The Higher Ed Resource Wars

Preparing for the college application process.

I have some comments below on the French and British elections, and on ours.

But first, I have a new piece up at Discourse this morning on a topic I’ve been looking into for a while: the incredibly fierce competition for admission into elite universities, and how it reverberates into the rest of our political discussion.

It’s important to grasp that this is relatively new.

In early June, I had a conversation with a parent at my kids’ high school whose daughter had just graduated. She was a star student, but the admissions process had still been a nightmare, in which she was placed on multiple waitlists and didn’t know where she was going in the fall until literally days before graduation. The toughest part was that she had wanted to go to the same Ivy League school her father attended but was rejected. Then again, he observed, when he went there, they accepted 20% of applicants—but now the acceptance rate is below 5%.

This is true across the board. Schools that used to be hard to get into—you had to have good test scores, great grades and a couple of prominent extracurricular activities—have become almost impossible to get accepted to, and decisions about who gets in and who doesn’t seem increasingly arbitrary.

On a related note, I looked at the University of Chicago, where I went to college—a well-regarded school considered part of the “Ivy Plus”—and I was a little deflated to discover that when I got in, they were accepting 40% of their applicants, which I’ll admit makes me feel a little less special. I don’t think they necessarily had lower standards; I met a lot of very smart, very dedicated students there. I think the school had less name recognition back then, so they got a more selective group of applicants to begin with. And perhaps we were still in the post-Baby Boom lull, in which there were fewer kids graduating from high school. But by now, the U of C’s admission rate has fallen to 5% just like all the other elite schools.

That leads me to another factor I didn’t mention in my piece: the Common App, a single, standardized online application process that makes it easier for students to apply to multiple schools. Some of the decrease in acceptance rates may have to do with more kids taking a chance on an application to Yale who would never have tried at all thirty years ago.

But the big driver is that the elite schools stopped growing with the growth of population. I quote a 2021 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In 1979, the incoming class of Yale College freshmen stood at 1,346 students. In 2015, the size of the incoming class of Yale College freshmen stood at 1,360 students, an increase of just 14 students. Over the same period, the number of applications to Yale College increased by over 300 percent, from 9,331 students in 1979 to 30,932 in 2015. Across elite colleges, the story is the same—increasing demand for spaces but with only a small increase in supply. In contrast, less elite colleges have largely expanded supply in response to increasing demand.

I lay out a few more of the relevant figures:

America is a larger and more educated nation than before. In the past 30 years, the population of the United States has grown by about 70 million, the number of kids graduating from high school each year has increased from less than 2.5 million to more than 3.7 million, and the percentage going to college has risen. 

The NBER’s diagnosis is that the top schools are motivated by a quest for prestige that is gained by being the school that admits the smallest percentage of applicants—with the implication that the ultimate in prestige would be to admit no students at all.

I offer the usual caveats in this article about how we focus too much on elite schools. Way more Fortune 100 CEOs went to state schools, for example, than to the Ivy League. But my point is to look at this artificial scarcity as both a cause and symptom of other important aspects of our culture. The disproportionate number of electrons devoted to debate over admissions preferences at elite schools is driven by what is, in effect, a resource war.

When resources are scarce, we fight over them.

Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling finding that racial preferences in college admissions are unconstitutional. The case was brought against elite universities, not on behalf of white students, but on behalf of Asian American and Indian American students, who were able to demonstrate that preferences in favor of Black and Hispanic students were exercised mostly by making it more difficult for the Asian kids to get into school.

Others have responded that if we really want to stamp out “privilege” in admissions, elite schools should get rid of “legacy” admissions, which favor the children of previous graduates. A long, good examination of the issue in the Harvard Crimson points out that all of this misses the underlying problem:

The discussion about who is advantaged or disadvantaged by the admissions process—be it Black students, white students or legacy students—seems to take this regime of selectivity for granted, as though elite admissions had to remain a zero-sum game.

As for the wider cause of artificial scarcity, I note that after significant growth in the early 20th Century, most elite schools stopped growing in 1970. (The University of Chicago is an exception. Its undergraduate class has nearly doubled since my day, but its acceptance rate is still low and falling, as a spillover effect from the stagnation of the Ivies.)

I refer to 1970 as the Year of Stasis, because that’s a date that keeps recurring as the point at which, across various different measures, many Americans decided that everything had grown enough and should stay the same from then on.

What we need to confront is the wider cultural malaise of a country that in significant ways gave up on growth as a goal—for universities, for towns, for energy, for everything—50 years ago.

This is, obviously, an idea I’m going to have to follow up on in the future.

Read the whole thing.

The Unnecessary Crisis of Elite College Admission

The Rise of the Double Haters

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Emanuel Macron’s response to the strong performance of the French far right in EU parliament elections was to call their bluff. It has happened before that the nationalists have performed well in the first round of elections, only to have everyone unite against them in the final run-off. A lot of people were skeptical it would happen this time—but that’s exactly the pattern of the final result. National Rally gained seats in the French legislature, and President Emanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble coalition lost them. But the New Popular Front, a left-wing coalition, won even more seats, leaving National Rally in third place.

This is not entirely a good result. The main reason to worry about National Rally was that the party is quite explicitly sympathetic to Vladimir Putin and opposed to Ukraine’s resistance against reabsorption into the Russian empire, while Emanuel Macron has been increasingly vocal in his support for Ukraine in the last year. But at Persuasion, Quico Toro gets us the goods on Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the leader of the largest party within the New Popular Front.

First, he explains how the center and the left co-operated to keep the nationalists out of power.

After the far right again topped the first round on June 30, many of Macron’s own centrists felt forced into a tactical alliance with the left to try to block the National Rally, with some centrist candidates who had come in third agreeing to drop out in favor of the left, and some third-place left candidates doing the same reciprocally for the center.

But some of the compromises may end up being a problem.

With political roots in France’s Trotskyist movement, Mélenchon has an undoubted soft spot for dictatorial figures, which has seen him bounce between bouts of softness for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. In his own words, he was reduced to tears at a rally for the dictator who forced me out of my own country, Hugo Chávez.

Mélenchon’s party ran on a program that makes Bernie Sanders look like some kind of milquetoast Third Way type. La France Insoumise’s platform calls for a “tax revolution” that translates into much heavier taxes and much, much more intrusive state regulation across the board. Mélenchon fancies himself a moderate because he’s backed off of the proposal he touted back in 2017 for 100% marginal tax rates for incomes above 400,000 euros: the top rate of income tax he proposes now is just 90%. (Lest you worry he’s gone soft, inheritances beyond 12 million euros would still be taxed at 100%.) It takes a particular kind of political mind to look at France’s sclerotic, low-growth, hyper-regulated economy and conclude that the solution is higher taxes and more intrusive regulation.

Mélenchon wants France out of NATO. He wants a vastly reduced EU too, vowing to simply disobey EU law when he judges that to be in France’s national interest. His gut reaction, upon hearing that Putin had annexed Crimea back in 2014, was to justify Russian aggression and declare the problem solved (though he has since corrected course and condemned Russian aggression in an uncharacteristically mealy-mouthed manner).

You can’t, of course, be a proper left-wing lunatic if you’re not at least a little anti-Semitic, and here the war in Gaza has given Mélenchon all the rope he needs to hang himself….

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, today, the second most powerful person in France. He is, by any reasonable estimation, a far-left extremist. He publicly espouses ideas that, if put into practice, would destroy France’s economy and probably tank the Euro. His comfort around, and admiration for dictators (so long as they are of the left-wing kind) is a matter of record.

I should caution that we tend to use our own political framework, where we have two dominant major parties, when we think about parliamentary systems with a large number of splinter parties. So when we hear that a politician got the most votes in an election, we naturally assume that means an American-style landslide in which he won significantly above 50% of the vote. In most cases (as in Georgia Meloni’s victory in Italy a few years ago), it actually means they got less than 30% of the vote.

In America, fractious coalition politics between splinter factions almost all happens within the major parties, usually during the primaries. Then everybody gets behind the bland front man who represents a compromise between these factions, usually chosen so as not to scare off moderates and independents. That’s how the Labour Party won its massive victory in Britain last week—though we are entitled to skeptical about how moderate they really are.

In parliamentary systems, things tends to work the other way. The top vote-getter may be a wild-eyed radical—but all the horse-trading happens after the election, when radical agendas tend to get swallowed in a swamp of compromise. In the case of France, the New Popular Front is a coalition of splinter parties and will undoubtedly splinter even more as it seeks to form a governing coalition with the center. We can look forward to seeing the New Popular Front break off from the Popular New Front and the New Popular People’s Front. Splitters!

More widely, this is a reminder of the inadequacy of the whole left-right spectrum, conceived as a contest between two irrational and illiberal extremes, with only wishy-washy compromisers in the center. It leaves the people lurching to vote for the right to protect themselves against the left—then lurching back to the left to protect themselves against the right.

That brings me to our own upcoming election.

The idea that Joe Biden might step down in favor of a successor before the Democratic National Convention is possible but not yet probable. He seems to be stubbornly digging in, so the outcome will depend on what new revelations about his health and cognitive functioning emerge from amidst the current swirl of rumors. More than that, it will depend on his performance in the polls.

I’ll admit I was surprising to see one Bloomberg poll in which Biden actually improved his position in swing states after the debate. That may be a strange result, but I’m open to it. The pundit class is hit way harder by Biden’s debate performance than everybody else. The moment he gets a question, or the moment Trump says something he needs to respond to, our brains are already formulating articulate and convincing responses—and then Biden opens his mouth, and something lame and totally inadequate comes out, and it is literally painful to us. I suspect a lot of our readers, who are likely to be relatively well-informed and engaged with the issues, feel the same. So we are all dealing with the trauma of knowing a thousand devastating retorts to Trump and not hearing his opponent make any of them.

The ordinary voter may not find this so shocking and traumatic. Or perhaps it’s that they have already absorbed and accepted that Joe Biden is an unimpressive figure. A striking aspect of Biden’s polling is that an unusually high percentage of his support comes from people who disapprove of his performance in office. The big bloc of swing voters in this election are the “double haters”—the people who don’t like either Biden or Trump, but who hate Trump more.

Many of these people are inarticulate and have no clear idea what they want as the alternative to Biden vs. Trump. On other hand, being a double hater—so far as it goes—is a pretty rational response to the inadequacies of our current left-right alternative.