Marxist nonsense well received in a conservative think-tank

The Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank and among their areas of focus is an online magazine Minding the Campus which offers contrarian and often thoughtful commentary and research on trends in academia. But not always.

Why Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Peter Sacks is an example of a failed book review, in part because of the reviewer and in part because of the book being reviewed.

The conventional meritocratic recipe for success is simple enough: study hard in school, get good grades, be involved in one’s community, find an appropriate college, apply for jobs in your field of study, and everything else falls in place. But that’s not how it really works says Lauren A. Rivera, author of Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs.

The path to success she sees is this: Be born to upper-middle-class or wealthy parents. Know what academic tracks to be on by the end of middle school — knowledge that one acquires from well-educated parents and school counselors with low caseloads. Get involved early in the competitive sports favored by elites, such as lacrosse, tennis, sailing, skiing, golf, cycling, climbing, soccer, and running. Test well enough to get into an elite university.

Part of the issue is a lack of clarity of terms. What does Rivera mean by elite? By income? By wealth? Something else? Is Rivera charting how children from elite families move into elite jobs or is she documenting that elite jobs are dominated by elite families?

It appears to me as if she is doing the former but claiming the latter.

There is no doubt that elite families invest heavily in terms of money, parental time, and life experiences for their children. Some of what she writes is no doubt true. What she doesn't address, at least as reflected in the review, is an analytical justification for her thesis. I have no doubt that some proportion of elite children will strive for elite performance themselves and that a disproportionate number compared to non-elite (the greater number of people) will succeed in becoming elite themselves. But that isn't particularly useful knowledge. What is useful are specifics which appear to regrettably be absent from the argument.

If 10,000 elite children set out to run the company, perhaps only 10 succeed for a 0.1% yield rate. And if 10,000 non-elite children set out to run the company, perhaps only 1 succeeds for a 0.01% yield rate. However, the non-elite outnumber the elite by many multiples and so across thousands of companies and institutions, even though the success RATE for elites is higher, in absolute numbers, the non-elite win hands down. But that doesn't fit the Gramscian/Marxist fantasy.

There is also no doubt that elite schools play a role in this. I can't think why anyone would either be surprised by any of that nor dismayed. Surely the issue, though, is outcomes both for elite children and for elite jobs.

In other words, do elite children actually succeed disproportionately? I suspect the answer is yes but not nearly to the degree that people wish to pretend. All those investments move the dial favorably in one direction but much of the outcome is dependent on individual choices, decision-making and behaviors. All that investment is contributive of good outcomes but does not by any means guaranty it. Children who fail to launch, fall from the straight and narrow, get distracted on the pathway of life, etc. may, perhaps, not be quite as common in elite families as in poorer families but they certainly are not uncommon.

The other question apparently not addressed is whether elite performers today come from elite families yesterday? My experience is that yes there is a skew among current elite leaders towards upper middle class family backgrounds but that the greater majority of executives and leaders come from non-elite backgrounds. On any given corporate or foundation board, you might have one or more Ivy league degrees, but most of the board members are going to be from state schools or middle tier private schools.

The reviewer considers that

The book offers a rare glimpse into the hiring practices of EPS firms and how they differ from “the dominant theory of hiring” in the United States. The dominant model holds that employers hiring decisions are based largely on “estimates of human capital, social capital, gender and race. But that model is inadequate, she argues, because it fails to account for the increasingly powerful role that one’s class background plays in the recruiting and hiring practices firms that prepare one for leadership roles in society.

This is nonsense on a stick. Elitism and class have always played their roles and continue to do so. It appears that Rivera wants to make the case that it is getting worse and that elite performance now depends on elite background. The literature is long and complete on that argument. No, elite backgrounds neither guaranty elite personal performance nor are most fields dominated by people from elite backgrounds. Having worked for an Elite Professional Services (EPS) firm, having risen to the top rank of that firm, having recruited hundreds of professionals on three continents, I can attest to the fact that Rivera has the wrong end of the stick. She appears to have an academic's ignorance of the real world of commerce and the ideologue's conviction that all data supports her hypothesis that the elites are out to prevent anyone else coming up the ladder.

Here's the tell.

The author says she did not set out to prove any particular theory, but allowed the data to drive her interpretations. She concludes that the hiring practices of certain employers — ones that are pivotal in shaping the nation’s future leaders — are driven by considerations of class status. Class, she argues — and the social capital associated with class, is more important than virtually any other factor in whether certain high-statues employers will even consider an applicant for a job.

Of course she would say she just wanted the data to drive her interpretations but regrettably she selected only the data that would support her preconceived interpretation.

No doubt that class serves as a marker that is of interest to employers. But it is a proxy. It is not, repeat not, "more important than virtually any other factor in whether certain high-statues employers will even consider an applicant for a job." What employers care about far more than anything else is the probability as to whether a particular candidate will adjust to the given firm and its circumstances, grow with it, and materially contribute to the financial well-being of the firm. That is their primary concern, not Rivera's imaginary class.

Rivera's ignorance is not limited to commerce. She appears also to be unaware of the mechanics of higher education as well. Why do EPS firms go to elite universities for candidates? Efficiency not class. Firms cannot test for IQ but Universities can. If you go to an elite university for recruiting, you are virtually guaranteed that you will have very bright individuals interview. You still have to determine whether they can also be effective, but the university usually does a good job of screening not only for intelligence but also for accomplishment (and the necessary behavioral attributes underpinning accomplishment).

If I am an EPS recruiting at an elite university with a graduating class of 500, virtually any one of them are likely to meet the minimum profile. If I go to a state university with a graduating class of 5,000, almost certainly there are 500 similarly accomplished candidates at that university compared to the elite university. But now I have to take time and money to discern which among the 5,000 are the 500 I might want to consider hiring. Rivera seems oblivious to all this in her pursuit of the myth, pardon me, thesis, that the elites are circumscribing everyone else's opportunities.

The fact that Rivera doesn't know what she is talking about was, for me, most forcefully made with this passage.

Rivera cites research that America is unique among other advanced nations in the extent that people care about the reputation and prestige of one’s alma mater. In few other countries has one’s potential for leadership been so closely tied to where one attended college. As Rivera demonstrates, that has become a self-fulfilling prophesy of the new meritocracy. Exceedingly influential firms have uniquely positioned themselves as “finishing schools” for America’s elites, and yet there is virtually no evidence to suggest whether the system selects for the best, or simply the more well-positioned and well-polished.

This is so bad it calls to mind Wolfgang Pauli's famous rebuke, Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch! (It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.)

If Rivera researched anything overseas, it can't have included Britain, France, Russia, India, China, Japan, etc. All those countries have clearly understood hierarchies of prestige and elitism in their universities that is far stronger than in the US.

Rivera wants to make the case that

“Because of the way they hire,” Rivera writes, “these employers end up systematically excluding smart, driven, and socially skilled students from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds from the highest-paying entry-level jobs in the United States, positions that serve as gateways to the country’s economic elite.”

She fails entirely because she fails to actually look at where the elite come from. Ivy League students do very well out of life's competition but that is primarily because the Ivies have made themselves very good at admitting the brightest and most accomplished students. If Rivera had defined what constitutes the elite and then had actually looked at who occupies the elite positions in the country, she would have found that the overwhelming majority did not attend an Ivy League or equivalent school and did not arrive at their position of accomplishment through classism. They arrived because of what they were able to accomplish.

Rivera appears to be one more in a long line of Gramscian academics who are so blinded by their ideological convictions that they can't even acknowledge what is common knowledge. I cede to no one a concern about classism as a continuing potential threat, but this isn't evidence of that.

Yet another issue that is not addressed is the academic's desire to talk about the abstract conception of "The Elite" versus addressing the concrete realities of who actually constitutes those elite. Are we talking wealth, income, celebrity, academic fame, objective performance? And how many of these elites are there? In England in the 19th century, it was said that there were 400 families who effectively determined the course of the country. So how many elite are there in the US and who are they? A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million? Apparently Rivera never says.

More importantly than that, is this a stable group over time? Historically, class meant some self-identifying, self-propagating group of influential people. Rivera disavows a hereditary definition of elitism. That's good because there is pitiably small evidence to support that argument. But if we aren't talking about familial hereditary as the basis of class, then what exactly are we talking about? The top 5% of the population by income, for example? The problem with this is that it lacks meaning and is tautological. There will always be a top 5%.

The other problem is churn among the 5%. Whether looking at income, wealth, or any other empirical measure of elite performance, the population that constitutes that 5% is always churning. The Forbes list of 400 richest people in the US has 20-40% churn in any given year and the number of individuals who remain on the list for ten years or more is vanishingly small.

What you are left with is that elite people in sports, commerce, politics, entertainment, media, academia, etc. come from all walks of life. There is a skew towards people from middle class and above families but it is by no means even close to being sealed off from everyone else. 70% of all Americans will be in the top quintile of income at least one point in their life. Elite education and then into EPS is certainly one pathway towards success but it is not the main pathway (in terms of number of people who travel along it). Nor is there a stable population that constitutes the elite class. It is changing by individuals, by country of origin, by race, by education attainment, by region, by religion, etc. all the time. And not slowly.

Rivera's argument is in tatters. Having staggered through factual and evidentiary errors of such a basic nature, it is galling to see the reviewer, Sacks, conclude "For the most part, Rivera’s analysis is believable and compelling." Well, no. Someone who has never heard of Oxford and Cambridge, the grandes écoles, University of Tokyo, etc. as elite gatekeepers is neither believable or compelling.

UPDATE: I should have remembered this. It is the nail in the coffin to Rivera's thesis. Revisiting the Value of Elite Colleges by David Leonhardt is a summary of Dale and Krueger's replication of their earlier work which found that, for a given SAT score, it din't matter whether you attended Penn State or University of Pennsylvania (elite Ivy League), statistically you will achieve identical life outcomes in terms of income and wealth accumulation.

The starting point is the obvious fact that graduates of elite colleges make more money than graduates of less elite colleges. This pattern holds even when you control for the SAT scores and grades of graduates. By themselves, these patterns seem to suggest that the college is a major reason for the earnings difference.

But Ms. Dale — an economist at Mathematica, a research firm — and Mr. Krueger — a Princeton economist and former contributor to this blog — added a new variable in their research. They also controlled for the colleges that students applied to and were accepted by.

Doing so allowed them to capture much more information about the students than SAT scores and grades do. Someone who applies to Duke, Williams or Yale may be signaling that he or she is more confident and ambitious than someone with similar scores and grades who does not apply. Someone who is accepted by a highly selective school may have other skills that their scores didn’t pick up, but that the admissions officers noticed.

Once the two economists added these new variables, the earnings difference disappeared. In fact, it went away merely by including the colleges that students had applied to — and not taking into account whether they were accepted. A student with a 1,400 SAT score who went to Penn State but applied to Penn earned as much, on average, as a student with a 1,400 who went to Penn.

“Even applying to a school, even if you get rejected, says a lot about you,” Mr. Krueger told me. He points out that the average SAT score at the most selective college students apply to turns out to be a better predictor of their earnings than the average SAT score at the college they attended. (The study measured a college’s selectivity by the average SAT score of admitted students as well as by a selectivity score that the publisher Barron’s gives to colleges.)

It is not elitism that determines outcomes but IQ, effort, and some combination of personal attributes such as confidence, perseverance, resilience, etc. that determine life outcomes. So much for the closed doors of the elite club and class as a determinant.