How the Ivy League Broke America

Second, yes, trotting out national service as a solution to this or that social ailment has become a cliché. But a true national-service program would yield substantial benefits. Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found that cross-class friendships—relationships between people from different economic strata—powerfully boost social mobility. Making ... See more

When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.

Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by th... See more

The physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow puts the point more broadly. “While IQ scores may correlate to cognitive ability,” he writes in Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, “control over and knowledge of one’s emotional state is what is most important for professional and personal success.”

Schools should prepare people to build things, not just to think things.

But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House.

For instance, Princeton’s unofficial motto is “In the nation’s service and the service of humanity”—and yet every year, about a fifth of its graduating class decidesto serve humanity by going into banking or consulting or some other well-remunerated finance job.

The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

In fact, the researchers found that these soft skills, when measured in the fourth grade, are 2.4 times more important than math and reading scores in predicting a student’s future income.

Social engineers