I emailed the one guy who would know about research into the reasons that Ivy League universities have not increased their student bodies. That’s the question Steve Sailer brought up the other day. Berkeley’s Jerome Karabel, the author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton which was a strong source for Ron Unz in his discussion of the quota system enacted by Ivy schools to limit that number of Jewish students, responded that he was not aware of any research that has addressed the question. I take this to mean that there probably is not much if any research on the topic. He added that Princeton is the only elite school to really increase its student body, and even so, not by very much.
The most interesting stuff I could find is by Yale law professor Henry Hansmann who makes the case that education is an “associative good” and that the Ivies essentially have a monopoly on elite education in this country. And since monopolies persist by restricting supply below the socially optimal level, Ivy League schools are stingy with their highly-demanded product. None of this is all that groundbreaking when you think about it, but nobody within academia ever talks about it.
The associative character of higher education also helps explain why private colleges and universities remain relatively small. When demand for admission to an elite institution increases—as it has at most of the elite institutions over recent decades—these institutions rarely respond, as they could, by keeping the quality of their student body constant while increasing its size. Rather, they tend to keep the size of the student body relatively constant, and increase its quality. This reluctance to expand is evidently not because the institutions face important diseconomies of scale, in terms of facilities or curriculum, if they were to expand their student bodies. In fact, it seems likely that most private institutions operate well below the efficient scale for an appropriately varied set of curricularand extracurricular offerings. As some evidence of this, one need simply note the enormous size of many state university campuses.
Rather, the reason for remaining small is that increasing the size of the student body reduces its quality, and this reduces the welfare of the students who attend the institution, of the institution’s faculty, and probably of its administration as well (since administrators would generally like to be known for managing a highly selective institution). To maintain high quality, an institution therefore has an incentive to operate with a student body that is well below the size that minimizes the average cost of producing an appropriately designed college experience. This incentive is particularly pronounced if, as is often effectively the case, a college or university cannot charge different prices to different students according to their personal qualities. It is even further pronounced when the institutions are nonprofit, since a nonprofit is likely to be particularly sensitive to the interests of currently enrolled students, alumni, and current faculty and administrators—and not to the welfare of those students who would like to attend the institution and are willing to pay its tuition, but are rejected.
And on Ivy League as a monopoly:
This works, however, only because the Ivy League schools as a group have some monopoly power that derives from the stratification of higher education. If there were other institutions outside of the Ivy League’s agreement that were close competitors to in the eyes of applicants, the Ivy League schools could not get away with charging monopoly prices to talented students who are prosperous. Indeed, the Ivy League schools were always frustrated that they could not induce Stanford, which they saw as a close competitor, to join their agreement.
Hansmann points out that since 1991 Congress has been trying to determine if the Ivy League schools have violated anti-trust laws.
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Are you trying to make a case for the Ivies to expand their student bodies here? I think the reasons why they haven’t done so are obvious. They have to tightly control supply of their graduates in order to maintain the “exclusive” tag, and, as you quote, expanding the student body dilutes the quality. But at the end of the day, Harvard has been in business since the 1630s, and they have a $32 billion endowment. I don’t think they have much motivation to change.
Hats off to the US Medical schools that got the government to shut down 2/3 of their competitors and created a shortage of medical students and then a supply/demand imbalance.
And , of course, the anti-trust , price fixing of financial aid to students (that has been “studied” by the government) is another classic.
Tamburlaine,
As was Sailer’s point, this is a case of “exclusivity for me, but not for thee”. elites find ways to limit their interactions with the muck but chastise everyone else for wanting to maintain some semblance of exclusivity when it comes to housing or immigration.
Don’t bother asking them to expand their quantity. Just start showing up for all their classes and then ask for amnesty in a few years, and a degree.
CR,
Gotcha. Makes much more sense when I read your first piece. I probably should have done that to begin with.
Tangentially to JC, In fact, US med schools have *not* effectively shut down competition to create a supply/demand imbalance. The gates are wide open for NPs, Doctrates of Nursing Practice, PAs, DOs, and foreign educated MDs to practice on par with US med school graduates. All of these enjoy less training costs, so have higher ROI. Incomes and practice opportunities are depressed for primary care US trained MDs .
“And since monopolies persist by restricting supply below the socially optimal level, Ivy League schools are stingy with their highly-demanded product.”
Minor correction – this is not something monopolies intentionally do to “persist”, it’s just the usual result of monopoly pricing to maximize profit. The monopoly persists because it is the sole supplier of the desired good, for whatever reason.
Just start showing up for all their classes and then ask for amnesty in a few years, and a degree.
This is genius. And this is why the Alt-Right, or the Right in general, desperately needs street-theater shock troops a-la OWS. Imagine this actually happening. Say fifty people descending on Harvard and just sitting in on the classes of big name professors, while othes simultaneously stage a campus protest around “educational amnesty — there are no illegal students!”
The hypocrisy of the Harvard establishment would get exposed, as would that of all the nice Lefty students who would no doubt be quoted saying “these people have no right to be here!”
Why is it that the Right has never had any ability to protest while the Left has been doing it with wild success, up to and including numerous assassinations, for 150 years? I guess it’s for the same reason that the Right has never effectively taken over any institution either. At least not in the United States.
“This is genius. And this is why the Alt-Right, or the Right in general, desperately needs street-theater shock troops a-la OWS.”
LOL! Yes! And I clearly imagine peterike as the perfect figure to embody this bit of Alt-right agit-prop, if you will.
(For some reason, I picture peterike as this sort-of Joe Pesci, a la Goodfella’s era, looking guy, with a shrill Pesci voice articulating his keenly written ‘disgruntled alt-right prole’ screeds and comments he avails here. Why? I don’t know.)
It’s funny how, when you get to be familiar with regular commenters on certain blogs, you sometimes get these very clear and realistic images of what they would look and sound like in real life —– but, of course, a moment’s further reflection makes you realize that you really have know idea whatsoever what they’d be like, yet these strong illusions persist (or at least they do in my case, etc., blah-blah, FWIW).
Why is it that the Right has never had any ability to protest while the Left has been doing it with wild success
People protest when:
1) coordinated by an element of the elite
2) it’s a fun and low-risk way to get some pussy and cred
3) they are hungry – literally
Fourth condition: they are free men who have their own communities.
To be honest, Ivy League schools could probably increase enrollment and maintain standards. There were students, at my state school, who were as intelligent as the average Ivy League student. Then, of course, there were plenty more average students, like myself. Even so, it does make sense to limit enrollment just to give more cache to the degree.
The observation Sailer made was interesting but a bit of apples and oranges.
The ivies are elite precisely because they want to maintain a perception of a small, highly-talented group of students and alumni. In broad brush this is generally true, although it is often not true in specific cases, in my own personal experience having attended one of these kinds of schools. In order to have an elite, it has to be exclusive.
When these elites look at the “everyone else” they see them as the “everyone else”, and not as the elite, so there is no need to be exclusive — they are just modestly talented people, after all (this is how elites see them, at least). Exclusivity makes no sense other than for prejudice, in the eyes of the elites, when it comes to the masses, because they are seen mostly as a very modestly talented and otherwise indistinguishable mass — of whatever race or ethnic background or what have you. That’s why they label a desire for exclusivity coming from “everyone else” as racist — to the elites, it is not justified by the people in question actually *being* elite, and therefore worthy of exclusivity.
Several of the commentors on here, are easily smart enough for an Ivy League school.
Yes I don’t doubt that. But they maintain the sizes small so that it can be more elite and less broad.
“Several of the commenters on here, are easily smart enough for an Ivy League school.”
Lara, who here would you nominate for Ivy-League admission—– besides Promoting Justice, that is?
Novaseeker: “That’s why they label a desire for exclusivity coming from “everyone else” as racist — to the elites, it is not justified by the people in question actually *being* elite, and therefore worthy of exclusivity.”
Yes, I think that nails it precisely; I don’t believe it’s anything more nefarious than that.
My experience offers a bit of contrast to clarify the observations: My undergrad college was a strong but massive state university; well-respected Big-10 but hardly ‘elite’ or ‘exclusive’ in the way the terms used here..
However, my grad school was a Bona-Fide elite —– or, at least how the term used here applies to the Midwest, and there the distinctions and qualifications that Novaseeker points out above seemed to quite aptly describe my grad-school as well.
What’s funny but probably not a surprise is that some of the undergrads I went to school with, but much more among fellow grad students, was the sense that we were academically in the shadows of the east-coast and west-coast elite universities; you’d constantly here stuff like ‘we’re as good as Harvard or Yale” or “we’re just as good as Stanford,” etc. I really didn’t have much interest or patience for that kind of stuff —— perhaps because I was in a subjective humanities M.A. rather than a hard professional law or med program, where at least the supposed distinction would hold some practical or outright monetary value (now that’s something I DO think about now and DO regret —- not going to law school).
And it really does makes sense that east-coast elite schools have a slightly higher cache than their Midwestern counterparts: they’re closer to the elite professional action, so it’s quite natural that they’re those cities high-end ‘feeder’ universities.
Simplest explanation: they keep it exclusive and limit numbers because they can + it is in their best interests. Not society’s interests at large, but their best interests.
I’ll say one word of defense for limiting numbers of students, Ivies already use TAs at a decent rate, which dilutes quality of education. I was disgusted at Cornell by the TA run classes, which felt like a higher percentage than my friends at small liberal arts colleges. Expand student population, and you better expand faculty or else every parent will be pissed that their kid is going to an Ivy but being taught by TAs 90% of the time, and mostly in thickly accented English. It’s like firms that send call center work to India only to relocate it back to North America after customer pushback. Expanding faculty would make ideological purity much tougher to enforce. Can’t have that. These schools are a giant filtration system to suck up talent from America and indoctrinate them to the cathedral beliefs.
Look at Jack Lew’s thesis at Harvard. Sure he’s a Citigroup bankster, but his thesis discussed exaggerated fears of Communism and expanding social insurance in ’78.
I agree with everyone that there are as many if not more brainiacs outside of the Ivies than in them. Ivies accept 15-20% legacy and athletic exception admissions, so you know plenty of those students were on the margins. We should focus more on the ideological crap they feed students rather than the admissions process.
People outside of academia (including the well informed) tend to underestimate the importance of prestige within academia.
Thousands of book-smart people enter grad school every year at solid institutions like, say, UC Irvine, or Kansas State, or Rutgers. Ninety percent of them end up hoping for jobs in academia, yet they have no appreciation for how hopeless their chances are on the academic job market. There is more on that on the “100 reasons NOT to go to grad school” blog: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
Keeping numbers down with the thought of increasing prestige is a strategy employed by the professoriate as a whole. There are far more doctorates produced every year than there are jobs for people with doctorates, so the people with PhDs from places like Stanford, Yale, and MIT end up absorbing most of the jobs.This has been ruining people’s lives for decades, but the academic establishment does nothing to change the situation.
For some reason, I picture peterike as this sort-of Joe Pesci, a la Goodfella’s era, looking guy, with a shrill Pesci voice articulating his keenly written ‘disgruntled alt-right prole’ screeds and comments he avails here. Why? I don’t know.
LOLz! Couldn’t be more wrong! But hilarious, just the same.
Actually, I look a lot like this guy, though the first names are just a coincidence.
http://www.monkees.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/peter-tork.jpg
I think people forget that the biggest impact of expanding the Ivy Leagues would be to diminish to value of a degree from Rice, Vanderbilt, Duke, Emory, etc. There is only so much jobs for graduates of exclusive universities. Moving students from Washington University, Carnegie-Mellon, or Georgetown into the Ivy Leagues not only waters down the Ivy League degree value but also lowers the value of all the universities below them.
Walking into a Harvard class and demanding to be taught would just get you looked at askance. At the vast majority of universities, if you personally ask the professor beforehand, and there’s space in the lecture hall and don’t come across as a psycho or disruptive, they generally will let you sit in on classes for free. You don’t get credit for it, and it won’t be allowed in lab classes, but if you wanted a Harvard education for free (sans Harvard credentials), you could get quite a bit of it by being polite. Why you would want one is another matter entirely.
nikcrit,
Chuck, PA and you are pretty smart. I don’t think you’d be out of place at an Ivy League school.
To me the smartest person in terms of pure brainpower in all of the alt-Right is K(yle). There are lots of highly intelligent individuals around here, but many of them/us are all over the place. What sets Kyle apart is that he has a very disciplined thinking process.
There are two kinds of intelligence in this sphere: the creative thinkers and the critics. The former push against conventional narratives and at theri best develop new and more useful ways of understanding things and move things forward intellecutally. Thier/our problem is that they can be hit-and-miss with their insights. I count myself, Heartiste, Derb, and Moldbug among that type, among many others.
The “ciritcs” are people who think things through and authoritatively refine or discredit shit that gets thrown against the wall “to see if it sticks” and ultimately it is on their authority that ideas survive or perish. This is high-IQ, high-discipline, high-learning performance. Kyle is an apex-performer in this group, as is Doug1 (did he die?), Chuck, and Auster.
Sailer is an example of a very effective mix of the two.
“Thursday” is another example of a high-end Critic. Some of his and Heartiste’s exchanges have been excellent. None of us are infallible. If the ‘creatives” pitfall is undiscipined thought, the “critics” pitfall can be intellectual arrogance.
“Why is it that the Right has never had any ability to protest while the Left has been doing it with wild success?”
P.J. O’Rourke once asked that question of his friend Andrew Ferguson, who replied, “Because we have jobs.”
“To me the smartest person in terms of pure brainpower in all of the alt-Right is K(yle). There are lots of highly intelligent individuals around here, but many of them/us are all over the place. What sets Kyle apart is that he has a very disciplined thinking process.”
I sort of a agree and not agree. Or you could say: I sort of agree, but do so reluctantly.
I fear the latter because I do recognize his keen insight and well-roundedness in terms of cultural and scientific knowledge as the basis to his insights. But —– surprise! —— I’m sort of unhappy with a lot of his conclusions, if you can imagine that.
The antagonisms that come with his comments, as well as the outright slurs, aren’t necessarily indicative of anything in terms of intellectual integrity, but I do think they very well might reveal a lack of academic detachment, or, at the very least, a sort-of disciplined determinism in finding arguments and proofs that serve his qualitative preferences, but empiricisms leading in other directions that ones he’d like be damned.
Who knows. But I am aware that he may be right and inconvenient to my empirical wishes. lol!
To me, the guy in the alt-right, clearly, who is ‘most intelligent’ and alleviates that partisan-heavy concern I have, is the ‘Chuck,’ aka “Lesacre du Printemps,” who runs the scientific-driven HBD blog, Occidental ascent. Heads and shoulders above the rest, IMO, in terms of balancing the science and apt statistical measuring with a relevant qualitative cultural probes and insights. He used to comment a lot at Guy White, and at the Asian HBD’ers blog, Sagat Says, but he nowadays sticks mainly to his own blog and doesnt’ really comment much beyond responding to technical stat questions directly related to his research.
He became sort-of defacto and unwitting mentor into the HBD and Alt-right blogosphere, lol.
“Thousands of book-smart people enter grad school every year at solid institutions like, say, UC Irvine, or Kansas State, or Rutgers.”
As a Rutgers graduate, this is spot-on, though as an east coaster I couldn’t evaluate the west coast and midwest schools you compare RU to (typical equivalents are Penn State, UMass, or Michigan).
Rutgers is just 17 miles and a couple of train stops from Princeton and classes there were taught with much of the same materials, and by the same professors, who also taught at ultra-prestigious Princeton down the road. The difference is that something like forty thousand people get to wear scarlet and black while less than one-tenth of that are clad in Princeton’s orange and black. The up-front cost of Princeton is terrifyingly high and when you’re a 16- or 17-year-old high school kid looking at those loan conditions, it’s not at all clear that it’ll pay off, unless your parents went to an Ivy and can assure you that it will.
(Side note: “Rutgers” is not in my Mac’s dictionary and is thus flagged with a red dotted line as a potential spelling error. Prestige.)