What an Ivy League Education Really Gets You
The graduates of America’s most elite universities dominate our economy and culture so disproportionately that the statistics can seem like a mathematical glitch. Students at Ivy League schools and the similarly selective University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT together comprise less than half a percent of America’s undergraduate population. Yet their alumni represent more than 12 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs, 32 percent of all New York Times journalists, and 13 percent of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the population. So the people who go to the fanciest colleges tend to have the most successful careers—this is not exactly news. The question of why this is the case, however, is surprisingly tricky to answer. Perhaps the super-achieving and super-privileged teens who get into Princeton would have thrived after college no matter where they went. Maybe (hear me out) they owe their success to the academic lessons imparted by world-class faculty. Or the answer could just be that employers are dazzled by the name of the school on the diploma. The Brown University economist …
