The Cult of College
I went to a semi-”elite” private college. I quite enjoyed my time there, and I’m not particularly keen on the idea of dissuading teens from going to college. There’s something about college, however, that has long bothered me but I hadn’t been able to pinpoint exactly what it was until now. Colleges, or at least elite name-brand research universities, do not exist to educate students.
If you haven’t listened to it, I highly recommend the completely unrelated Planet Money episode on Modern Monetary Theory. In it, one of the hosts discusses how the economy is a lot like the vases/faces optical illusion. You can be certain it works one way, and then once someone points out that it’s actually something completely different, you can’t stop seeing it the new image. This has happened to me with college.
As someone who grew up in white, Jewish suburbia and went to private prep school, the vision of college hammered into me while growing up was one of institutes of higher learning that make you smarter and prepare you for your career. My parents, who both had experience at semi-elite colleges before ending up at University of Florida, pushed me to look at state schools (both my sisters also went to UF) because they were certain I could get just as good of an education for a lot less money. I, on the other hand, fully drank the Ivy Kool Aid and knew I had to go to a top-ranked school. My original thinking was that top colleges really were better educators, and then once I was in college I realized that the true benefit was the access to networks.
As I’ve recently realized, if you focus on the “value” of college, you miss the complete picture. Looking from the angle of incentive design, its clear that colleges are not primarily educational institutions. Rather they more resemble a hybrid of cults, religions, research institutions, and corporations, whose main purpose is to build an endowment through donations, and every activity that they do works towards that aim. Being an educational institution is merely a pretense that both allows them to exist in the first place and serves a number of additional, useful purposes.
Remember, the end goal of a university is to build the endowment. To that end, universities target and exploit some of the most fundamental needs of humans: social belonging and esteem.
Admissions and the Cult
Like most cults, universities target young people when they’re both vulnerable and malleable. If you (or your kid) haven’t applied to college in the past decade, you may be shocked by how much of a circus the process has become. Beginning in their freshman or sophomore year of high school, kids start getting mailings from colleges, suggesting that they consider them. These post cards feature beautiful scenes of campus life and are sent to a vastly wider swath of students than are ever accepted. Universities want to have as many people as possible apply, because the lower their admission rate is, the more prestigious they seem, and the higher they’re ranked. This results in a positive feedback loop that gets more students to apply while also giving a sense of pride to alumni (who may donate more money).
As students get closer to application age, these mailings become thicker and more personal. At the same time, students are hit by a tornado of recruitment from other sources. Admissions officers tour the country, giving speeches and showing videos of what it’s “really like” to attend Yale. MIT’s famous admissions blog features student-written content that honestly sucked me in and made me feel like I was falling in love. High schools organize college tours, and you’re repeatedly reminded that you can’t really know if a college is a good fit until you visit (the messaging is all about fit). When you tour a campus, you’re shown around by students paid by the admissions department who go through a semester-long training process that teaches them how to make the university look perfect. Needless to say, tour guides are almost always highly attractive.
So what’s the point of this three-year-long marketing blitz? Besides bringing up application numbers, it also serves the purpose of building a mythic image in incoming students minds that requires massive cognitive dissonance to ever shatter. Like any cult, you’re told that this is the place you belong… you’ve found your chosen family right when you’re leaving your real one.
Once you’re admitted, the appeals to your need to belong ratchet up. You might be mailed shirts, bumper stickers, and in my case, a personal video from Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. On campus, more and more colleges are sorting students into “houses” where you’ll hopefully form close bonds with your chosen family (to be clear, this is a good thing). Sports and rivalries are another major aspect to get you to feel part of a family. Common enemies bring people closer together.
Incentives
Now that you have a chosen family that you feel a part of and spent the most formative years of your life with, you’ll likely want to support that family and turn a blind eye towards transgressions.
Taking a look at incentives, almost every one appears to exist primarily to increase donations. I originally thought that universities were primarily research institutions, but then I realized that the scientific research is really in service of building the endowment. Research allows the university to appear on the cutting edge of science, put out press releases, hire esteemed researchers, and thus raise the status and reputation of the university. This in turn plays off of people’s “esteem” needs and gets them to donate by making them feel like a good person who’s helping to find a cure for cancer. Sure, their money may be better spent donating to the American Cancer Society, but the American Cancer Society won’t put their name on a research lab.
Sports teams of course bring in massive donations and also bring additional revenue through ticket sales, tv rights, and merchandizing. Sports give alumni an excuse to return to campus and stay connected to the school throughout the year. So do alumni associations, university clubs, and awards.
If your university can’t get you to donate through your sense of belonging, or desire for status, they can always get you where you’re truly most vulnerable: your real family. The biggest change that would really fix college admission would be to get rid of legacy admission. Unfortunately, this will never happen, as legacies are probably the single largest source of donations for the endowment. Because colleges keep getting more and more selective, even if your kid is smarter than you, there’s not a guarantee they’d get in. However, there’s always a price, and legacy admissions further strengthens ties by associating your chosen family connection to your real family.
If colleges were primarily educational institutions, their incentives would look completely different. Professors would be paid more, while there would be significantly fewer administrators. Admissions would involve significantly less marketing, and perhaps there would be a limit on the number of colleges you can apply to like there is in the UK. Professional-level sports programs would certainly be cut.
Does this really matter?
Now, after saying all this, I’m not so certain this system is actually a bad thing. Sure, the US has incredibly unequal educational outcomes, but this is more a result of lower-level school failings, and as I mentioned earlier, state schools provide a great opportunity for students to get a just-as-good education for a small fraction of the cost.
Perhaps this incentive system, as warped as it is, actually results in significant benefit that wouldn’t exist without it. The US has the highest per-capita charity donations of any country in the world, and although I believe the largest portion of this goes to churches, universities are pretty high up there. A large amount of this money comes from the richest alumni, and they may not otherwise donate this money if it weren’t for the psychological pull of the university. The US leads the world in scientific discovery and corporate value creation, and it’s conceivable that this wouldn’t be the case without the university system.
If you’re a high schooler reading this while applying to colleges, my advise to you would be this: just know what you’re getting into. The top-ranked schools won’t necessarily provide you the best education, and you can get a great education from somewhere cheaper and less name brand. Much of how a school advertises to you resembles cult recruiting, so don’t believe everything you read. At the same time, there are real benefits, especially in network and access, of going to an elite university. College is an incredible time of freedom and learning and discovery, and we’re lucky we live in a country that encourages this for young people. Or maybe I’ve just bought into the cult :)
Notes:
I’m certain this point has been made before, probably by others that are much more articulate than I am. Feel free to comment/send me better takes on this. The more original parts of this take are not fully developed, so I might revisit them in the future
I’m publishing this on Medium (which I’m not a huge fan of) because I’m trying to get myself to publish more writing but haven’t taken the time to set up my own blog. In the future, this may live on: https://www.josephpmay.com/blog
