The Secrets of Princeton

[OKNancy]

This was a "good read"... not too long and something we all know, but it is interesting nevertheless.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-secrets-of-princeton.html/?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=OP_TSO_20130407

The Secrets of Princeton
By ROSS DOUTHAT

SUSAN PATTON, the Princeton alumna who became famous for her letter urging Ivy League women to use their college years to find a mate, has been denounced as a traitor to feminism, to coeducation, to the university ideal. But really she’s something much more interesting: a traitor to her class.

Her betrayal consists of being gauche enough to acknowledge publicly a truth that everyone who’s come up through Ivy League culture knows intuitively — that elite universities are about connecting more than learning, that the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates, and that rather than an escalator elevating the best and brightest from every walk of life, the meritocracy as we know it mostly works to perpetuate the existing upper class.

Every elite seeks its own perpetuation, of course, but that project is uniquely difficult in a society that’s formally democratic and egalitarian and colorblind. And it’s even more difficult for an elite that prides itself on its progressive politics, its social conscience, its enlightened distance from hierarchies of blood and birth and breeding.

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The intermarriage of elite collegians is only one of these mechanisms — but it’s an enormously important one. The outraged reaction to her comments notwithstanding, Patton wasn’t telling Princetonians anything they didn’t already understand. Of course Ivy League schools double as dating services. Of course members of elites — yes, gender egalitarians, the males as well as the females — have strong incentives to marry one another, or at the very least find a spouse from within the wider meritocratic circle. What better way to double down on our pre-existing advantages? What better way to minimize, in our descendants, the chances of the dread phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”?

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the rest is at the link.

[BainsBane]

1. I thought the connections were professional

but of course I knew connections were what those schools are about. You can get a good education lots of places. Connecting with the economic elite, however, is what the Ivy League is for. The MRS degree, not so much.