The False Promise of Elite Education

Education is crucial to a democratic society because it is how we ensure that citizens will have the knowledge and skills our societies need. In countries such as the United States, Britain, and France, some colleges play a further role — they educate the elite. All of the current U.S. Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard University or Yale Law School. In Britain, 41 out of 54 of the country’s past prime ministers received their education at the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge. Five recent French presidents and five prime ministers attended the Paris Institute of Political Studies, commonly called Sciences Po. These universities pride themselves not only on offering superb educational opportunities, but also on educating those who will go on to hold influential positions.

Can a system of higher education for the elite be democratic? Ideally, democracy ensures that the interests of all sectors of society are represented. Those in the elite have disproportionate power in making their voices heard, whether through lobbying, writing policy briefs, or deciding what news gets coverage in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, while voices from groups and classes with less power are chronically underrepresented. The idea of an elite would seem to be at odds with central democratic values.

This concern has led to intense public scrutiny of admissions practices. Recently a lawsuit claimed that Harvard unfairly discriminated against Asian-Americans. Oxford and Cambridge have faced criticism after a report showed that they admit a remarkably low number of black students. Sciences Po’s efforts to increase socioeconomic diversity have also been controversial. Although these institutions educate a minuscule proportion of students, their admissions practices are a source of public concern because of the disproportionate amount of power they hold. One way of holding them accountable to the democratic ideal is to insist that they admit students from a broad swath of society, including from communities that have been historically marginalized. The argument is that this will make the resulting elite more representative of the concerns of the country as a whole.

Consider a doctor working in a hospital that serves residents in a low-income neighborhood of Detroit or a rural farming community in Montana. A physician in such a place should have the technical knowledge required of a good doctor. But technical skill alone is not enough. In order to serve her community well, she needs to understand the concerns of the people with whom she works. As the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has pointed out, if all doctors came from the same privileged class, they would be unlikely to know enough about the interests of those in marginalized sectors of society. They might be less motivated to speak up for those people, and more likely to lack the social knowledge to competently represent them. Elite universities that admit students who grew up in inner-city Detroit, rural Montana, or hundreds of other locales will produce better doctors for the country as a whole. The people will be better served, and by a more diverse and representative elite. This diversity rationale is one of the most well-accepted arguments in favor of affirmative action.

As a Latina first-generation college student who attended Princeton, I found this argument persuasive until I started teaching at the City College of New York. CCNY is part of the City University of New York, one of the largest public-university systems in the U.S., and arguably one of the most diverse. There I started to see that the focus on elite universities as engines for democracy is fundamentally misplaced.

The diversity argument relies on an oversimplified view of what happens within educational institutions. Universities are places where knowledge is pursued and shared, but they are also social institutions made up of people who influence one another in myriad ways. College transforms students as thinkers — but it also changes them as social beings. For students drawn from low-income neighborhoods who are attending elite educational institutions, this transformation is bound to be profound. In all likelihood, college will be the first time that these students interact on a regular basis with members of the top echelons of society. These students are also learning how to be a part of the elite spaces they may enter after graduation. In doing so, they are likely to become less representative of the outsiders they once were.

Recent research is helping us to better understand the experience that first-generation students undergo when they enter college. Nicole Stephens, a psychologist at Northwestern University, suggests that there is a difference in cultural framework between first-generation students and those who have at least one parent with a four-year degree. First-generation students are more likely to have an interdependent cultural framework, seeing the world and themselves in a way that is more socially oriented and that emphasizes family, community, and social place. Continuing-generation students — as well as administrators and professors — tend to have an independent cultural framework, seeing the world and themselves in a way that is more individually oriented and that emphasizes self-expression, autonomy, and independence. Part of the achievement gap between first-generation and continuing-generation students, she hypothesizes, derives from this difference.

Students from marginalized communities who attend elite universities find themselves living and studying not just with the children of middle-class professionals but also with those who come from the richest families in the country. These universities produce an elite, but they also reproduce it, admitting a disproportionate number of students from the highest income sectors. As research from the economist Raj Chetty’s project shows, four in 10 students from the top 0.1 per cent in the U.S. attend an “Ivy plus” college (the eight Ivy League universities plus the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Duke University). The median family income of students at those institutions is $171,000, or the 92nd percentile. Oxbridge admits around 80 per cent of their students from the top two income brackets in Britain. So what is it like, if you are a student who comes from a poor or outsider background, to attend and be educated at such a university?

To isolate the effect of culture on the experiences of college students, the sociologist Anthony Jack compares the experiences of two groups of low-income, minority students at a selective liberal-arts college. What he calls “the privileged poor” are those low-income, black students who attended elite, private high schools on scholarships. And the “doubly disadvantaged” are students who come from a similar family background but attended regular public high schools. The privileged poor find college a much easier place to navigate. They are already familiar with the culture that dominates such institutions. One of the privileged-poor students whom Jack interviews says: “You get in places and you start to feel privileged. Especially with me coming from boarding school, I’ve already been infected. … You get spoiled. You don’t even think of it. Sometimes I don’t even think of myself as a low-income student.”

Jack’s research suggests that the experience of being at an elite private high school changes these students. It tends to erode the differences between them and the more privileged students.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed the social aspects of class — knowledge of social norms, tastes, and culture — “cultural capital.” Cultural capital marks class distinctions and make it more difficult for those in the working class to be at ease among the elite. But colleges are dynamic places in which class is not only reproduced but negotiated. Students adapt to the cultural barriers they confront. Low-income students do not emerge from the college experience simply having gained technical expertise — they have learned to be a part of a new social world.

I am myself a product of this process. I am not only a first-generation college student but also an immigrant raised by my working-class grandmother. Yet I have spent my entire life in elite educational institutions. I came to the U.S. to attend Princeton University, after having attended the most expensive private international school in Lima, Peru. I went on to get my doctorate at Stanford. The more educated I became, the more like my peers at those institutions I became, while growing dissimilar to my grandmother and much of my extended family. In the words of Alfred Lubrano’s memoir, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (Wiley, 2004), I exist in a kind of limbo, native to neither world yet adept at both.

Of course, education aims to transform students. There is no avoiding the fact that the outsiders who are picked up into the meritocratic system will become less like most of those in their communities, who lack such an education. A doctor is different than someone who didn’t go to college — first, obviously, because of the skills and knowledge she has, but also because our society remunerates professional skills and knowledge more than it does manual labor and service work.

It is easy to imagine that these differentiations, built out of educational attainment, fully account for the transformation of first-generation students. It would follow that, in order to make sure that those entering the elite have sufficient professional expertise, we must accept that they are going to be different from the communities they represent and serve. Or, to put it another way, I would rather be treated by a skilled doctor who struggles to relate to the reality of my life than by someone who is less skilled but more similar to me.

But this argument trades on a false confluence between expertise and elite education. Chetty and his colleagues have shown that elite U.S. universities educate a minuscule proportion of students from the bottom of the income scale. The researchers have fashioned a mobility report card that measures how many students from the bottom half of the income scale are admitted, and how effectively these universities are able to lift such students into the top of the income distribution. Elite universities are very good at catapulting those low-income students they admit to the top, but they admit an embarrassingly small number of such students. Public universities, such as those in the CUNY system as well as California State University at Los Angeles and the University of Texas at El Paso, score much better at helping to lift low-income students into a better life. In part, they do better in promoting upward mobility because they admit so many more students from the bottom half of the income scale than the most-selective elite universities do.

Another key difference between institutions like CCNY and Princeton is that they offer quite different social environments in which learning takes place. A student attending an Ivy-plus college acquires her skills and knowledge in an environment dominated by the cultural capital and norms of the very elite. A City College student, in contrast, can gain similar professional or technocratic expertise, but will do so amid many other working-class and low-income students. These different social experiences are bound to influence a student in ways that go beyond professional expertise.

One might argue that we can’t compare these two kinds of educational experiences because an elite university is bound to offer a much better education than a public university is. But the Chetty data give us reasons to resist this conclusion. Income might be an imperfect proxy for the knowledge and skills gained in college, but presumably those students who attend Texas at El Paso or Cal State at LA and jump to the top of the income distribution have sufficient expertise to be generously valued by their employers. There is some evidence that going to a selective college does increase one’s eventual earnings, although once we control for family background and other factors, the effect is much less marked. There are many moderately selective universities that offer a good education and a social environment that is more representative of the country at large. If we are truly concerned with democratic representation, these institutions, many of them public, are what we should focus on.

One need not deny that there are significant benefits to receiving an education at an elite university in order to accept that there are also significant costs. Being educated in a philosophy department that is consistently ranked among the best in the world has certainly made a difference to my philosophical skills and career trajectory. Yet, when I arrived at CCNY, there was so much about the lived experience of poor, working-class Americans that I didn’t understand. My education had been both excellent and lacking.

Since its founding, CCNY has embraced serving the least-advantaged as part of its mission. The New York politician Townsend Harris, who in 1847 lobbied to support the establishment of the college, wrote that it would “open the doors to all, let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct, and intellect.” That mission continues today: 41 per cent of students at CUNY are first-generation college students, and 37 per cent come from families that make less than $20,000 a year. That is, almost half of CCNY students come from families that are poor. This means that my students face many challenges — some work long hours while taking a full course load, some lack academic preparation in crucial areas, some already have families of their own. I do not want to glorify those obstacles. But it is important to recognize how the rich, complicated lives of these students add a dimension to the classroom that I didn’t enjoy as an undergraduate or graduate student.

In one recent class, we read the philosopher Tommie Shelby’s work on the inner city. Shelby argues that those who live in parts of the country that lack access to good jobs, educational prospects, and other basic necessities are consequently freed of the political obligation to fulfill their part of the social contract. The students enjoyed discussing his groundbreaking work, as I expected. I hadn’t anticipated that a handful of them were born and living in parts of the Bronx that weren’t so different from the communities Shelby studied. He was, in a sense, writing about their neighborhoods.

One student told us, with tears in his eyes, how he was the only “civilian” among his group of friends — and that many of his friends considered themselves outside the law. He described how his friends had been shunted to the margins of society, often as a consequence of minor offenses that put them in trouble with the police. The class was quiet. After a few minutes in which several of us fought off tears, we thanked him for sharing his life experience. Like their counterparts at more-elite institutions, CCNY students are reading philosophy, evaluating arguments, and developing important technical skills. They are also forming relationships with and learning from other students with very different social knowledge.

It is important to recognize the extent to which the social norms at elite colleges strongly discourage “outsider” students from revealing themselves as such. One recent graduate I interviewed admitted that she had joined one of Princeton’s eating clubs as an undergraduate because she believed that not doing so would damage her prospects on the job market. She had been told that prospective employers would automatically presume that anyone who had not joined must have been unable to afford it. At elite universities, there is an incentive to conceal anything that could expose one as not really belonging. The student in my class was comfortable enough sharing his experience because he looked around and saw many students whose experiences were not dissimilar from his own.

Instead of imagining elite universities as black boxes into which “diverse” students are deposited, later emerging ready to shape our society, we should understand more about what happens there. We must ask whether the prevailing dynamics are more or less conducive to producing students enriched and empowered by experiences that make them better representatives of the many who are excluded. Not all institutions do an adequate job of creating such environments.

If we are concerned with creating a representative elite, we shouldn’t look at just the racial or economic background of its future members, but also at their educational experiences. If, for example, we want to foster policy discussions that include a broad range of perspectives, we must do better than turning to a room full of Ivy League or Oxbridge graduates. Instead, fill that room with graduates of places such as CCNY or the University of Hull. Those students are much more likely to have educational experiences that can contribute different insights for a more representative elite.

I do not intend this argument as a disavowal of the fundamental democratic principle that leads us to affirmative action. Representation matters in a democratic society. A diverse elite is better able to advance the interests of all sectors of society. Unfortunately, the way that this principle has been practiced is too narrowly focused on the demographics of elite institutions. Instead, we should consider whether the education of those in the elite has done a good job of furthering their understanding of a diverse swath of society. Some universities do better at providing this type of educational experience. It is time to recognize that they are the essential way toward a more truly representative elite, one that incorporates not just diversity but real difference, too.

Jennifer M. Morton is an associate professor of philosophy at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her book, Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility, will appear this year from Princeton University Press. A version of this essay first appeared in Aeon.