Who ends up in positions of influence in society matter because their preferences and personal qualities can influence policy issues that impact all of us. This has been documented by a long history of the study of influential people, such as The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills. But who ultimately ends up in positions of influence in society—among those people we might call “elites”?
In his recent cover story, “How the Ivy League broke America,” for The Atlantic, David Brooks argues that meritocracy does not appear to be working. Brooks specifically argues that it is the elite-education system that has much to answer for, as it has contributed to much of the divide between the political parties and red and blue America. By elite education in the U.S., Brooks is talking about the pinnacle of the Ivy League—Harvard—but also the broader set of schools that compose the top of any university rankings system. Brooks in many ways is echoing the analysis of the book Coming Apart.
“When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money,” Brooks notes. “When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture.”
Indeed, in their recent book, Polarized by Degrees, Matt Grossman and David Hopkins explain that over the last several decades, “Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations and even corporations.” 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 since 1973 to the present.
Brooks argues that when he was starting out as a journalist, where you went to school (or even if you went to college), was not particularly important, but that this has markedly shifted over the years, pointing to a study that Kaja Perina and I conducted published in the Journal of Expertise showing that roughly half of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal editors and writers attended a set of 34 elite schools (20% attended an Ivy League school).
The Influence of Elite Schools in America
In a recent paper published in Nature Humanities & Social Sciences Communications along with colleagues Stephen Anderson, Kaja Perina, Frank C. Worrell and Christopher Chabris, we examined a sample of over 26,000 Americans who came from 30 different groups of influential people, ranging from four-star admirals and generals, presidents and vice presidents, Pulitzer Prize-winners, billion dollar startup company founders, National Academy of Sciences members and Harvard faculty. Across the same set of 34 elite schools, we found that, overall, 54.2% of these individuals had attended one of these schools, and this ranged from 11.2% to 25.9% for the generals, admirals and House members and up to 78.9% to 80.9% for the Forbes most powerful men, Harvard faculty and members of the American Philosophical Society. Overall, 36.3% attended one of the Ivy League schools and 16% attended Harvard.
We calculated that of all adults in the U.S. population, roughly 32.5% have received a bachelor’s degree or higher, 1.9% have a degree from one of the elite 34 schools in our study, 0.6% from an Ivy League school and 0.2% from Harvard. As we explain in the paper: “These data indicate that the percentages of individuals in each of the groups of American leaders and influencers are quite high relative to population base rates. For example, with 54% of the 26,198 individuals in our sample having attended one of the ‘Elite’ 34 schools and the base rate at about 1.9%, this suggests a factor of overrepresentation of roughly 28 times base rate expectations (calculated as 54/1.9). Across all groups, roughly 36% attended an Ivy League school, suggesting a factor of overrepresentation of roughly 60 times (36/0.6). Across all groups, roughly 16% attended Harvard University, suggesting a factor of overrepresentation of roughly 80 times (16/0.2). This overrepresentation factor is 75 times even when Harvard faculty members are omitted (15/0.2).” Below is a figure visually showing this overrepresentation from our paper.
The Harvard Effect
The influence of Harvard alone is incredible across all 30 of the domains we examined. And notably, a full 44.5% of Harvard faculty members attended Harvard University, and roughly 80% of Harvard faculty attended one the elite 34 schools.
These findings are confirmed by a study of 6,900 by Steven Brint and colleagues published in Sociology of Education, showing that among U.S. cultural elites 1.97% attended Harvard, and among U.S. government and business leaders, 6.3% attended Harvard. These findings are also confirmed more broadly outside the U.S. For example, a recent study by Ricardo Salas-Diaz and Kevin Young published in Global Networks showed among roughly 6,000 global elites a Harvard-educated rate of 9.18% (among the U.S. sample, the rate was 16.19%). The Salas-Diaz and Young findings thus replicate our findings in the U.S. These findings also are aligned with prior work looking at global elites (sample of about 4,000) and the global wealthy (sample of about 18,000).
Salas-Diaz and Young also show in their paper that “Oxbridge,” or Oxford University and Cambridge University, are both highly represented among the global elite, also confirmed by some of my prior findings. And more recently, in their book Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman examine elites as measured by inclusion in the historical database of Who’s Who, finding that among the 33,000 people in 2022, around 35% attended Oxbridge compared to less than 1% of the British general population.
This research documents the influence of elite schools, and in particular the Ivy League and Harvard University, among people who have great influence in our society. However, it does not mean that this is the way that things should be or could be. Michael Young wrote back in 1958 a fictional dystopian account of society that is connected to the arguments of Brooks. An older story by Kurt Vonnegut and more recent satire by Lionel Shriver both concern what can happen when society is deeply concerned over inequalities. Some possible solutions that are worth considering are put forth by Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, and by David Goodhart in Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect.