America’s Educational Caste System

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

America’s Educational Caste System

By Henry Srebrnik

In late March of every year, American students across the United States are notified of their acceptance or rejection from the Ivy League schools to which they applied.

“Ivy Day,” as it is called, provides a picture of admissions at the seven most elite and selective institutions of higher education in America: Harvard, Princeton and Yale first and foremost, followed by Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania. Their acceptance rates are in single digits and undergraduate enrollment at the eight Ivies averages around 8,500 students each.

(Prior to co-educational teaching, their women’s counterparts were the “Seven Sisters,” Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley.)

Along with peer universities such as the University of Chicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they are the pathways into the country’s elite. That’s because the United States has one of the steepest educational hierarchies in the world.

They are all private universities and, no surprise, incredibly expensive. The cost of attending an Ivy League school without financial aid is more than US$90,000 per year, including tuition, fees, housing, and other expenses. Tuition alone starts at US$52,659 for the least expensive of them. In 2023-2024, tuition at Columbia University cost US$69,045.

As their name implies, “Little Ivies” are small prestigious liberal arts colleges scattered across the Northeast, comparable to the Ivy League in terms of their academic excellence and selective admission standards. Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Haverford, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Williams top the list. They too are known for their large financial endowments in comparison to their size, and their students come from very wealthy backgrounds. (A study conducted in 2013 found that 41 per cent of Swarthmore students came from families sitting in the top five per cent of the U.S. income distribution.)

Top state schools such as the Universities of California’s campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles, along with Illinois, Michigan, Virginia, and Wisconsin, may provide as excellent an education, but nowhere near the same social cachet. They are all far bigger in terms of enrollment. Berkeley and Michigan, for example, each enroll over 33,000 undergraduates.

Using hierarchical terms similar to those used in many sports, all these schools, armed with billion-dollar endowments, are in the “first division.” They are followed by at least three more “divisions,” extending down to unranked schools of dubious academic value.

Canadian universities, on the other hand, whatever their relative merits, are all within one grouping – call it the “University of Canada,” similar to the Canadian Football or National Hockey leagues. Higher education is not nearly as stratified in this country. It’s therefore less of a signifier by which people are streamlined for life depending on the university they attended.

The status of the top American institutions is not derived from their stellar academic departments or pedagogical commitment, but rather from the signalling value of their credentials, the wealth of their alumni networks, and their relative importance to corporate and government research apparatuses. Elite colleges simultaneously reproduce class inequality and belief in the justness of that inequality.

What first and foremost distinguishes the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons from other colleges are not the syllabi, lectures or undergraduate libraries but the access they provide to the economic, political, and cultural capital that one’s fellow students possess by virtue of their upbringing, prior education, family relations, and wealth.

Graduating from an elite school provides symbolic, social, and cultural capital, according to Shamus Khan, a Princeton professor of sociology.  “It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings,” he contends in “Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You think they Do.” Your entire future may depend on it.

Recruiters for firms in finance, consulting, and law are obsessed with college prestige, typically identifying three to five “core” universities where they will do most of their recruiting. The résumés of students from other schools will almost certainly never even get read.

“Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities,” University of Texas Professor Lind writes in “Break Up America’s Elite,” “can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation. The lateral circulation of members of the same elite through revolving doors in the public, private, and nonprofit realms is a formula for oligarchy. They go on to dominate the rest of society when it comes to income.

“Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines,” notes New York Times journalist David Brooks, in “How the Ivy League Broke America.” As a result, maintains Columbia University political scientist Mark Lilla, today the cultural gap in America is the function of education. And the consequences, he explains in “America’s New Caste System,” are not just economic.

 “University does not only provide training for entering lucrative professions, it also socialises students into new styles of living,” in effect producing a caste system. And for those on its lower rungs, their “widely shared sense of exclusion, with all the attendant emotions of shame and resentment,” becomes toxic to democracies. We see these results clearly now.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.