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Despite representing a tiny fraction of American colleges and universities, Ivy League schools play an outsized role in educating the power players in American politics. Sixteen former U.S. presidents attended Ivy League schools, and both the current Republican nominee for president and his running mate are Ivy League alums.
The crassness of Donald Trump's and JD Vance's rhetoric might seem like a strong contrast with the genteel Ivy aesthetic. And yet, we can trace a direct line from those messages back to the myth of meritocracy that Ivy League institutions have spent generations trying to promote.
Schools like Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania have long served as finishing schools for the wealthiest and the whitest of the old-money American elite. Historically, the young men who attended them didn't have to be particularly talented to warrant admission, and they didn't have to work particularly hard to graduate with a "gentleman's C." By virtue of their families' wealth and social connections, those same men also didn't have to work particularly hard to secure high-status positions.
Yet, in a classic case of correlation masquerading as causation, Americans began to treat Ivy League schools as the source of their students' success. Employers, for example, prefer graduates of "top" schools over otherwise similar candidates. And families go to great lengths to get their children into Ivy League schools.
Faced with that growing demand, Ivy League schools have diversified somewhat, admitting and even offering substantial financial aid to students from groups historically excluded from higher education. Yet legacy students and children from families in the top one percent of the income distribution—those whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year—are still vastly overrepresented in the Ivy League and in other highly selective schools.
To justify those lingering inequities, Ivy League schools lean heavily on the meritocracy myth, which suggests that American society—and institutions like Ivy League schools—allocate opportunities to those who have proven themselves most deserving, usually by virtue of their aptitudes, talents, or past efforts and resulting success. Sociologists call this idea a myth not because skills and efforts are inconsequential, but because they're a narrow way of constructing deservingness and because privilege tends to matter even more.
Despite those realities, Ivy League schools often tell their students, "you're here because you deserve to be here, and you deserve to be here because you're the best." Or, as one Harvard president intoned in a commencement address, "We have told you from the moment you arrived here that you will be the leaders responsible for the future, that you are the best and the brightest on whom we will all depend, that you will change the world."
For students from systematically privileged groups, this message is easy to swallow, as sociologists like W. Carson Byrd and Shamus Khan have found in their work. Particularly when coupled with messages about the heritability of intelligence, the language of meritocracy explains not only privileged students' own opportunities but also why their families and communities have advantages that others do not.
For students from systematically marginalized groups, this same message is a bitter pill to take. To believe that they deserve an Ivy League education because they're so special, they also have to accept that most people in their families and their communities are not. Some of these students never get over the bitterness. As sociologists like Anthony Jack and Elizabeth Lee have found in their research, students from systematically marginalized groups often wade uneasily as outsiders through their time in Ivy League schools or leave before finishing their degrees.
Others, like vice presidential hopeful JD Vance, swallow the pill with a glass of champagne. The result, as we see in Vance's memoir Hillbilly Elegy, is a willingness to use the myth of meritocracy to throw one's family and community under the bus. Drawing on classic meritocracy rhetoric, Vance argues that "If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard." To illustrate this point, Vance tells a story about an acquaintance from the blue-collar town where he was raised. The acquaintance, according to Vance, blamed the economy and the government for his unhappiness, but Vance refused to accept this assessment, arguing instead that "his status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will only improve through better decisions."
The zeal of the converted makes people like Vance dangerous weapons for meritocracy's proponents. They're willing to hold themselves up as proof that the U.S. is a meritocracy (and therefore doesn't need a social safety net or affirmative action or other DEI initiatives), even if it means viciously disparaging their families, their communities, and their friends.
Ivy League schools don't deserve all the blame for producing men like Trump and Vance, but their political ascendancy makes clear that we ought to take a hard look at their role in shaping policies based on classist, racist, and sexist ideas. And it suggests that we should look beyond the Ivies for our next president—and maybe consider a graduate of a historically Black college like Howard University instead.
Jessica Calarco is a sociologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net and Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
