vassar College, still uses the practice, despite boasting about its commitment to diversity
and helping students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. I’ll be writing a letter to
Vassar to let them know I won’t be donating any money until they end the practice that only
advantages the kids who least need the help. That being said, ending legacy admissions is just
one ingredient on the list of what it would take to truly increase economic and racial diversity
on our most elite college campuses. Many are calling for use of an adversity index to replace
affirmative action, one that places less weight on water polo and other extracurriculars only
available to rich kids and that takes into account the socioeconomic status of the student’s family
and neighborhood, and the adversity they had to overcome to achieve what they did in high school.
This would of course also benefit low income white students, but given the fact that any attempt to
control for race will likely be considered unconstitutional, an adversity index would
be a step towards increasing overall diversity on campuses. In addition to this, elite schools,
with their billion dollar endowments, could do more to engage with communities of color and low
income students to provide the resources necessary for the “best and brightest” in those communities
to be successful, both in the application process and also when they arrive on campus.
Additionally, hiring managers can do their part to put less emphasis on the weight of elite schools
listed on resumes. There are hundreds of thousands of other candidates out there who are every bit
as intelligent and capable, and having Harvard on your resume doesn’t guarantee you’ll be good
at a job, in fact you might be a nightmare to work with. Placing less emphasis on the
pedigree of school and more on the demonstrated character and quality of work will create less
of a frenzy around getting into Ivy League schools and increase diversity of identity,
thought, and experience in the workplace, which frankly would be economically beneficial too.
This goes not just for hiring managers looking at undergraduate degrees but also those hiring people
with law degrees and other advanced degrees. When I worked as an intern during law school at the US
Attorney’s Office in Boston my boss said he liked me better than the Harvard kids, just sayin’.
I do also have hope that the obsession with prestigious colleges has worn off a bit for
gen z and kids younger than them. Millennials bore the brunt of “fuck around and find out” when it
comes to student loan debt, and a lot of people in hindsight see they would have been better off
taking a year or two to think about what they wanted, or going to a trade school that isn’t
prestigious but gives you actual hands-on skills that you can immediately apply and that can lead
to entrepreneurship and other opportunities that a liberal arts degree won’t get you. It’s
actually unhinged, from a financial investment standpoint, to go tens of thousands of dollars
into debt for a degree that you have absolutely no plan for, which was the experience for the
vast majority of millennials who went to college because we were told it was the only way to get
a job. That’s bullshit, and I think younger generations have learned from that mistake.
So maybe there’s hope for us yet. So, to review, what can you do?
First, take a sec to pause and ask yourself, despite how it might have been for you,
what kind of a world do you want to build for the next generations of students?
Ok great, here are some next steps: * Call your representative and senators
and tell them you are in favor of House Bill 4900 and Senate Bill 2524, both named Fair
College Admissions for Students Act. This is especially important if your representative
sits on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce or the Senate Committee on Health,
Education, Labor, and Pensions. * See if there is a movement in
your state to end legacy admissions for public schools at the local level.
* If you went to one of the top 100 schools that still use legacy status as a factor in their
admissions process, write them a letter, call them up, don’t donate to them until they’ve done
away with the practice. Reach out to your college buddies and have them do the same. Write an op-ed
for your alumni magazine. Gross men in the 70s did it to protest women getting allowed in. You can do
it too, this time for a worthy cause. * While you’re at it, ask them what
they’re doing to recruit low income students and students of color.
* If you have a hand in hiring people, in any capacity, push to create more inclusive
standards that don’t rely on the pedigree of a candidate’s college or university.
* If you have kids, focus more on who they are, what they actually want,
and what will actually make them happy, as opposed to vanity metrics of success like
a job title or a salary amount. Obviously we want our kids to do well and not struggle financially,
but there is a point when that obsession creates anxious, perfectionistic kids who dull down their
own light in order to fit in with the status quo of what society and capitalism expects of
them. Do better for your kids than that. And if you liked this video, check out my other
video about how conservatives sabotage public schools.
And hey if you didn’t know, my work in bringing you these videos week after week, which
collectively take about 25-30 hours each to make, is supported in part through my Patreon, where I
do weekly chats on our private Discord server, book giveaways, early access to videos, access
to my research notes, and soon I’ll be starting monthly ask me anything style livestreams, just
for Patreon supporters. If you like what you’ve been watching, and any of that sounds good to you,
I encourage you to come on over to Patreon today. Thank you to my Patreon supporters, including
my newest patrons, and an extra special shout out to my multi-platinum patrons Safiya Samms,
Anthony Jiles, and Brett Piontek. Thanks so much for watching have a good day buhbye!