The Ivy Dilemma

Harvard gets 60,000 applicants every year, and if Harvard came to its senses and expelled your genocide-loving asses, 59,300 would happily run over their own grandmothers to fill your spot https://t.co/H1D9Yb3eYV

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 20, 2023

The post on Xwitter above raises an interestimg question: right now, we're at the start of the 2024 college application season. Early decision deadlines begin on November 1, while regular decisions start early next year. The current brouhaha over pro-Palestine demonstrations at elite schools ought to affect applications over the coming 2024 admissions season, right? For instance, here's Bill Maher:

As an Ivy League graduate who knows the value of a liberal education, I have one piece of advice for the youth of America: Don’t go to college, and if you absolutely have to go, don’t go to an elite college, because, as recent events have shown, it just makes you stupid. There are few, if any, positives to come out of what happened in Israel, but one of them is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone either an oppressor or oppressed. In the case of Israel, oppressors being babies and bubbes. The same students who will tell you that words are violence, and silence is violence were very supportive when Hamas terrorists went on a rape and murder rampage worthy of the Vikings. They knew where to point the fingers, at the murdered. And then it was off to ethics class.

Do you suspect for one instant that the volume of elite-school applications will drop at all as a result of all this fulmination? The tell that it won't is Maher's need to reassure the reader at the start that he has an Ivy League education himself. Glenn Reynolds, a professor with an endowed chair and Yale Law degree makes these qualifications eminently plain as he posts, Academia is bringing about its own destruction. If it is, he's watching it from the VIP boxes high above the field.

Prof William Jacobson posts on Leftist Campus Embrace Of Hamas Barbarism: “We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase” of Higher Ed collapse. Jacobson is a professor at Cornell and a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law. Neither Reynolds nor Jacobson appears ready to abandon academe's sinking ship. Even Alan Dershowitz so far hs neither publicly burned his Yale Law degree and returned its ashes nor renounced his emeritus professorship at Harvard.

I once got into an argument with an economics professor in the comments section of his blog. He challenged me, if I saw so many flaws in academia, to find a way to arbitrage the differences in product quality and make money out of it. I never really tried to give him a systematic answer, although it later occurred to me that I arbitraged the situation in my own career by recognizing, as I began writing my PhD dissertation, that I would likely make far more money in a career outside the academy without a PhD than I would inside the academy with one, and I never looked back. So that's my answer to Reynolds and Jacobson.

My belated answer to the economics prof is that the undergraduate higher education product is so thoroughly uniform and cartelized that arbitrage is effectively impossible. It's like the airline industry under fare regulation -- every airline had to charge the same fare between any pair of cities, so that they had to sell the sizzle, not the steak. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are selling the sizzle, an undergraduate product that's otherwise indistinguishable from one university to the next.

The only real arbitrage that's currently taking place is with a few institutions like Hillsdale College, but that's a different subject that I may take up another time.

But let's return to my original question here: will there be any decline in applications to elite schools for 2024 admissions due to any perceived defect in product quality that might be reflected in pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish demonstrations on campus? My sense of things is that if there's any decline, it will be traceable almost entirely to economic conditions, not product quality. In fact, I would even ask if any decline in Ivy applications would be reflected in an increase in applications to Brandeis University, Yeshiva University, American Jewish University, or Touro University. Instead, I would guess that even Jewish applications to the Ivies will continue at more or less the same level.

I first visited these issues 20 years ago or so when I became interested in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement. This arose early in the last century when Dartmouth College, facing a financial crisis, asked its alumni to bail the school out, in return for which several seats on the board of directors would be nominated and elected by the alumni. This went unnoticed for decades until, in the 1980s and 1990s, conservative students began criticizing liberal faculty and administration policies. The result was that sympathetic alumni organized campaigns to elect avowed conservatives to the board as opportunities arose.

I participated in online forums and wrote several articles in The Dartmouth Review in support of the movement. I saw the potential for a curriculum more like Hillsdale College, although I was always somewhat skeptical of the movement's aims and whether they could be accomplished. The movement foundered for two reasons: first, the alumni trustees who were elected turned out to be narcissistic self-promoters, and one was arrested for domestic violence on top of that.

The other reason was harder to beat, most alumni, but especially the parents of current students, objected to the movement on the basis that any controversy about the quality of the Dartmouth product would detract from the perceived value of a Dartmouth degree on a resume. The parents in particular -- many of whom were alumni themselves -- didn't like the idea of annual fees that could otherwise buy a really nice boat or vacation home going to something that wouldn't pay off in a child's career.

That sank the movement, and the college moved to seize control of the trustee nominating process to prevent its reemergence. The problem with the current round of complaints about the Ivies is similar: alumni, parents, current and prospective students, even Jews, won't tolerate any perceived decline in the value of an Ivy degree. At best, they're going to take objections to elite education -- that it actually makes you stupid, as Bill Maher alleges -- cover their ears and go LALALALA.

There have been a number of elite-school scandals in recent years, including the Varsity Blues and now the pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses, that have had no real impact on the demand for elite-school admissions. It's going to take something much, much bigger to change things.