We’ve argued in this space more than once that all the churn about the Ivy League is misplaced. Rather than obsessing about admissions to these alleged gatekeepers to power we should expand the gate to include a lot more schools while we also tear down unnecessary barriers for those without college degrees.
Now comes some good news along these lines from Forbes. The business magazine reports that companies are souring on Ivy grads and turning to a wider list of new ivies, including (drum roll) the UW Madison.
According to Forbes, the eight elite schools have undercut themselves. First, they’ve eroded their own meritocracy by emphasizing racial and other veneer diversity over test scores and demonstrated academic achievement. At the same time, they cling to “legacy” admissions that essentially let rich kids cut the line.
And, second, employers are starting to wonder what these kids are learning once they make (or don’t make) the grade to get in. Some of the insane and inane statements that came out of these schools in support of the Hamas terrorists after the October 7th attack on Israel justifiably shook the confidence of potential employers. Do you really want to take on a new employee who goes around saying that terrorists are martyrs? It didn’t help that many of the faculty joined in support of their students. Whatever they’re teaching at Harvard and Columbia, good judgement doesn’t appear to be a required course.
Employers are, in the words of the Forbes article, looking for “hard-working high-achievers.” That’s exactly what the UW offers employers. Yeah, we’ve got a reputation for knowing what a good party is about, but we also put in the work before Friday (okay, sometimes Thursday) night.
Along these lines, I was happy to see that the Gaza protests on the Madison campus were limited and didn’t grab much in the way of national headlines. I think Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin could have handled it better, but the end result was that a campus once known for its protests took a back seat to Columbia and other schools. Fine by me.
Here are the 10 “new Ivies” among public schools according to Forbes:
- Binghamton University
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- University of Florida
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- University of Maryland-College Park
- University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
- University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
- University of Texas-Austin
- University of Virginia
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
The problems with Ivy League schools is not because of diversity, at least not in the manner you described. They don’t lower their academic standards to allow entry to diverse applicants. Assessing applicants isn’t a hard science that can be boiled down to a number that can be accurately ranked. There really isn’t any tangible difference between a 1510 and a 1505 SAT score, and far more applicants are sufficiently smart and capable than can be admitted, and considering diversity in the admissions need not and does not lower the standards.
But allowing in qualified and smart people from diverse backgrounds does change something culturally. You see, the point of elite institutions is not academic excellence, it is cultural gatekeeping. Big law firms didn’t hire Ivy League grads because they are smarter, they hired them because they were safe cultural “fits” for their workplace.
Allowing people who won’t ignore atrocities to have degrees from elite institutions messes this process up. What if your company wants to profit from atrocities? In the past, you could be sure an Ivy League grad would go along with it in the name of capitalism and manifest destiny. But now you might mistakenly hire someone who cares about who is on the receiving end of the bombs. Can’t have that.
So now the rich will have to devise a new process to filter out the undesirable viewpoints from their spheres. And as long as they avoid the magic words from our civil rights laws, this discrimination will be perfectly legal.
There was not a bygone era where relevant, objective, reliable measures were used for university admissions or corporate hiring. Meritocracy is a myth; or at least an unrealized dream. Note how these corporations who don’t want to hire from the Ivies anymore don’t make that decision based on merit of the individuals, they make it based on their feelings. Rich people appear much more concerned about their own feelings when hiring people than they are about the qualifications or merit of the applicant. That they were using these universities as automatic green lights in the past shows how empty their own evaluation processes are.
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