Can We Please Stop Calling Them “Elite” Colleges? (column)

I often feel like the skunk at a garden party.

That’s not uncommon for journalists: Our job frequently requires us to ask hard questions and to say what others might be too polite to say (out loud, at least). I can’t blame it all on my vocation, though; I’m that way by nature, and this old dog isn’t changing.

Several times in the last couple years I’ve found myself at gatherings of college leaders that included representatives of highly selective, wealthy institutions. Without fail, during discussion of some higher education issue or another, one or more of them will refer to their own institution as “elite.”

That’s a record-scratch moment for me. Sometimes I can let it go, but at a Washington gathering hosted by an Ivy League university not too long ago, I couldn’t help myself. I had kept quiet for a few hours, but I couldn’t contain myself as participants (from what my colleague Rachel Toor calls “fancy-pants schools”) kept referring to themselves as “elite” while bemoaning why their relationship with the federal government had soured.

I started (rather obnoxiously, I’ll admit) by reading a definition of the word: “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.” I suggested, (dis)respectfully, that if we had some clear definition of “superior” that everybody could agree on, it might be reasonable to refer to the Yales and Amhersts and UVAs of the world that way.

But I’d posit that in higher education, there is no clear definition of “superior” or any other synonym of elite. Some colleges and universities are often perceived as the best because they’ve been around the longest, or because U.S. News and other rankers, with methodologies that usually favor wealth and selectivity and research output, have deemed them so. Or because my colleagues in the national media focus on them obsessionally at the expense of thousands of other institutions.

(As I wrote recently, I’m totally up for a rigorous discussion about how we might go about defining “best” or most valuable—those that do the most to help their students reach their educational goals they’ve set, say, or whose learners learn or develop the most during their time at the institution. Anyone interested?)

When we call a set of colleges and universities “elite”—and when people at those institutions refer to themselves that way—what are we really communicating?

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries define “elite” as “belonging to a group of people in society that is small in number but powerful and with a lot of influence, because they are rich, intelligent, etc.”

And Thesaurus.com’s top synonyms for the word are “exclusive” and “silk-stocking.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

There is nothing inherently wrong with exclusivity or with being influential, and goodness knows that the dozens of highly selective, usually wealthy, most visible and powerful colleges and universities that journalists and pundits frequently refer to as “elite” contribute enormously to our society. They generally do well by and for the students fortunate enough to get admitted, they produce important research and knowledge, they prepare leaders, and they deliver hefty economic benefits to society and their students. (I, it’s important to acknowledge, am one such individual beneficiary.)

And it feels a little unfair to be kicking them while they’re on the defensive, which they are more than ever in the 40 years I’ve paid close attention to higher education.

But as the name of this column indicates, I’m raising this issue out of (tough) love. Yes, these institutions contribute enormously, but several aspects of how they operate have helped put them in their currently difficult spot (which has been made much worse by a Trump administration that is punishing these institutions for its own political, class-warfare reasons).

Among the reasons why the most highly selective private and public colleges and universities (appropriately) find themselves under scrutiny:

• Their benefits disproportionately accrue to the already privileged. Yes, most of them have made recruiting lower-income, first-generation and minority students a higher priority in the last 10 to 15 years than they had previously, and they (with help from organizations like the American Talent Initiative) deserve credit for doing so.

But the 2017 publication of the so-called Chetty data (more formally known as Opportunity Insights’ social mobility index), which reinforced years of work by the Pell Institute and others, showed that many of higher education’s best known institutions reinforce rather than combat a social order than advantages the wealthy and the white. While the Chetty study has been unreplicable, this recent graphic from James Murphy (focused on representation of low-income learners) speaks volumes.

While this is most problematic at selective private colleges, many public flagship universities have also been moving in the wrong direction on the accessibility front, as they chase wealthier out-of-state learners over working-class and transfer students from their own backyards.

• They often aren’t good citizens of higher education broadly. There are plenty of examples of wealthy institutions behaving in service of their less fortunate counterparts: Ivy League institutions like Brown, Princeton and Harvard have worked with historically Black universities, and Stanford’s Community College Outreach Program and Ed Equity Lab do great work with needy institutions and students, to name a few. And many creations of wealthy and selective universities have benefited the rest of higher education (and the world), like the internet.

But pursuing their own agendas, as they can reasonably be expected to do, often comes at the expense of the rest of higher education. Using their wealth advantage to eliminate loans for low-income students obviously helps those students fortunate enough to get one of their precious slots, but it also ratchets up the national financial aid competition in ways that are bad for other institutions. And right now, flagship universities around the country—seeing their international enrollments threatened—are increasingly picking off talented (and full-tuition-paying) domestic students from their regional public university peers.

Self-interest trumps good citizenship in other ways, too. Most highly selective and wealthy institutions are grudging participants, at best, in national associations of colleges, and they’ve bristled at accreditation, often arguing that they should be treated differently from other institutions.

As an old guy, I hold some historical grudges, particularly against the institutions that helped shape me. In one particularly galling moment from the Obama administration’s review of accreditation in 2011, a Princeton lobbyist, channeling then-president Shirley Tilghman, argued to a federal accreditation panel that institutions can learn best from those “with the same backgrounds and the same experiences in higher education.” (Princeton was upset that its accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, had dared to ask the university to prove that its undergraduate thesis requirement benefited its learners.)

Tilghman suggested that it made no sense for Princeton and its neighbor Mercer County Community College to be judged by the same accreditor. “It is a very fine community college,” Tilghman wrote. “It serves the student population it serves exceedingly well. But I have nothing in common with Mercer County Community College … There is so little that we have to say to each other, other than that we reside within the same county.”

The nation’s most powerful institutions have sometimes stood idly by when other colleges and universities have been under attack. Most said and did little to nothing when Ron DeSantis and other Southern governors targeted their states’ public universities with attacks on diversity, tenure and governance in the early part of this decade.

Of course, the critics eventually came for the Ivies and the other wealthy and most selective colleges and universities, and they’ve arguably been left with far fewer friends and defenders because of their arrogance and selfishness.

These institutions have disproportionate visibility and significance and power, and we all need them to thrive. They will be fine—beyond fine—but they have serious work to do to regain public confidence and trust.

One place to start would be to stop viewing themselves as superior to their peers and to more fully engage as parts of a larger ecosystem that benefits them as much as it does the community colleges and regional public and private colleges that successfully educate a far greater proportion of Americans than the “elite colleges” do.

Can we please stop using that term?