In everything from “Legally Blonde” to “Gilmore Girls,” stories of empowerment and success consistently lend themselves to the Ivy League. The immense cultural capital commanded by our nation’s top institutions is evident in pop culture and real-world news alike. According to us, going to a prestigious college is a pillar of success. Once you’ve made it here, you've made it in life.
While the recognizability and academic prowess of the Ivy League are not inherently problematic qualities, worshiping those qualities is something we need to be cautious about. We reinforce the value of prestige in every avenue: entertainment, news, and our personal lives. The proliferation of exclusivity and superiority has the constant potential to create controversy.
When it comes to matters of policy, lawmakers and public opinion point to America’s most recognizable names first. Most coverage of an issue like affirmative action was grounded in the idea that it was creating disparities for those trying to gain admission to highly selective universities. Last summer, diversity initiatives in admissions were gutted by the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. In real life, less than 1% of American college students attend one of 12 "elite" universities: the Ivy League, Stanford, Duke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago. But, we centered the public discourse around these few isolated cases. Elitism was baked into the conversation before anyone stopped to question it.
Practically, affirmative action wasn’t an issue that affected the masses. Opponents of a relatively harmless system were able to win support by drawing on America’s two favorite concepts: fairness and success. People who would never have been affected by affirmative action became a driving force behind getting rid of it.
The problem is that we use prestige as an exemplum. When it comes to race, if Harvard isn’t fair, how can anything else be? This fallacious assumption is based solely on the American myth of meritocracy. In a world where income and alumni relations are the strongest indicators of merit in admissions, not everyone deserves to be made into an example simply by virtue of the school they attend.
Those on the outside who are looking in seldom draw accurate conclusions about what people actually make up the Ivy League. I was guilty of the same before I became a student at a top 10 American university. The unfortunate truth is that we’re not a collection of prodigious students destined to change the world. Many of us will one day make decisions of consequence, but that’s not always because we deserved that power.
That isn’t to say prestigious schools aren’t valuable. They come with a vast wealth of opportunities, often creating paths to very strong careers, growing student networks, and producing renowned scholarship. More importantly, though, it’s essential to scrutinize our nation’s leading institutions.
Looking past political issues, the Ivy League is something that sets American education apart. It makes us attractive on an international scale. We become outstanding because we house truly unrivaled academic programs. But is that why American education should have the reputation that it does? Why don’t we point to how many people graduate from college in total? It’s because our value is extracted from the few examples of greatness that we offer, not our more generalized success.
This is the crux of an elitist culture. We don’t take into account the reality that so many people experience. America’s rugged individualism necessitates that some are venerated for their success while others are snubbed as ordinary and insignificant.
In fact, I have to acknowledge my own personal elitism. I seek the same superiority that I’m calling out as culturally reprehensible. No Penn student is truly free from that reality. Why didn’t any of us choose to attend a state school or community college? After all, they're usually less expensive, more convenient, and less competitive. I’ll tell you exactly why — because a different school wasn’t good enough for us. At the end of the day, you value what prestige can do for you. It’s not an irrational perspective, but it's one that's worth recognizing.
It’s crucial to put into perspective how much discussion we have about small, concentrated groups of people. Otherwise, our discourse will continue to be deeply skewed in favor of the already powerful. Elitist culture is holding us back. In so many ways, we need to push past our notion of what makes some people “exceptional.”
JACK LAKIS is a College sophomore studying political science and communication from Kennesaw, Ga. His email is jlakis@sas.upenn.edu.
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