![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/230\/2013\/04\/prince-4.jpeg\" "\\"prince-4\\"")
<\/a>When I was getting my undergraduate degree at KSU back in the late 80s, I had a few friends from neighboring Manhattan Christian College. The running joke, many decades old even at that time I\u2019m sure, was that many female students on their campus seemed a little less interested in getting an education than finding a husband. We called it the \u201cMRS. Degree.\u201d The comment carried a not so subtle condescension toward those young women who held to a more traditional role for women\u2026 not an original way to be mean, but there it is. I sort of thought that kind of thing was over.<\/p>\nWhen Susan Patton, a \u201977 Princeton graduate, wrote an ironic letter to the editor of the Daily Princetonian<\/a>\u00a0urging all of the co-eds to get their MRS. degree she knew exactly what kind of flap it would cause. I\u2019ve read it three times and honestly can\u2019t decide if she was serious or not. Ross Douthat wrote a very interesting opinion about the article in Sunday\u2019s New York Times<\/em>, saying that he thinks that what Patton meant (which is exactly what we used to mean back in The Little Apple<\/a>), is not actually what the Ivy\u00a0League-rs\u00a0are upset about.\u00a0Douthat says that the Patton\u2019s letter was a scathing attempt at exposing the Ivy League\u2019s strangle hold on power that comes through, well, breeding. Douthat wrote:<\/p>\n \u201cHer betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who\u2019s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively \u2014 that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The elite ruling class seeks, as it has always done, to perpetuate its kind. What Douthat gets wrong in my opinion, is that he calls American culture a meritocracy. The chief revelation of Patton\u2019s article, if Douthat\u2019s take is correct, is that the illusion of American meritocracy is exposed for what it really is: Plutocracy. Money rules.<\/p>\n That college might double as a dating service is nothing new. That Ivy League schools tailor their admissions toward the rich and powerful (as opposed to the smart and qualified), has to sort of make you wonder why? Douthat says the reason is so that the people running the world can continue running the world. He writes:<\/p>\n The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms \u2014 but it\u2019s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn\u2019t telling Princetonians anything they didn\u2019t already understand.\u00a0Of course<\/em>\u00a0Ivy League schools double as dating services.\u00a0Of course\u00a0<\/em>members of elites \u2014 yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females \u2014 have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as \u201cregression to the mean\u201d?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, at this point I\u2019m feeling really bad. Although not for my straight A\u2019s wife, who never even sniffed a B until she had an official post-graduation job offer (\u2026which she accepted before she even started her senior year). She did not marry her intellectual equal. Nevertheless that\u2019s not what I\u2019m feeling bad about. It\u2019s my children and their inevitable regression to the mean; already doomed to middle management. Douthat again:<\/p>\n That this \u201cassortative mating<\/a>,\u201d in which the best-educated Americans increasingly marry one another, also ends up perpetuating existing inequalities seems blindingly obvious, which is no doubt why it\u2019s considered embarrassing and reactionary to talk about it too overtly. We all know what we\u2019re supposed to do \u2014 our mothers don\u2019t have to come out and say it!<\/p>\n Why, it would be like telling elite collegians that they should all move to similar cities and neighborhoods, surround themselves with their kinds of people and gradually price everybody else out of the places where social capital is built, influence exerted and great careers made. No need \u2014 that\u2019s what we\u2019re already doing! (What\u00a0Richard Florida called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places\u201d is one of the striking social facts of the modern meritocratic era.) We don\u2019t need well-meaning parents lecturing us about the advantages of elite self-segregation, and giving the game away to everybody else. \u2026<\/p>\n Or it would be like telling admissions offices at elite schools that they should seek a form of student-body \u201cdiversity\u201d that\u2019s mostly cosmetic, designed to flatter multicultural sensibilities without threatening existing hierarchies all that much. They don\u2019t need to be told \u2014 that\u2019s how the system already works! The \u201cholistic\u201d approach to admissions, which privileges r\u00e9sum\u00e9-padding and extracurriculars over raw test scores or G.P.A.\u2019s, has two major consequences: It enforces what looks suspiciously like\u00a0de facto discrimination<\/a>\u00a0against\u00a0Asian applicants<\/a>\u00a0with high SAT scores, while disadvantaging talented kids \u2014 often\u00a0white and working class<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0geographically dispersed\u00a0<\/a>\u2014 who don\u2019t grow up in elite enclaves with parents and friends who understand the system. The result is an upper class that looks superficially like America, but mostly reproduces the previous generation\u2019s elite.<\/p>\n But don\u2019t come out and say it! Next people will start wondering why the names in the U.S. News rankings change so little from decade to decade. Or why the American population gets bigger and bigger, but our richest universities admit the same size classes every year, Or why in a country of 300 million people and countless universities, we can\u2019t seem to elect a president or nominate a Supreme Court justice who doesn\u2019t have a Harvard or Yale degree.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I don\u2019t always agree with Douthat, and I\u2019m not sure he\u2019s interpreting Patton correctly, but I think he might be interpreting at least some of the response correctly.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was getting my undergraduate degree at KSU back in the late 80s, I had a few friends from neighboring Manhattan Christian College. The running joke, many decades old even at that time I\u2019m sure, was that many female students on their campus seemed a little less interested in getting an education than finding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[527,530,526,525,528,529],"class_list":["post-1751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-manhattan-christian-college","tag-princeton","tag-ross-douthat","tag-susan-patton","tag-the-little-apple","tag-the-new-york-times"],"yoast_head":"\n