What Top American Schools Owe Top American Talent

No doubt my undergraduate years at Brown were immeasurably enhanced by the opportunity to befriend a range of international students. There was the sweet and diligent guy I met in my dorm on the very first day, son of a prominent family in Nicaragua, who hoped to master enough economics to deliver more democratically distributed prosperity back home. There was the amiable Filipina down the hall trying to figure out which direction in STEM she was the very most passionate about. A couple of years later, in some upper-level seminars in public policy, I got to know an IDF veteran grad student and young family man earning his degree up on College Hill in Providence, who taught me a thing or two about the complexity and ambiguities of foreign policy.

But then again, international students could be just as mixed a bag as their domestic peers, such as the South Korean debutante roommate of a friend of mine down the hall my freshman year (herself the daughter of an Ethiopian business magnate) who ditched several of our dorm floor’s mandatory first-week activities to hang out with her society friends from back east. I scarcely even saw her around after our perfunctory introductions. In the end, she seemed to have come to America primarily to accrue the prestigious global credential, not to contribute to the broader social and intellectual community; in terms of the cutthroat zero-sum game of admissions to ultra-selective schools, but likely not Brown’s bottom line, it was a net loss for everybody but her.

And thus I was always ambivalent about some of the international contingent at Brown, wondering about the stark opportunity cost for the throngs of equally talented Americans from Nebraska or New Mexico or wherever who might otherwise have landed those prized and coveted slots that really do help open doors in life. In the summer after my sophomore year of high school, I’d had the privilege of attending a publicly funded college prep program, the Missouri Scholars Academy, designed to convene around 330 of the most promising rising high school juniors from all across the Show-Me State to spend a month at our state flagship “Mizzou” in Columbia, Missouri.

I happen to hail from the relatively affluent inner suburbs of St. Louis, sort of a Midwestern Scarsdale, so my life course was really always a matter of when rather than if I’d go to college. But commingling with such a motley array of small town, rural, and inner-city kids, who often ran circles around me intellectually but yet had never considered pursuing higher education since it simply wasn’t in their frame of reference, was a humbling experience that still represents perhaps the most dazzling intellectual community I’ve ever known—much more impressive than almost anything I found among the Ivy League. Most of the time the academic experience at Brown positively paled in comparison, not to mention the manifold disappointments of Columbia University in New York a number of years later.

Among my fondest ambitions for The Ivy Exile has been to try to help demystify and debunk supposedly elite schools’ preeminence in comparison to plenty of other equally or more respectable institutions that well warrant equivalent status. My friends that I roadtripped to go visit at Mizzou’s distinguished Honors College as an undergrad weren’t any less talented on average than the rank and file at Brown or other friends to whom I’d take the Amtrak to go visit at Yale and Amherst. Elite admissions have become such an arbitrary and unfair crapshoot, so unjustly distorted by legacies, quotas, and outright graft, that several dozen more relatively prestigious schools both public and private have inexorably osmosed into the conversation in terms of where even the very highest achieving Middle American strivers might reasonably expect to matriculate.

That’s a big part of why it’s so deeply unfair and undemocratic for highly prestigious institutions with international profiles, that receive so much national attention and federal largesse, to give away quite so many of their most prized seats to non-Americans. And, there’s precious little reason why accomplished graduates of Tufts or Northwestern or Vanderbilt or Wash U in the City of St. Louis should enjoy any less aura and sparkle than those of us who happened to luck into winning the lottery for a golden ticket into the fancier coastal cliques, or why admissions to those sorts of places have to be so starkly discriminatory, or what hierarchical prioritization should accrue to this or that corrupted institution or other.

So my recommendation is this: let’s implement a blanket ban on legacy admissions to the most selective and desirable schools in America, in addition to cutting off heirs of privilege from outside the country who don’t seem so inclined to contribute to our academic abundance. The Ivies and other top-ranked institutions so frequently shoot themselves in the foot intellectually that they urgently need remedial instruction in granting an empathetic ear back to ‘flyover country’ once again.

When it comes to the most intensely desired Ivy League programs, most namely undergraduate and law school admissions, it’s both cruel and unusual to give away so much of that precious prestige to folks beyond our shores. A cap of something around 10-15% for foreign enrollment would make a ton of sense in terms of balancing international outreach and cultural exchange with extending a legitimate fair shake to a variety of gifted American hopefuls with at least the same SAT and/or LSAT scores.

But when it comes to graduate research in STEM, as I learned over eight years chronicling Columbia Engineering, that model quite simply wouldn’t be realistic. The bulk of top American engineering grads tend to want to seek the most immediately remunerative fields as soon as possible, rather than being willing to invest year after year of drudgery into foundational research uncertain to ever blossom into something profitable. Maintaining American primacy in engineering innovation undoubtedly requires robust recruitment of top talent from wherever we can find it, while also striving to seed American talent for generations to come.

But with that wide net comes risk. I had nothing but positive interactions with Chinese nationals at Columbia Engineering, they tended to be perfectly pleasant, but the unsettling fact remains that any researcher with family in totalitarian China is under immediate threat of coercion: deliver pirated intellectual property on demand, or your family’s social credit scores go bye-bye. With increasing dependence on foreign talent comes ever more need for ever more careful scrutiny and safeguards.

Had institutions like Harvard and Columbia behaved just a little less haughtily in recent decades, and been just slightly more inclusive, many millions of Americans might have been a little less gleeful about seeing them be taken to the woodshed in recent weeks. The general public might even have still perceived the Ivy League as champions of knowledge rather than a pack of snooty shysters. For the time being, there still remains some dwindling room for some kind of redemption arc.

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Next: Hey Hey, Western Civ Has Got to Stay

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