|
By every measure, Harvard University is one of the great educational institutions on the planet. It is by far the first choice of the brightest high school seniors, despite U.S. News and World Report's claim that Princeton is the best university in America. Although conservatives condemn the Ivy League for its liberalism and general wickedness, they nevertheless clamor to send their own kids to those schools. And the reason is that these school give their kids the keys to the kingdom-- posh mansions, exemption from hard life, and boundless political influence and social opportunities. But I wonder if this is a case of a victory of illusion over reality. Graduates from this intellectual sausage factory have the Seal of Good Housekeeping upon graduating. But is their education really any better than what you could get at, say, Arizona State? There is little interaction with the Nobel Prize winning superstars, and assistants not much older than the typical freshman teach some of the survey classes. When a demi-god does descend from the clouds to teach lowly underclassman, it's more often than not mumblings and grunts from thirty-year old notes. Frankly, I think most people can do better with a card to their local library. Perhaps all of this could be tolerated, except for the suspicion that rather than being a center for excellence it is rather a cesspool of mediocrity. Harvard, like many of the top private university, is as far from the ideal of meritocracy as cats are from kings. At Harvard, for example, Daniel Golden estimates in "How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite College-- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates" that as many as 60 percent of the freshman slots are reserved for legacy and investment admissions. This would make a good SAT question. If the average SAT of the 40 percent who get in on their intellectual bandwidth is 1500 and the average SAT of the remaining legacy kids is 900, what is the average SAT of Harvard University? The answer: probably less than the students at most trade schools. According to Golden, investment admissions seats are reserved for those who have parents who buy their way into the school, and the going price at Harvard is currently about $2.5 million dollars. Harvard expects an average SAT score of 1485. But, like the price tag for education, this too is a fiction. The true score that they expect from you on your applications depends on all kinds of diversity factors. Starting with a base of 1200, you can subtract 100 if you are Jewish kid from Boston but add 100 if you are a Baptist kid from Utah. Subtract 100 if you are Chinese majoring in math but add 100 if you are a Chinese hockey player. And add another 300 points if your daddy has endowed a chair or if your last name is Bush or Kennedy. The admissions process is indeed fertile ground for ample cynicism. Harvard will continue to attract smart students and professors, and must do so to dissolve the possibility that the school is merely a diploma mill willing to sell a piece of paper to the highest bidder. But the reality is that vast numbers of people are excluded from these gateways to the good life and power, not through lack of effort and ability but through an accident of birth, in this case, birth into the home of the not so rich and not so famous. There is nothing American about this kind of unfairness, so in that sense I do think Harvard hates America. While I think that the ending class-based discrimination should be a condition of continued federal funding, I think also it's unlikely that will ever happen. Thus, for most people, that is just one more obstacle to endure, not unlike the numerus clausus that Harvard inflicted on Jewish students for decades. In face of such obstacles, the answer is not to retreat but to study harder and be mentally tougher than the legacy kids. And should someday an eating-club secret-society frat-boy tell you that they "graduated Harr-vaard," don't be too impressed. |