Okay, so now we’re getting somewhere. We agree that the Ivy League (and its cohorts) are capable of affecting much of what its students learn about the rest of America, and that, in turn, finds its way into public policy.
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Very much so. Failures of policy are a characteristic of what comes out of academia, not just the Ivy League.
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This reminds me very much of a meeting of my 50th reunion at a NESCAC college not long ago. It was right after an off-year election; things were relatively calm in the rest of the country, as far as such things go. But the sense that something had gone wrong since we were confident undergrads was palpable. All it took was one classmate sharing a recent cross-country automobile trip and it was almost as if a dam had broken; we all could visualize what he saw: a virtual “hollowing out” of what had been the industrial America of our youth. What I remember most was the self-reproach expressed by a good friend of mine I hadn’t seen since graduation. That the whole thing had taken place “on our watch.” That sense of guilt has stayed with me ever since.
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I’d just caution again against overweighting how much influence college alone has when it comes to these much broader issues.
Like, there are all sorts of interesting (and depressing) studies about what is sometimes called the balkanization of media. There has always been some of that, and actually there was a lot of it before the telecommunications era. But in the first few decades after WWII, a lot of people were at least watching the same news programs on broadcast television, reading the same newspapers or at least the same AP articles, and so on. And perhaps not at all coincidentally, political measures also suggest this was a low point for what is sometimes called partisan polarization.
But then cable came along, and radio was changed, and then the Internet took off, and then social media took off. And now different groups of people in the US are often using largely non-overlapping media outlets, social media, and so on. And they are ending up with very different worldviews. And again, maybe not coincidentally, partisan polarization measures have returned to their pre-telecommunications-era levels.
OK, so today we are looking at adults who have potentially experienced decades now of balkanized media outlets, more recently balkanized social media, and so on. And maybe they also many, many years ago went to different schools. But how much of whatever difference in worldviews they might have is actually because of going to different schools, and how much is it all the subsequent decades of different media/social media?
One other note–I think one has to be careful with phrases like “ordinary Americans” as well. The United States is a very diverse country. We have people living in notably different regions, different sorts of communities, working different jobs, with different religions, and on and on. And in many ways we have been getting more diverse, such at this point it is usually hard to find any meaningful category where a majority of Americans would fit. It is more just bigger and smaller fractions in the different categories. Like here is a relatively recent Census release on educational attainment:
- In 2022, the highest level of education of the population age 25 and older in the United States ranged from less than high school to advanced degrees beyond a bachelor’s degree.
- 9% had less than a high school diploma or equivalent.
- 28% had high school as their highest level of school completed.
- 15% had completed some college but not a degree.
- 10% had an associate degree as their highest level of school completed.
- 23% had a bachelor’s degree as their highest degree.
- 14% had completed advanced education such as a master’s degree, professional degree or doctorate.
OK, so all these different people are Americans, but which are the ordinary ones? Like, what is an “ordinary” amount of education? I would suggest there is no real answer to that question.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest people do not have blind spots in their respective worldviews. I just think rather than a certain few people being out of touch with a certain large many, it is more all sorts of fractions are out of touch with lots of other fractions.
Educational attainment varies significantly by state. So what is “normal” really depends on where you live. I live in MA which has the highest levels of educational attainment in the country (apart from DC). Most people I know have a BA and a good number have a MA or Phd. Once you move away from the Northeast corridor, the % of people with a BA+ goes down quite a bit. Education levels are lowest in the South and in most traditionally “red” states. Is it any wonder that there are divides? We live in the same country but our lived experiences might be quite different.
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I agree. “Ordinary America” is very diverse. The failure to understand this on a deep level (not just an intellectual one) is a major failing of many (not all) of the policy makers who come from academia. Not to get too political, the recent election showed the limitation of lumping people in groups and assuming that would govern their voting behavior or their views on immigration, public health, abortion or something else. The Ivy League and other colleges’ professors are blind to this and fail to educate their students on this reality–maybe because they don’t want to?
Oh, I don’t think it’s because they don’t want to. I just think there are limits to how much you can apply laboratory techniques to human nature. Nothing takes the place of actually sharing the same spaces with each other which we seem to do less and less with each generation.
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