How the Ivy League Broke America

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.

A sense of drive and mission. When the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he noticed that the men who tended to survive the longest had usually made a commitment to something outside the camps—a spouse, a book project, a vision of a less evil society they hoped to create. Their sense that... See more

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

capacious

One observational study that followed four children between the ages of 14 months and 5 years found that they made an average of 107 inquiries an hour.

Students who have been treated as smart since elementary school may go off to private colleges that spend up to $350,000 per student per year. Meanwhile many of the less gifted students, who quickly perceive that teachers don’t value them the same way, will end up at community colleges that may spend only $17,000 per pupil per year. By adulthood, t... See more

Waldsterben , or “forest death.”

In chaotic situations, raw brainpower can be less important than sensitivity of perception. The ancient Greeks had a word, metis , that means having a practiced eye, the ability to synthesize all the different aspects of a situation and discern the flow of events—a kind of agility that enables people to anticipate what will come next.

The advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. Affluent, well-educated parents marry each other and confer their advantages on their kids, who then go to fancy colleges and marry people like themselves. As in all caste societies, the segregation benefits the segregators. And as in all caste societies, the inequalities invol... See more