‘Seriously, Don’t Give Money To Fancy Colleges’
23rd February 2014
Matthew Yglesias chides the 1%.
Put aside, for a moment, this instance of a Voice of the Crust growling toward the hand that feeds him.
I don’t say ‘biting the hand that fees him’ because nobody who is in a position to give money to Harvard listens to the likes of Matthew Yglesias.
And here’s why:
Basically what you see is that highly selective institutions are institutions for kids from affluent families. You’ll often hear that such-and-such a donation to an already-wealthy institution is a great idea because it’s going to financial aid. But when only about 5 percent of your class is coming from the bottom quarter of the income distribution (and we can assume that very little of that 5% is coming from the really truly poor) then even this financial aid is extremely poorly targeted. Meanwhile, the demographics of highly selective institutions reveal that highly selective institutions remain what they always have been—mechanisms for the perpetuation of inequality and hierarchy.
Giving $150 million to Harvard accomplishes a number of things:
- It guarantees that any of your descendants who want to go to Harvard will do so, yea, unto the fourth generation;
- It buys you status amongst the Crust and its Chattering Class.
- It gives you a huge tax write-off, typically from securities for which you didn’t pay anything out-of-pocket, thus shielding a lot of future income from the exactions that afflict the likes of Warren Buffet’s secretary.
So this is like a flea saying to a dog: ‘Dog, don’t be that way!’ Or like a Baptist preacher exhorting his congregation not to use drugs. (Dude, if they were the type to use drugs, they wouldn’t be sitting there listening to you.) It’s all just hot air (for which he gets well paid, I presume; I should have such a job).
Now Matthew Yglesias knows this perfectly well, having gone to Dalton and Harvard himself. He knows, as some perhaps do not, that Harvard arranges its admissions policies to admit, not only ‘kids from affluent families’, but those who will produce ‘kids from affluent families’ themselves someday, in the hopes that they will want to send said kinder to Harvard. They quite deliberately skim off the cream of the student applicant universe, which consists of people who would be successful with or without a Harverd education (vide Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whose key characteristic is not that they graduated from Harvard, which they didn’t, but that they were admitted to Harvard). Harvard is the farmer who figures out where the tallest corn will grow and then lays out his field accordingly, preening at harvest time about his ‘green thumb’ and expertise as a farmer.