There is a lot of news today about the democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz, including the fact that he's among the few in recent political leadership to have graduated from a state school (and Kamala Harris went to Howard and UC Law San Fransisco). It's much more common for political elites to be drawn from private elite colleges, especially the Ivy League.
Thus, it seems like a good day for two recent essays on what is lost when so much of political leadership is educated on campuses that exclude most people and overwhelmingly admit students from the wealthiest of the wealthy.
Jess Calarco, author of multiple books and articles on education and social class, wrote that at the Ivies, the elite's sense of themselves as "the best" is reinforced while upwardly mobile students may see their success as evidence of the meritocracy as they also question whether others need safety nets or merely need to strive like they did.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Morton wove ideas from her book Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility in her essay that questions whether valuing elite education in political leadership is at odds with the democratic goals of equal representation and voice. Having graduated herself from an Ivy League college, she realized only after beginning to work at a public urban university how much she hadn't learned about the experiences of so many others.
It's relatively easy to find research on what's gained at elite universities: higher salaries in more prestigious workplaces, rich social networks, connections to some of the most brilliant scholars in the world. It's much harder to find consideration of what's lost when students graduate from such places with so little understanding of those they're told they'll someday lead.
