Meritocratic competition is giving way to increasingly opaque systems of admission. Many universities have abandoned rigorous tests like SATs in favour of “holistic” assessments intended to help more diverse students but which inevitably also favour the kinds of wealthy elite scions who can spend vast sums of parental money on fencing tutors.
Most astonishing is the system of “legacy admissions”, which gives preferential treatment to the children of donors and alumni. Fully 21.5 per cent of a recent cohort of successful white applicants to Harvard had legacy status. One in six Ivy League students belong to the wealthiest 1 per cent of society.
It is no surprise, then, that elite universities are increasingly behaving like aristocratic finishing schools, resuming the role they played at the beginning of the 20th century. The most exclusive American campuses are not (as their idealistic founders might once have hoped) austere temples of learning but five-star hotels with educational facilities attached. Exorbitant student fees help fund luxury gyms, sports clubs, spas, emotional support animals, safe spaces and organic cafeterias. It is an elite world that makes sense if you have grown up cocooned in the upper middle class but which is disconnected from the way the rest of the country lives.
And inevitably, America’s universities are once again developing a rarefied culture that is as exotic to ordinary people as the top-hatted and tailcoated world of Yale’s Wasps was in the 1920s.