“How Ivy League Admissions Broke America:” David Brooks Explains

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, back to the U.S. The election here has highlighted a distrust in American institutions. Many working-class voters opted to vote Republican due to the reputation of Democrats being the party for the educated elite. So, what’s led this divide? For the Atlantic’s December issue cover story, Contributing Writer David Brooks argues that the dysfunctional system of meritocracy is largely responsible and needs to be redefined. He joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss further.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Bianna, thanks, David Brooks. Thanks so much for joining us. Your recent cover story in The Atlantic dives into how, essentially, we have created a system of meritocracy that isn’t working. That’s created a diploma divide in America. You write, the meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines. Less educated people will Republican and more educated people vote Democratic. So, how did one lead to the other?

DAVID BROOKS, CONTRIBUTING WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Well, the diploma divide, the political divide, grows out of a deep cultural divide. And so, increasingly, people with college degrees and people with high school degrees are living in different worlds. People with high school degrees die eight years younger. They’re 10 times more likely to die of opioid addiction. They’re much more likely to be obese. They’re much less likely to marry. They’re much, much more likely to have kids out of wedlock. They even have fewer friends. 24 percent of High school grads say they have no close friends. And so, they’re living — we have created two different Americas. And we created that unintentionally, but on purpose. Over the last 70 years, we created a world in which people who do really well in school, get to go to fancy colleges, marry each other, invest heavily in their kids. They get to go to fancy colleges. They move to the same 10 or 12 cities, Austin, San Francisco, Washington, and they’ve created an inherited caste structure. And 50 percent of America takes a look at this and says, you educated elites, you have too much power. And by the way, you’re not all that competent. So, we’re going to revolt. And that’s what Donald Trump is all about.

SREENIVASAN: You know, you kind of go back into the history of interest of the Harvard president almost 100 years ago. How does that translate into this situation that you’re describing?

BROOKS: Yes, the guy’s name was James Conant, and he inherited a situation which was getting into Harvard was super easy if your dad went to Harvard. Harvard and Princeton and Yale and schools like that were for the Protestant establishment. And so, the ideal in those days was to be a well-bred man. And you didn’t want to study hard. Academics were not important, but you had to be socially polished. And he decided, that’s ridiculous. We can’t enter the 20th century governed by the dimwitted children of mayflower families. We need a new kind of elite. And he had great faith in the power of IQ tests and in the power of GPA, getting really good grades. So, we said, we’re going to pluck all the smart kids from all across America. We’ll bring them to places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and they’ll run the society really well. So, inherently, he was creating a new elite. The problem with his vision was that, A, rich families learned to game the system. And the second problem with his system is he didn’t have the right definition of human ability. For him, it was all IQ. And IQ is important. It really is. If you want to be an astrophysicist, probably important to have a high IQ. But those of us who, you know, live life know there are other things that are more important. Being curious, having a passionate drive, being a good teammate agility, knowing how to move in life so it’s you’re graceful toward other people and decisive toward yourself. And so, all these traits, which were hard to measure, got lopped off. And so, we not only created these elites, this inherited caste system, but it’s not that competent because it doesn’t select on the basis of what are the real skills in society?

SREENIVASAN: Is it OK to ascribe this current situation to the meritocracy and the amount that you do? Meaning, you know, are you, David Brooks, giving enough credit to the social policies that multiple administrations have come up with that might have exacerbated the very, you know, dichotomy in America that we’re describing? Is it all the meritocracy? Aren’t other things responsible for this as well?

BROOKS: I’m monomaniacal about this, so maybe I oversee it. But what I would say, I would put it this way, a lot of the social policies grow out of the assumptions for the educated class, and I’m a member of this educated class. I went to an elite school, I teach at elite schools, I’m deep in the system. But we decided that in moving to a postindustrial society, we need to create all Americans to look like us. And so, you had a whole succession of presidents with education policies where the policy was designed, we’re going to funnel all kids into college, for your colleges because you need a college to get the, quote, “jobs of the future.” And then look at our immigration policy. Our immigration policy, we’re going to relatively open borders. That creates cheap labor force for those of us in the educated class, but a lot of competition for those more working-class folks. Look at our trade policy. We’re very tolerant of free trade, which is what the market wants. It’s very efficient, but it meant a lot of the jobs got shipped overseas and not — are not my job as a journalist, that didn’t get shipped overseas, but a lot of other people’s jobs.

SREENIVASAN: You know, when I was growing up shop class was an option. And now, when I talk to younger people, they’re just like completely flummoxed by the idea of going to something that would teach you carpentry and welding at high school, right? I mean, but we as a culture decided that, well, those were not really even tracks that we wanted to invest in for secondary or primary education.

BROOKS: Yes, we used to train a lots of things in schools. Shop class is one thing we had used to have more arts education. There used to be things called the Courtesy Club where people are taught social skills. Now, we do a little of that through social and emotional learning, but not as much as we should. And basically, we just took one form of intelligence, the ability to do well in school. And we said, that’s the thing that matters. If you can get straight A’s, you’re the kind of person we want to promote. And by nine or 10 years old, kids know. They know either the school thinks I’m a smart kid, in which case I get put into the pressure cooker, or the school thinks I’m a dumb kid, in which case I’m probably mentally checking out. And it’s just wrong to be sorting kids at that early age, especially by a very narrow and bogus criteria. One of the problems with the meritocracy is it’s based on a non-sequitur that doing really good at school is the same thing as really doing really good at life. And that’s not true. The relationship between your high school and college grades and your life outcomes, that correlation is essentially trivial. There was a study done — somebody looked at thousands of cases where people were fired from their job. Why were they fired? In only 11 percent of the cases, they were fired because they lacked intelligence or technical skills. In 89 percent of cases, it’s because they were bad teammates. They were hard to coach. They didn’t try hard. They weren’t calm under pressure. And so, these are things which the scientists call non cognitive skills, because they’re hard to count. But to me, they’re the most important thing in life, and our schools have sort of shunted them off to the side.

SREENIVASAN: You know, what is the problem with this somewhat simple idea, and I think it’s stayed around because it’s a simple idea, that, you know, number one people go to number one schools, that there is a purpose in having baseline standardized measurements where we can sort.

BROOKS: Yes. Well, it just doesn’t — number one people don’t necessarily go to number one schools. You know, they — having a high IQ, as I said, is good. If you have the 1,600 in SATs, that’s going to help you in life. It’s going to probably lead to higher jobs. It’s probably lead to higher incomes. But there was a study called the term and study that looked at super smart people over their lifetimes and they did fine. They were doctors and lawyers. These are like top 1 percent. But none of them were geniuses and none of them were creative. Intelligence is not the same as creativity. Intelligence is not the same as good judgment. Highly intelligent people are really good at persuading themselves. Their own false ideas are true. And so, eat a lot of other things aside from that. And so, to me, when you — and so, you look at a study of — somebody did a study of students and they gave him a bunch of consulting problems like as if they were in a consulting firm and the Ivy League kids did only a tiny amount better than the other kids. And so, for example, Adam Grant took the results of that study and calculated that a Yale grad, in these consulting problems, did about 1.9 percent better than a grad from Cleveland State, and that’s not a big difference. And so, the parents of high school juniors think that there’s an awesome difference between Princeton and Penn or between, you know, Penn State and Penn or between Williams College and some other college. But these are — this is a status system that really has no correlation in reality.

SREENIVASAN: Look, you know, I haven’t met any college administrators in my time reporting on higher education who are happy with the U.S. News and World Report rankings and how disproportionate that number factors into how prospective parents think, right? But there is definitely, you know, an idea that has crept in and been established in the minds of those parents is that, look, this is the system that has created this American society for good as well as the things that you describe, right?

BROOKS: Yes. I mean, I — as I say, I went to these schools. I now teach at one of these elite colleges. I taught for 20 years at different elite colleges. I find them awesome places filled with awesome people. And the people currently in them are not the problem. The problem is they are part of a system that was established 70 or 80 years ago, and we’re all stuck in the system. And most of us are not happy with the system. So, parents. A lot of parents think there’s too much pressure put on their kids in junior year, in high school, in senior year. But they can’t unilaterally disarm because the neighbor down the street might be — being a tiger mom and making sure kids compete so that you can’t unilaterally withdraw. The admissions officers I know at universities, they don’t like the system. They’d love to create a class that is based on a wide variety of abilities, but they have to worry about their exclusivity, about rejecting a certain number of people. They have to worry about the U.S. News rankings. They have to worry about what the media and SAT score is. And so, they are trapped in the system. The teachers I know don’t like teaching to the test. But standardized tests have become such a main force of this system that that they have to teach to the test. And so, to me, the only way we’re going to fix the meritocracy is to change the definition of merit.

SREENIVASAN: OK. Let’s just take David Brooks’ idea, run its course here. Next year, the admissions counselors at the top 25 schools want to say, all right, how do I implement this, right? If I want to de-emphasize the IQ or the test score, and I want to start measuring for these things that Brooks is outlining, right, courage and grid and a sense of purpose, and you know, how good of a teammate you are. So, how do we start to think about restructuring the system and measuring appropriately?

BROOKS: Yes, first we need to make schools not the sorting system of society. You can’t tell a person’s potential at age 18. You just can’t. And so, you’re creating a bogus system. The second thing is we need — one of the problems is our high schools and elementary schools and middle schools oriented themselves to feed into this system, where grades, AP tests and SATs are really what matter primarily. But some schools have ways of doing education that’s different. And one of the models I describe, and they’re all out there, and I find most teachers I talk to love these models, they’d love to transfer to this kind of model. So, for example, one kind of this model is called Project-Based Education. There are no grades, there are no class periods, you’re part of a team and you’re given a big project to work on. So, there’s a school called High Tech High, which I happened to recently see a documentary about, and some of the students there were in a team and they had to analyze why do civilizations decline. And then, they not only had to analyze it, they built this big wooden gizmo with levers and gears and charts with all the different factors that feed into a civilizational decline. So, they were thinking about a problem together. They were working with their hands on something together, and they were producing a product. And that’s more like life. And so, when you come out of a one of these project- based learnings, you may have grades and you have SAT scores, but you also have a portfolio. A portfolio of your accomplishments. And some schools have a thing called a portfolio defense, where they get the students in front of a team of teachers, and they ask them, why’d you make this decision? Why do you make that decision? And that’s more like how the workplace works. So, when you get that kind of school, then you’re nurturing certain abilities, like initiative, working on teams, having desire, being curious, being able to work hard through a difficult problem. And so, you’re cultivating that, and you can’t quantify it, but you can create a biography of the person and then that can be sent off to schools and they can find the right person. We’d have a greater diversity of educational institutions, which would cater to a greater diversity of human abilities.

SREENIVASAN: You know, we also had a conversation or multiple conversations with Raj Chetty from Opportunity Insights on the program too. And, you know, one of the things that’s intriguing is when you listen to the statistics of what the proportion — how likely you are to get into college, if your parents went to one of these elite colleges, it makes you just look at this and say, well, is this really that meritocratic system if the — if it’s so tilted in favor of legacies or other external factors?

BROOKS: Yes. I mean, it’s an inherited meritocracy. So, Daniel Markovits calculated all the in-kind contributions that educated parents make to their kids, like not only private school tuition, possibly, but also like oboe practice, travel teams et cetera, et cetera. And he assumed over the course of a childhood, such parents invest about $10 million in each kid. If you don’t have the means, you just can’t do that. And you can’t compete. And the gap opens up early. So, by eighth grade, the children of the affluent are four grades ahead of the children left less affluent. By high school, their — the Children of the affluent have way higher SAT scores than the children who are less affluent. So, it’s a system you can gain. And so, one of the things Raj Chetty’s work is so valuable at is reminding us the importance, like we’re totally school obsessed, we should be community obsessed. And Raj Chetty talks about how different communities create radically different levels of social mobility. And so, some of the things — and that makes total sense to me, because an American child spends only 13 percent of his or her time between ages zero and 18, only 13 percent in school. 87 percent of their time is spent somewhere else. And so, the neighborhood really matters. And Chetty’s research shows all sorts of unexpected things, at least to me. For example, cross class friendships. If you have a friend — if you’re in one social class and you have a friend from a different social class, that significantly increases your social mobility, because your friend may show you different forms of life that you don’t see in your immediate experience. That friend may have ideas for you. Here’s how you get into that school. Here’s how you pursue that career. And so, that super matters. Are there fathers in the neighborhood? It doesn’t even have to be your own father. If you live in a neighborhood where there are fathers around, especially the guys, have a role model they can follow in life. And so, these neighborhood effects are just super important. And somehow, we need to think not just as we think about who benefits from society, who has advantages in society. It’s not just in the school. It’s primarily in the neighborhood in the family. And those are the soft — what they call the soft skills or the non- cognitive skills, but which are the important skills.

SREENIVASAN: You know, There’s another through line in your essay here that’s interesting to me. And you seem to be advocating for, you know, a shift away from the me model towards an us model. You write, quote, “We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient and committed to the common good.” And I wonder in America in 2024, is that something that we can tilt toward? Because the cultural forces all seem aligned towards an idea of everyone for themselves, and it didn’t just happen overnight.

BROOKS: Yes, that’s the culture of individualism we’ve had at the same time, I would say going back to post-World War II period. I happen to think that we’ve had 60 years of hyper individualism in this country, and whether it was right-wing individualism, which is about economic individualism or more progressive individualism, which about lifestyle individualism, we’ve had a lot of individualism. And we’ve created more freedom for ourselves, which is great, but we’ve also weakened the ties between each other. And so, my view right now, our political moment, we’ve — right and left, we’ve decided we had a little too much individualism. We need more community. But now, we’re having a big fight over what kind of community we prefer. And so, MAGA prefers a highly nationalistic, maybe patriarchal community. Progressives want a community built more on ethnic identity. Other people have different versions of community, but we’re in the — the last three or four years, which have been so tumultuous to me are period of cultural transformation. And we’re chopping up that old system of individualistic mindset, me, me, me. That system of narcissism, and we’re in a very messy way, trying to move our way toward a different kind of communal culture, and we’re searching for what kind of community can we build that will be healthy.

SREENIVASAN: David Brooks, thanks so much.

BROOKS: Good to be with you, Hari, again.