What the Ivy League Is Really Selling

Not a better education, but elite social formation.

This essay originally appeared in Minding the Campus.

Should you pay for private school if you can afford it?

My fiancé and I are starting to think about having kids in the next few years, and naturally, as the child of two Soviet immigrants who put education above all else, I was quick to raise the question of private schooling for our future children. Although we disagree on the merits of private schooling, there is no question that my Chicago private high school was leagues ahead of his Miami public school in educational rigor.

In English, I read Macbeth while he read Percy Jackson. In math, I had the option to take linear algebra and discrete math as early as tenth grade. I became interested in philosophy early in life because my high school assigned Nietzsche in tenth grade, and I spent hours memorizing John Keats’s poems after my English teacher encouraged me to enter a poetry competition. Even on the STEM side, my high school gave me the chance to explore college-level math and science courses that rounded out my academic development.

That’s not to mention my private school’s abundant resources: premier college counseling, connections to prestigious internships, funding for more than 300 student clubs, and access to the University of Chicago’s library system.

And, of course, my private school gave a no-name immigrant kid (me) the chance to attend an Ivy League university.

I am forever indebted to my high school for enhancing my intellectual development, and I would argue that the private school price tag is worth it for that reason alone. You won’t find a single public school in America that encourages fifteen-year-olds to grapple with Hegel or think through the limitations of the Collatz conjecture. In fact, my high school was so rigorous that I assumed I would find a similarly thriving educational environment at the nation’s most elite hub of intellectual inquiry: the Ivy League.

But at Columbia University, where I completed both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, students and professors were not only disinterested in the spirit of classical academic inquiry but actively opposed to it. The search for objective truth was deemed racist and colonialist, and all heterodox or otherwise contrarian opinions were immediately stamped out by professors or administrators trained on Stasi playbooks.

But the issue cuts deeper than ideology.

In STEM, where ideology has thankfully had minimal effect on classroom learning, I saw virtually no difference between the math courses my friends at Columbia were taking and the courses my younger brother later completed at our local state university. Similarly, because professors secure tenure-track positions based almost exclusively on availability, my Ivy League education was not necessarily equipped with quality professors. Worse, hiring in academia is now based on diversity rather than merit.

In other words, the Ivies have lost their educational edge.

So why do we still live in the era of the “Ivy League” hype? And does paying up for an Ivy League school still make sense?

Let me start by saying that I do not believe you will receive the same level of education from Columbia University as you would from, say, Weber State University. What I do believe, however, is that the difference between a Columbia education and a Rutgers education—at least in terms of the basic information students absorb over four years—is negligible. You might have a slightly deeper discussion of Hegel at Columbia than at Rutgers, depending on the professor, but if you enroll in a “Philosophy 101” course at either university, the syllabi will look more or less identical.

Nevertheless, when comparing salary outcomes between your typical Ivy League kid and your typical large state school kid, the narrative is clear: the Ivy League will set you up for much better financial success than your typical large state school, with Columbia students earning a median of $102,491 ten years out of college and Rutgers students earning almost $30,000 less ($74,479). Compare Columbia’s number to that of the University of Alabama ($59,221), and the value of an Ivy League education could not be clearer.

From an ROI perspective, then, the price tag of an Ivy League education is justified. What is less clear is why, if course content at four-year universities is broadly similar, large earnings discrepancies persist.

The simplest answer is the pipeline to top-tier firms. Columbia and other Ivy League schools benefit from extensive alumni networks, many of whose members are willing to offer referrals that help graduates secure jobs at prestigious firms. Similarly, many employers use the “Ivy League brand” as a heuristic for competence: the mere appearance of “Columbia” at the top of a résumé signals intellectual worth.

While there is an argument that the Ivy League, on average, leads to better professional outcomes, the question remains whether the price tag is justified. After all, learning for its own sake has gone out the window at many of these schools. And in an age where college has become more of a pre-professional training facility than a Platonic symposium, is it really worth paying up for the Ivy League?

I would argue yes—and not for the educational quality or the connections to prestigious firms. The primary reason that it is still worth paying for the Ivy League today is to upgrade your social circles—and your social status—in a way that no amount of money can ever buy.

The social psychologist Rob Henderson has a fascinating explanation for this phenomenon through The Great Gatsby. “The central tragedy of Gatsby,” writes Henderson, is “his belief that access can be purchased. Gatsby has the external symbols (money, clothes, mansion, charm, etc.) but not the habitus.” On the other hand, Gatsby’s friend Nick Carraway, who attended Yale, easily blends into the old-money social world—even though he is not nearly as wealthy as Gatsby. In other words, Ivy League schooling provides a sort of social refinement based on the people you spend your time with.

The idea of social refinement is hazy in itself, but I’ll attempt to explain what I mean through my own experiences of gravitating in these circles for almost ten years now.

For one, Ivy League students are versed in a certain elite “code speak.” At Columbia, we were taught the history of Western literature, art, music, and philosophy through the famous Core Curriculum. Columbia often markets the Core not only for its intellectual value but also for its social value. Students of the Core are told they will better understand how society works. Indeed, two of my professors independently claimed that studying the Core texts would make us more interesting at dinner parties—and they were not wrong. In my current social circles, the ability to casually reference art, politics, literature, or history functions as a form of social currency.

There is, however, another aspect of Ivy League circles that matters even more: their relationship to risk and ambition. Ivy League students normalize “elite” outcomes by making them feel attainable. Since I was 18, I have watched my peers found companies, appear on podcasts, run for office, or publish books. In that environment, pursuits that seem like distant dreams to most people were treated as ordinary ambitions. That normalization—being surrounded by people who make extraordinary goals feel achievable—may be the greatest value of an Ivy League education.

As much as I like to disparage Columbia for its turn to wokeness and the decline in the quality of its education, what mattered in the end were the people I met there, who always pushed me to dig deeper and shoot higher in everything I did. By 28, I wrote three novels and started my own company—dreams that would have seemed unattainable if I weren’t constantly around other people doing it, too.

So while the value of a private school might be the intellectual foundation and the early exposure to ideas, the value of the Ivy League is different—the Ivy League not only embeds you in a certain class but also provides you with the built-in social circle to chase your dreams.

And I believe that that’s priceless.

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