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Joseph A. Soares is Associate Professor of Sociology at Wake Forest University. He is the author of The Decline of Privilege (Stanford, 1999), which received the prize for outstanding book from the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association.

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The Power of Privilege

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Tables.....................................................................................................................ixForeword and Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................xi1. Meritocracy and Its Discontents.................................................................................................12. Elite Colleges and the Search for Superior Students.............................................................................133. Social-Class Diversity at Yale after 1950?......................................................................................534. The Brewster Years, Meritocracy in Power? The New Administration in 1964: Kingman Brewster and Inslee Clark.....................725. The Old Machinery of Meritocracy Is Discarded: No More Predicting Grades, No More Verbal Analogies..............................1196. Top-Tier Colleges and Privileged Social Groups..................................................................................163Conclusions........................................................................................................................191Notes..............................................................................................................................203Index..............................................................................................................................233

Chapter One

Even Americans unfamiliar with the word embrace meritocracy as if it were a birthright. We believe in the essential goodness of the idea that people should be able to achieve in school and at work to the full extent of their natural abilities and drive. Being rewarded for what one does, rather than whom one is, and being able to rise or fall on one's merits is part of what defines the American dream of individual freedom and personal accomplishment. Our national ethos of self-determination may be a delusion, but its appeal persists, even internationally. A female graduate student, speaking for French youths frustrated by a culture of limited opportunities, lamented to a New York Times reporter, "We are never taught the idea of the American dream," the concept of "the self-made man."

For many Americans, schools and colleges are the vessels of our meritocratic aspirations; they provide our primary experience with an institution that evaluates individual performance. Reliable surveys tell us that most adults think of merit in school or college as academic accomplishments; we believe entry to college should be based on grades and test scores alone. Youths applying to college count on the basic fairness of the admissions process, and when it does not appear to be that way, a rejection letter may bring on litigation. If all else is equal between two candidates, is it fair for the applicant whose father went to Harvard, for example, to be admitted there over someone whose parents did not? Should religion, gender, or race matter to one's prospects? Some of the ambivalence that many feel about affirmative action is because it seems unconstitutional that anything other than individual academic merit should count for college admissions.

America has, according to international scholars, seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world. Most of our best universities, as ranked by Barron's, the Princeton Review, or U.S. News and World Report, are private. We take great national pride in our premier universities and like to believe that their academic excellences are matched by a fair admissions process that selects the best brains for their classrooms. Our belief in America as a society where opportunities are open to talent is sustained, in part, by our confidence that our most prestigious universities operate according to the best possible standards of academic meritocracy. One should get into a top university because of one's achievements, not because of accidents of birth.

What would it mean, however, if Harvard and Yale and their peers had a history of excluding applicants based on gender, religion, race, income, and personality? The facts are that colleges like Yale kept a limit on their Jewish students until the early 1960s, females were barred entirely through the late 1960s, Blacks were eliminated from the competition by poverty and inadequate schools until the 1970s, and right up to the contemporary period, one's personality and family income still matter. If those ivied universities pursued, not only in the recent past but at present, admissions policies aimed at capturing youths from families at the top of the income pyramid, and those universities selected students more for personal qualities than for academic accomplishments, would that require us to reevaluate the way we think of educational opportunity and individual merit? What sort of academic meritocracy would we have if one's chances of being in it were substantially determined by extracurricular performance and family wealth?

It is ironic that those top colleges who distance themselves from the pre-professional practices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) provide the greatest boost to athletes in their admissions process. Neither racial minorities nor alumni offspring receive the preferential treatment given to athletes in top-tier admissions. The academic entry hurdle in the Ivy League is lowest for athletes, a majority of whom are White and from affluent families. And athletes are in a stronger position to influence campus life in ivied colleges than in NCAA state universities because they are a larger percentage of the undergraduate population in the former. Male athletes are just 3 percent of the men at the University of Michigan, for example, although they are 22 percent of Princeton's men. The emphasis placed by American elite colleges on athleticism is a national anomaly. Youths with undistinguished academic records cannot get into England's Oxford University or to France's Ecole Nationale d'Administration just for playing soccer. Why should sports matter so much in the Ivy League?

Separate from the significant athletic boost in admissions, there is the benefit of standing on stacks of money. Lawrence Summers, as president of Harvard, expressed dismay with the grip of wealthy families on elite colleges. He reported that at America's most prestigious colleges, approximately 74 percent of undergraduates came from families in the top income quartile, and only 9 percent of undergraduates came from the bottom 50 percent of America's families ranked by income. Is the overlap of economic class and academic prestige merely an unfortunate yet inescapable coincidence? Or are admissions in the Ivy League governed by a logic that rewards socioeconomic status but disguises it as merit? Summers proclaims, "There is no more important mission for Harvard and higher education than promoting equality of opportunity for all." Yet, as his statistics show, unless one believes that only rich people can be smart, we have a staggering distance to travel to achieve a fair opportunity for all to reach every level of our educational system.

President Summers's disclosure on the economic composition of top-tier colleges draws attention to another American irony. America, which we like to think of "as the very embodiment of meritocracy," is a place where economic class origins largely determine one's educational destiny. Class background influences whether or not one completes a college degree. If one is born into a family in the bottom-income quartile, one's odds of finishing college are nine out of one hundred, whereas the odds for a top income quartile youth are seventy-five out of one hundred. And class origin affects, as Summers noted, whether one attends a top-tier or an unselective college.

For an overview of the national situation, consider the raw percentages of students by their social origin in each college tier. If one divides American colleges into seven prestige tiers and U.S. families into four socioeconomic status (SES) quartiles, the composition of tier 7 is without serious disparities. In tier 7, where colleges have non-competitive admissions, 22 percent of students are from the top SES quartile; 25 percent are from the second SES quartile; 27 percent are from the third SES quartile; and 25 percent are from the bottom quartile. The social composition of the other tiers is not, however, as egalitarian (see Table 1.1).

The least equitable outcomes are in the first tier where 79 percent of the students are from the top SES quartile and 2 percent are from the bottom. Whether one uses Summers's percentages, or these numbers derived from Department of Education data, there is a symmetry between social class and college tier.

Many things beyond brand-name prestige are at stake in attending a top-tier college. The consensus among economists is that college tier corresponds to income; the higher the tier, the higher the lifetime payoff. College graduates earn over their working lives on average one million dollars more than high-school graduates, but tier-one college graduates accumulate an equally impressive one-million-dollar premium over the average earnings of alumni from the bottom tier. The bottom tier enrolls the greatest cluster, 35 percent of all college students, whereas tier 1, where Yale and Harvard reside, includes just 4 percent of America's undergraduates.

Students enter the top tier from wealthy families and leave it for the best-paying jobs. How have we gotten to a place where we profess meritocracy but apparently condone the reproduction of class privileges?

Yale's Story

This book explores these questions through a history of admissions at Yale. Why is Yale's story relevant to the whole nation? How does it illuminate the social-class dilemmas of our entire higher educational system?

Yale is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in America. Its role in our society, from colonial times to the present, has been extraordinary. Founded in 1701 by Puritans who thought Harvard, established in 1636, had gotten lax, Yale's original purpose was the same as its rival, to provide a supply of educated clergy to Calvinist Congregationalists in New England. By the time of the American Revolution, however, Yale was already producing more lawyers than ministers, and careers in industry, trade, and banking took off after the Civil War. Throughout our history, Yale has provided prominent lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and politicians, and perhaps it is for the latter that Yale is best known today.

Yale graduates play an exceptional role in the political life of our nation. First, and most visibly, there is Yale's eminence in presidential politics. When George W. Bush, a fifth-generation Yalie, completes his second term in office and steps down in 2009, a Yale man will have been sitting at the president's desk for twenty years. And the last time there was a presidential election without a Yale man on the ticket for either of the two major parties was in 1968. Since 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned and was replaced by Gerald Ford, we have had only Jimmy Carter's administration when a Yalie was not either the president or vice-president of the country; by 2009, that unbroken occupancy of the White House will have lasted twenty-eight years. Commenting on Yale's presidential record during the Bush/Kerry contest, an author wrote in the Yale Alumni Magazine, "The fundamental and clearest presidential pattern at Yale is the extraordinary power of privilege: the intense web of connections knitting together America's upper classes through family ties, business relationships, philanthropic and civic activities, social and recreational life, and of course, education." The incongruity between Yale's public meritocratic image and the author's reflections on its upper-class networks did not elicit any critical comments from readers of the publication. Apparently, insiders are not surprised by blunt statements on Yale's class composition.

Moving from the White House to the Supreme Court, Yale's record is second only to Harvard's. Yale's two graduates on John Robert's court are outnumbered by Harvard's five (counting Ruth Bader Ginsburg's unhappy time at Harvard, John P. Stevens is the only Supreme Court justice without any student days at Harvard or Yale).

In other branches of government, in the recent past there have been four state governors with Yale degrees. And in 2004, there were thirteen Yalies in the House of Representative and seven in the Senate.

Although Yale's image may be enhanced by its association with those who walk the corridors of power, it cannot take direct credit or blame for the actions of alumni in political or judicial office. Its impact on the world of higher education, however, is another matter. For centuries, Yale has consciously attempted to be a leader to the whole of higher education, and it has enjoyed considerable success in that endeavor. When Yale's president in 1967, Kingman Brewster, Jr., spoke to an alumni officers' convocation on higher education, he expressed the traditional view on Yale's leading role. Mixing terms from the cloister and the boardroom, he told the alumni assembled,

I think it's fair to say, without being too officious or self-congratulatory, and I hope not smug, that it has been and is the ancient privilege of endowed free universities of this country, particularly in the northeast, ... [to be] the yardstick, not only for the independent rivals in the Ivy League and elsewhere, but the yardstick for the fast growing and very rapidly improving state institutions in the west and far west. This is an industry in which the yardstick is the independent and the private institution even though quantitatively, it acts for a smaller and smaller share of the total market.... Yale University is ... one of the fortunate few whose tradition and endowed strength has permitted it to have a really discernible impact upon the standards of universities everywhere.

Smug or not, Brewster was right. Many aspects of American colleges, ranging from a liberal-arts curriculum to the use of financial-needs-blind admissions, have derived their legitimacy from Yale. Without Yale, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) would not have come into such prominence in college admissions across the entire country. There are many educational practices in the United States for which, unlike presidential policies, one can place praise or censure on Yale's shoulders.

The final reason why Yale is the right place for this story is that it has been one of the two colleges, the other being Harvard, featured in histories on the rise of America's meritocracy. No other colleges have been singled out as being as crucial to the abolition of family privilege and to the introduction of academic merit as those two.

Meritocratic Controversies

For decades, Yale and its elder sibling Harvard have taken center stage in tales on the fabled downfall of the old Protestant Establishment. Once, the story goes, America had an inbred upper class. It resided in brownstone townhouses and country estates in the northeast, attended Protestant, frequently Episcopalian, churches, and sent its sons to ivied colleges. Both church and college consecrated, within faux-medieval gothic walls, a stuffy deference to Anglophile tradition. It hired John Singer Sargent to paint scenes of its domestic bliss, and politely objected to unflattering depictions of its clannish customs in novels written by Edith Wharton, Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It built yacht clubs, museums of fine arts and symphony halls, and listened to its panegyric in Cole Porter's (Yale class of 1913) Hollywood musical High Society. For a time, stretching from just after the Civil War until the late 1950s, America's best colleges and top professions were dominated by old-money Protestant families, WASPs, who cared more about one's listing in the Social Register than about one's intellectual competence. Then, according to historians and journalists, meritocratic subversives got into control of admissions at Harvard and Yale, and the world of the WASP was undone.

The tale is told of how Harvard and Yale became meritocratic in the 1950s, admitting the best brains as judged by the SAT without regard to social pedigree; this allegedly produced, as the Economist calls it, "an academic and social revolution," first in the Ivy League and later in America's most powerful and high-paying occupations. Intellectually gifted newcomers elbowed aside the old-money Protestant gentlemen, making their way up in life through educational and corporate institutions rather than by family networks or wealth. Family privilege was dethroned, and self-made meritocrats were now in command. As David Brooks, the newspaper opinion journalist, puts it in his book on the new elite, "Admissions officers wrecked the WASP establishment."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Power of Privilegeby JOSEPH A. SOARES Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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