Where Ivy Matters: The Educational Backgrounds of U.S. Cultural Elites

Abstract

Status transmission theory argues that leading educational institutions prepare individuals from privileged backgrounds for positions of prestige and power in their societies. We examine the educational backgrounds of more than 2,900 members of the U.S. cultural elite and compare these backgrounds to a sample of nearly 4,000 business and political leaders. We find that the leading U.S. educational institutions are substantially more important for preparing future members of the cultural elite than they are for preparing future members of the business or political elite. In addition, members of the cultural elite who are recognized for outstanding achievements by peers and experts are much more likely to have obtained degrees from the leading educational institutions than are those who achieve acclaim from popular audiences. By focusing on the extent to which industries and cultural domains depend on quickness and facility in the absorption and manipulation of complex and sophisticated symbolic media, our analysis leads to an important specification of the role of highly selective colleges and universities in elite formation.

Elite recruitment in US finance: How university prestige is used to secure top executive positions

“…The discriminating effect between finance and non-finance is largest for Harvard, the most prestigious US University (Useem & Karabel, 1986). While the effect remains significant for other "super elite universities" such as Yale, Princeton, Stanford or Pennsylvania, we find no difference in the proportion of top managers having attended one of the top 25 US universities-even though these universities count among the very best globally and are used by many elite studies as exemplars of top universities (Brint et al, 2020). This "exponential selectivity" confirms Rivera's thesis on the importance of university prestige for contemporary elite recruitment.…”

“…Brint et al. (2020), based on Brint and Yoshikawa (2017), identify “leading U.S. educational institutions” using the U . S .…”

“…Categorizations of "elite universities" in the literature are astonishingly diverse. Brint et al (2020), based on Brint and Yoshikawa (2017), identify "leading U.S. educational institutions" using the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) ranking. They include all research universities that have been within the top 25 of the ranking at least once since its start in 1988.…”

“…For race, we searched for photos of the individual and categorized the person using the categories "white" and "non-white" (including categories Middle Eastern, black, Asian, Indian, native). See Hermanowicz and Clayton (2020) or Brint et al (2020) for a similar and recent coding scheme. Our underlying assumption is that race is a categorization system enforced on individuals by social institutions.…”

Ambiguous Credentials: How Learners Use and Make Sense of Massively Open Online Courses

“…First, it makes it possible to recognize that scholars know considerably more about the value and meaning of credentials in some quadrants than they do in others. For example, there has been copious research on how students experience and variably benefit from BA/BS degrees from (lower-prestige) for-profit, often online schools (e.g., Cottom, 2017;Deming et al, 2012;Eaton, 2020;Mettler, 2014), and from elite colleges and universities (e.g., Brint et al, 2020;Brint & Yoshikawa, 2017;Katchadourian & Boli, 1994;Rivera, 2016). There is also important nascent scholarship on how students experience and variably benefit from lower-prestige certifications from lowerprestige schools (Holland & DeLuca, 2016).…”