You cannot govern that which you do not understand.

From Intellectual Diversity, Dream and Myth, Prohibition by Rob Henderson.  The subheading is UNC panel discussion + links and recommendations.

He is actually addressing a slightly different point but he has the data to illustrate just how unrepresentative are elite universities which have such a significant influence on the chattering class, the NGO groupies and State players.  

But very few students come from such families. The vast majority of Ivy League students come from families in the top income quintile. At Yale, more students come from families in the top 1 percent of the income scale than the entire bottom 60 percent.

Click to enlarge.

From Diverse and Divided: A Political Demography of American Elite Students by Eric Kaufmann.

Minority and female students are far more liberal on campus than in the general population.

A quarter of students are LGBT, and there are roughly equal shares of Christian and nonreligious students.

Ivy League schools average 10-15 percent conservative and 60-75 percent liberal. Across 150 leading schools, there are nearly 2.5 liberals for every conservative.

Elite students are thus two-thirds more Democratic and twice as liberal as the American population.

Among elite students, there is a 15-point gender gap in political ideology and party identification between men and women. This is 3 to 5 times larger than the gender gap in the general population. It is also 2 to 3 times larger than the gender gap among either the 18-25 or college-educated general population. The campus gender gap has grown steadily since 2004.

Woof.  Our elite universities are both highly influential in setting a national agenda and also highly unrepresentative of the nation.  

Far more wealthy, far more female, far more liberal, far more LGBT, far more radical, far less religious,  No wonder there is social stress.  The ideas and ideology of our self-nominated elite have little in common with the average citizen.  You cannot govern that which you do not understand.  I visualize our current situation as being akin to a Smith College graduate trying to manage the Delta Tau Chi membership (Animal House).  

A rallying cry of the left in the 1990s-2010s was for our institutions to look like America.  I wonder what ever became of that aspiration.